'When will the job market get better?': Reddit's answer is grim — and the mental health toll is getting harder to ignore

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell from a 56-year-old woman who spent 18 months applying to thousands of positions after leaving a $180,000 senior role, only to be rejected for jobs paying $80,000, has talked about two realities that are increasingly hard to separate: the failure of the job market, and the psychological damage it is inflicting on the people living inside it.

The original poster is working in a male-dominated industry. The compounding disadvantages of her seniority, age, and gender are not paranoia; they are documented patterns in hiring research. This was not her imagination. She is experiencing all of them simultaneously.

The job market responses

One commenter who had been a director earning $225,000 described being invited to a group interview for a vending machine technician role. They noted that they sent an RSVP, filled out the application, received a “good news, they viewed your application” email, then a rejection five minutes later. “Didn’t even make it to the group interview,” they wrote.

Another, aged 55, described the specific exhaustion of dealing with recruiters who had not read their resume before getting on the phone. With two college tuitions to share, a mortgage, a laughable retirement account, and unemployment benefits in New York running out the following month, they described being “in despair of finding a job that will allow me to live.”

One commenter offered the bleakest take: “It never will. It is all by design to usher in a new serf class. In fact, things are going to get much worse.”

The mental health toll

One commenter described being trapped in a job that is “killing my mental health.” They remarked that they ended each day shaking and crying, with a teammate doing the same. All the while, they remain too terrified to leave. “Something has to give,” they wrote.

Another, with 25 years of continuous work history, described the past six months as taking a bigger mental toll than any other period of their career. They have applied to hundreds of roles, are overqualified for half of them, and have a resignation letter ready to send the moment an offer arrives.

A third described quitting and moving back to their parents’ home at 30 after feeling like a zombie, sleeping poorly, and finding it difficult to walk around the block in the days before they left. “Burnout from stress will wreck your health, mentally, and eventually physically,” they wrote. “I remember the last few days before I quit, I found it hard just walking around the block, and I’m not overweight or anything.”

The original poster asked when the job market will get better. The thread did not offer an optimistic answer. What it did offer was something the original poster seemed to need as much as information: confirmation that the experience is real, the obstacles are real, and the people going through it are not failing; they are being failed by a market that has stopped functioning the way it was supposed to.

Read also: ‘I’m a long way away from retirement’: 23-year-old asks how to cope with a life dictated by work