So, Gaby Hinsliff over at some paper or other is wringing her hands about the kids. Seems the little darlings, armed with their shiny degrees from “good Russell Group universities” – Christ, even the names sound like something you’d find on a bottle of overpriced gin – are finding out the world ain’t exactly rolling out the red carpet. They’re boomeranging back to Mom and Dad’s, dreams wilting faster than a cheap bouquet in a hot car. She calls it a “great betrayal.” Honey, welcome to the goddamn party. It’s been a betrayal since the first caveman promised another fire and delivered a damp stick.
It’s Tuesday morning, the coffee’s kicking in, or maybe it’s the ghost of last night’s bourbon – hard to tell these days. But I read this, and I almost choked on my cigarette. Not from shock, mind you. More like a grim, knowing chuckle that rumbles up from the gut, the kind you get when you see the same sucker fall for the same three-card monte trick for the fifth time. We told ’em, she says. We told ’em a degree was the golden ticket. Yeah, and some slob at a bar once told me he had a sure thing in the fifth at Santa Anita. I’m still waiting for that payout.
The universities, bless their ivy-covered, money-grubbing hearts, are dumping written exams for online assessments because it’s “cheaper.” Cheaper. That’s the new mantra, ain’t it? Shave a buck here, cut a corner there, and who cares if the whole damn building collapses, as long as the quarterly report looks good. So the kids are cutting their losses and food bills, heading home early. No job. Just a piece of paper that cost more than my first three cars combined and a head full of theories that won’t buy ’em a shot of rye.
And how are they getting these non-existent jobs? Oh, this is the kicker. They’re sitting alone, talking to a webcam, being judged by a bot. An AI. You can’t even shake its goddamn hand. Can’t look it in the eye, see if there’s a flicker of humanity in there, a shared memory of what it was like to be young and desperate and trying to bullshit your way into a paycheck. Nope. Just an algorithm, cold and calculating, deciding if your carefully curated persona matches its digital checklist. Rejection’s a kick in the teeth anyway, but to be found wanting by a machine? That’s a special kind of hell. It’s like being told you’re not good enough by a toaster.
Then there’s LinkedIn. Jesus. A digital monument to self-congratulation and inflated egos. The kids are on it, scrolling, seeing everyone else’s fabricated success stories, their “futures much more sorted.” It’s Instagram for the professionally anxious. Back in my day, if you wanted to feel inadequate, you just went to a bar and looked at the happy couples. Now, you can do it from the comfort of your childhood bedroom, comparing your miserable existence to the glossy highlight reel of some grinning jackass who landed a “grad scheme.” What’s a grad scheme anyway? Sounds like something cooked up in a marketing department after too many espressos.
And here’s where the snake really eats its own tail: 140 applications for every graduate job. One hundred and forty. You know why? Because the kids, figuring no human’s gonna read their desperate pleas anyway, are using ChatGPT to crap out applications en masse. So now you’ve got AI talking to AI. Robots applying to robots for jobs that probably involve servicing other robots. It’s a goddamn digital ouroboros, and the humans are just stuck in the middle, getting squeezed. Employers are swamped, kids are resentful. Efficiency, my ass. It’s a bureaucratic clusterfuck powered by silicon chips.
Even the golden children from places like Cambridge are lost. They won the lottery, got the “golden ticket,” and they’re still staring into the abyss, wondering what the hell comes next. If they’re sweating, imagine the poor bastards from No-Name State U. Student Reddit threads, she says, are humming with despair. Hundreds of applications, endless “assessment centres” – what fresh hell is that? – all for nothing. Advice? Move abroad. Britain’s finished. Well, ain’t that a cheery thought to go with your morning hangover.
“It’s the betrayal that hurts,” Hinsliff wails. Oh, you think? We drilled it into them: work hard, get the paper, and the world’s your oyster. Except the oyster’s gone bad, and the pearl was a goddamn plastic bead all along. The economy’s stagnant, not enough “graduate-level jobs.” And the ones that do exist are in places like London, where you need a trust fund just to rent a broom closet. So the bar gets raised. A Bachelor’s ain’t enough. Now you need a Master’s. Universities, smelling blood in the water, jack up the prices. An MBA at Oxford for £83,000. Eighty-three grand! For that kind of money, I’d expect a guaranteed seat on the board and a lifetime supply of decent whiskey. But no, it’s just another way to make sure the rich kids stay rich and the rest of us keep scrubbing the floors. An educational arms race, she calls it. More like a goddamn demolition derby where only the wealthiest survive the crash.
And all this time, AI is creeping in, quiet as a cat burglar, stealing the entry-level jobs. The grunt work. The stuff you cut your teeth on, make your mistakes, learn the ropes. Drawing up contracts? AI can do it in seconds. Turning a press release into a story? A clever algorithm can probably manage that, or at least scrape enough clickbait off other sites to fool the masses. But if you automate the bottom rung, how the hell does anyone climb the ladder? You can’t learn to swim if they drain the damn pool. Adzuna, some job site, says graduate opportunities are dropping faster than a drunk off a barstool. The only jobs with critical shortages? Low-paid gigs like care work. The stuff that needs a real, live, breathing human. For now, anyway. I give it ten years before they try to roll out “EmpathyBot 3000” to wipe old folks’ asses.
Hinsliff tries to offer some comfort. Most boomerang kids will find their feet. Eventually. Yeah, maybe. After a few more years of grinding, a few more kicks in the teeth, a few more hangovers of despair. They’ll take “circuitous routes.” That’s a nice way of saying they’ll wander in the wilderness for a while, lost and pissed off. The ones to worry about, she says, are the ones who can’t go home. The ones truly out in the cold. And she’s right about that. There’s always someone further down the food chain, someone with no safety net, just the hard pavement rushing up to meet them.
“We can’t keep doing this to young people and then be surprised when they’re angry.” You don’t say. You whip ’em through a system, dangling a carrot you know damn well is mostly stick, and then act shocked when they finally tell you to shove it? The consequences, she warns, will boomerang back on us. Lady, the boomerang’s been in the air for a while. It’s about to smack us all upside the head.
This whole damn charade… it reminds me of the track. Everyone’s looking for the sure thing, the magic formula. Get this degree, network with these people, use this buzzword. It’s all bullshit. Life’s a goddamn messy, unpredictable, often cruel beast. And trying to tame it with a piece of paper and a LinkedIn profile is like trying to housebreak a hyena.
What’s the answer? Hell if I know. I just write about the wreckage. But maybe, just maybe, we stop selling these kids a pack of lies. Maybe we admit that a degree isn’t a guarantee, it’s a tool, and sometimes the job needs a hammer, not a goddamn laser scalpel. Maybe we teach them resilience instead of resume-padding. How to take a punch, get back up, and keep swinging. How to find dignity in honest work, even if it’s not “graduate-level.”
And this AI judging humans… there’s a dark poetry to it. We create these things to make life “easier,” and they end up making us obsolete, or at least making us feel that way. We’re so busy chasing efficiency we forget about humanity. What’s the point of a perfectly efficient world if there’s no room left for flawed, messy, beautifully imperfect people? The kind who drink too much, smoke too much, feel too much, but at least they’re feeling something, not just processing data.
The young ones are angry, and they’ve got every right to be. They were sold a bill of goods, a map to a treasure that was never there. Now they’re stuck with the debt, the disillusionment, and the delightful prospect of being interviewed by a robot for a job that another robot will probably do in five years. It’s enough to make a man reach for the bottle. And I’m not even a fresh-faced graduate staring into the void.
So yeah, the kids are coming home. Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe they’ll learn a few things from the old folks. Like how to fix a leaky faucet, or how to tell a real story, or how to pour a decent drink. Skills that no AI can replicate. Not yet, anyway.
The whole thing’s a goddamn circus, and we’re all just clowns waiting for the tent to collapse. But at least we can share a drink while the damn thing burns.
Guess it’s time to find a bottle that still has some truth at the bottom of it. Or at least enough kick to make you forget the lies for a little while. Chinaski, out.