So you tossed your little square hat in the air. Congratulations. You played the game. You ran the maze. You racked up enough debt to choke a loan shark and for what? A piece of paper that says you’re qualified to begin the long, slow process of dying in a cubicle. You were promised a ladder. A nice, steady climb to a corner office with a window you could maybe, one day, think about jumping out of.
Then I read this piece of hand-wringing from The Guardian, and I had to laugh. The kind of laugh that turns into a cough and makes you reach for a cigarette. “The graduate jobs crunch,” it moans. “AI must not be allowed to eclipse young talent.”
Oh, the humanity. The poor children. Their education blighted by a pandemic, their pockets emptied by the universities, and now the robots are coming for the first rung of the ladder they were told to worship. It’s a real tragedy, like watching a moth fly into a bug zapper. It’s sad, sure, but what did you expect? The light was always a lie.
Let’s be clear about what these “entry-level jobs” are. They’re the digital equivalent of sweeping the factory floor. The “collative, summarising or research-heavy kind of tasks.” In other words, the stuff that’s so boring it makes your brain feel like a bowl of cold oatmeal. You spent four years and forty-five thousand pounds to become a glorified copy-paste artist, a human search engine with anxiety. And now you’re shocked—shocked!—that a machine built to do exactly that is putting you out of a job?
The machine doesn’t need a coffee break. It doesn’t get drunk on a Tuesday night and show up reeking of regret. It doesn’t have a soul to crush. It was designed for this work. You weren’t. This isn’t a crisis; it’s a correction. It’s the universe telling you that you were aiming too low to begin with.
The article mentions IBM, bless their cold, corporate hearts. Their HR department now uses AI for 94% of its routine work. Performance reviews, development plans… all handled by an algorithm. This is the part where you’re supposed to be horrified. But I find it beautiful. It’s the most honest thing a corporation has ever done.
HR was never your friend. It was the company’s immune system, designed to identify and neutralize threats—like your desire for more money or a shred of dignity. You’d sit there across from some smiling drone named Karen or Chad who would talk about “synergy” and “culture fit” while calculating the cheapest way to manage your eventual burnout. Now, you can get the same cold, impersonal judgment from a machine. At least the machine doesn’t pretend to care about your weekend. It just tells you you’re “suboptimal” and moves on. I respect the honesty. I could use a boss like that. No small talk, just the ugly truth. Pour me a drink.
And here’s the real gut-puncher in the article, the line that’s supposed to make us all weep into our lattes: a sustained contraction of the job market “would further undermine trust between the generations.”
Trust? What trust? The trust that if you play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded? That was a fairy tale your parents told you because the truth was too ugly. The truth is the house always wins, and the house is now run by a server farm in some godforsaken data center. The generations aren’t at war; they’re just different classes of inmates in the same prison, and the old-timers are just sad that the new fish won’t get to enjoy the same familiar beatings they did.
The government, of course, has a plan. They always have a plan. Some minister is urging everyone to “act now” and get AI skills. They want to train 7.5 million workers. Train them for what? To be the ghost in the machine? To be the guy who whispers prompts into the AI’s ear? “Hey, ChatGPT, can you write me a report that sounds like a human being wrote it before they lost the will to live?”
You’re not learning a skill; you’re learning to be a better middle-man for your own replacement. You’re the guy who used to shovel coal, now being “retrained” to polish the new atomic reactor. It’s a joke. It’s a way to make you feel useful while the world you understood disappears. I need another cigarette.
Here’s the thing they don’t want to print in their respectable newspapers. Here’s the secret I’ve learned from the bottom of a thousand bottles. This whole thing might be the best thing that ever happened to you kids.
They’re taking away the bottom rung of the ladder? Good. The whole damn ladder was propped up against the wrong wall. It led to a life of quiet desperation, of meetings that could have been emails, of forced smiles and cheap suits. It led to a mortgage, two-point-five kids, a slow-growing paunch, and the nagging feeling that you missed the whole point.
The robots are coming to do the boring work? Let them. Let the AI summarize the reports. Let it analyze the market trends. Let it write the soulless marketing copy. Let it handle the performance reviews. Let it have the whole damn thing.
What are you left with? You’re left with the stuff the machines can’t do. They can’t get drunk and write a terrible poem. They can’t fall in love with the wrong woman and have their heart ripped out. They can’t feel the sun on their face after a long night of bad decisions. They can’t create something truly, gloriously, beautifully human and flawed. They can’t paint a masterpiece, and they can’t paint a mess. They can only imitate.
You’ve been given a gift, wrapped in the ugly paper of unemployment. You’ve been freed. The path they laid out for you is gone. The cage door is open. Now you have to figure out what to do with the terror of all that freedom.
Will it be easy? Hell no. It’ll be brutal. You’ll be poor. You’ll be lost. You’ll wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life. Welcome to the club. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens. The alternative was to get that entry-level job and wonder the same thing twenty years later, only by then you’d be too comfortable and too scared to do anything about it.
So cry about it if you must. Curse the machines. Curse the old men who sold you a bad bill of goods. Get it out of your system. Then go do something the machines can’t. Go build something with your hands. Go write a story that nobody will read. Go start a fight in a bar. Go be a magnificent failure.
Let the AI have the spreadsheets and the quarterly reports. We’ll keep the hangovers, the heartbreaks, and the occasional, fleeting moments of pure, unadulterated life. I know which side of that trade I want to be on.
The robots aren’t eclipsing young talent. They’re just getting rid of the jobs that were eclipsing it all along.
Now, this keyboard is starting to look blurry. Time to see a man about a bottle.