All of us like so many cockroaches crawling atop one another, vying for the attention of the towering recruiter before us, trying to make it to the top of the stack.

All of us fighting for the same handful of entry-level roles (or hell, even post-grad internships) that our school props up on Handshake.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has applied for work on a website purely made to farm data from people. My phone was blown up seconds after applying on TotallyRealJobsUSA with heavily accented voices leaving messages chirping, “Hello, hello? 1 2 3!”

Interviews. On the phone. On Teams. Some good, some fine, some horrendously awkward because neither of us wanted to be speaking with each other on a Friday morning.

The roles themselves. Fine, sometimes interesting. But rarely. Almost never.

I will apply for something I don’t really care for, get an interview, fantasize a bit about what it would be like to have this job (like an influencer girl, “I wake up at 6, drink my matcha protein, do my 15 minute gratitude meditation, get to the office a quarter till 8, and on Mondays I will spend it out on the field sampling groundwater for EvilCorp’s industrial site, but I couldn’t do any of it without my water bottle from Scrumflow, who is having a big ‘Buy Ten Get 1 20% Off’ Sale”), and then the job doesn’t come through, and I’m sad over the loss of a fantasy that I didn’t even have a week ago.

A young person’s demise?

“Job Applications.”

~ Sammicakes