The kid at the bus stop had his shoes polished. That’s what I noticed first. Not new shoes — you could see the creases across the toe — but polished. The laces were clean. His shirt was ironed. He was holding a folder against his chest the way you hold something you need to believe in, and through the clear plastic cover I could see a stack of resumes printed on paper that costs more than the regular stuff. He was maybe twenty-three. He checked his phone, checked it again, looked down the street for a bus that wasn’t coming. I’ve seen that look before. It’s the look of someone who’s done everything they were told to do and is starting to suspect it didn’t matter.
A girl named Charlotte Briggs graduated with a business management degree in London. Spent three years working for it. Got a 2:1, which in the British system means she did well — not the top mark, but the one that’s supposed to open doors. She applied for five hundred jobs in two months.
Five hundred.
I’ve done some repetitive things in my life. I sorted mail for years at the post office, same motions, same routes, same fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped insects. But even at the post office, you knew the letters were going somewhere. You knew someone would open them. Charlotte was sending her letters into a machine that sorted them into the trash before a human ever saw them.
Because that’s what’s happening now. The applications go into an AI screening system. The system scans for keywords, for patterns, for whatever invisible criteria some engineer in Palo Alto decided constitutes a worthy candidate. If your resume doesn’t trigger the right nodes in the right neural network, you don’t exist. You never applied. Your three years and your 2:1 and your carefully formatted CV are just data that didn’t match the pattern.
Then there’s Theo. Theo dal Pozzo. Twenty-three years old, first-class master’s degree in computer science. First class — that’s the top. That’s the mark that’s supposed to mean something. He learned to build the very systems that are now being used to reject him. Five hundred applications. Rejected from every single one.
So he did something that would’ve been completely ordinary twenty years ago and is now almost radical in its desperation: he went pub to pub, restaurant to restaurant, handing out paper CVs. A man with a master’s in computer science, walking into kitchens and bar rooms, asking if anyone needs a pair of hands. Nobody called back.
I keep thinking about that. A kid who can write code that thinks, who understands the architecture of the machines that are reorganizing the entire economy, and he’s standing in a pub doorway with a piece of paper asking if they need someone to pull pints. And the pub doesn’t need him either, because the hospitality sector just shed a hundred thousand jobs after the last budget, and the ones that are left are being fought over by everyone else who got pushed out of wherever they were.
There’s a word for what’s happening and it’s not “disruption.” Disruption is what the people doing this to you call it. The word is “blockade.” The bottom rungs of the ladder have been sawed off and the people at the top are calling it efficiency.
Here’s what nobody in a boardroom wants to talk about: entry-level jobs were never just about labor. They were about learning how to exist in the world as a working person. How to show up when you don’t want to. How to deal with a boss who’s wrong. How to sit in a meeting that could’ve been an email and not scream. How to figure out that the textbook version of everything you learned is about forty percent accurate and the rest you have to learn by getting it wrong in front of people.
You can’t automate that. You can automate the tasks, sure. You can have a chatbot write the report, scan the inbox, summarize the meeting. But you can’t automate the thing that happens to a person when they spend a year doing work that feels beneath them and slowly realize it wasn’t beneath them at all — it was the foundation. The part you build everything else on.
A woman named Hadil dropped out of university after two years. She speaks three languages. Moved to the UK at fifteen, did her GCSEs in a single year, which is the kind of thing that would get a standing ovation in a movie and gets you exactly nothing in the actual job market. Seventy applications. Handed out CVs she lost count of. Nothing.
The charity people say they’re seeing kids who won’t leave their bedrooms. Not lazy. Not entitled. Scared. Isolated. The pandemic locked them in during the years when you’re supposed to be learning how to be a person in public, and now they’re being told to compete for jobs against algorithms that were specifically designed to be better than them at the only metrics anyone measures.
A LinkedIn executive — and I want you to think about who pays that man’s salary — offered this advice: learn AI literacy, focus on people skills, show your achievements, and don’t obsess over long-term plans. That last one is my favorite. Don’t plan long-term. Because the jobs that will exist in five years haven’t been invented yet. Which is a very elegant way of saying: we have no idea what’s coming and neither do you, but please keep paying for your premium subscription.
The government is offering companies three thousand pounds to hire a young person who’s been on benefits for six months. Three thousand pounds. The price of a used sofa and a weekend in Ibiza. That’s what a generation of educated, multilingual, technically literate young people are worth to the system now. A tax break. A line item.
There’s a researcher who warns that long-term unemployment early in life causes permanent damage. Not just to earnings — to health. To life chances. To the thing inside a person that believes they can do something and have it matter. She said allowing young people to drift from education straight into welfare “risks permanently scarring a generation.”
Scarring. That’s the right word. Not because it’s dramatic but because scars are what you get when something heals wrong. When the tissue comes back but not the way it was. When you can still move the arm but you feel it every time it rains.
Theo said he’s looking forward to a future he knows will be better than now. I admire that. I don’t know where he keeps it — that kind of belief, after five hundred closed doors. At his age I was already halfway through my first bottle of cynicism and the cork was long gone. But he’s got something I didn’t have, which is the specific cruelty of having done everything right and having it not matter.
That’s new. In my day, if you failed, you could at least point to the reason. Didn’t finish school. Drank too much. Told the wrong boss to go to hell. There was a narrative. Theo has a first-class degree in the field that’s supposedly eating the world, and he’s on universal credit going door to door with a resume nobody reads.
The kid at the bus stop was gone when I looked back. The bus must have come. Or maybe he gave up and walked. Either way, he took his polished shoes and his folder full of resumes into the kind of grey morning that doesn’t commit to rain but doesn’t let you forget it’s thinking about it.
I hope someone opens one. I really do.
Source: London graduate: ‘I’ve applied for 500 jobs in two months’