O Job, Where Art Thou?

Since I’ve been jobless for nearly eight months, my job search motivation fluctuates. Now that I’m not as overwhelmed, I look several times a day. The problem is most of the jobs aren’t what I really want, and I’ve already made that mistake once.

The other day my husband and I watched the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. It discusses how our phones and social media are designed to be addictive, and how we all see alternate realities online. When we finished watching, my husband said, “They should play that every year in schools.”

Since graduating college, I’ve learned that we are behind our own destruction; not only are we the cause of it, but we can’t change fast enough to fix it. Climate change is a great example. The more we sit and argue about it, the less time we have to make a difference. It’ll be easy to see the destruction in twenty years to fifty years. By then I’ll be forty or seventy, and I’ll be apologizing to my kids and grandkids for not doing more to keep this world healthy for them.

 With technology, we may never change unless we start passing laws to reign in social media and marketing. Companies know more about us than we will ever know about them; although that’s scary, it’s not as morbidly frightetning as knowing the devices we spend hours a day with are their tool to take our money and time.

I believe capitalism is ruining the fundamentals of human interaction and intelligence. The American Dream is a warped fragment of what it should’ve been. I think almost everyone from Millennials to Gen Z want to grow up to be rich and famous, and where’s the substance in that?

Here’s an article I found from Business Insider: click here. It tells us that Gen Z is going to be the largest consumer population we’ve seen. That seems more like a badge of shame, and I’m fearful each generation will only get worse.

How can we limit being consumers? Technology has made it nearly impossible to go one hour a day without being thrown an ad. Unplugging by leaving our phones somewhere else or silencing our notifications can help. I think the guy with dreadlocks on The Social Dilemma said something about don’t click on the recommendations like suggested videos, games, apps, songs, anything. (The people interviewed seemed reliable since they all worked at the massive corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.)

I know unplugging seems absurd, especially to those people who do business through their phone. I suggest buying a cheap Tracfone for work purposes. Somehow we have to limit our time on the internet, but our lives feed off it. We go there for information and comfort. We go there to consume and be consumed.

Thankfully while I scroll for jobs, ads aren’t popping up at me. All the companies are advertising for their positions though. If you read my “Why Blogging” post, then you’ll know they can even be deceptive.

The problem I have with ZipRecruiter is it shows me the same type of job despite me clicking on their frowny face to tell them I’m not satisfied with those results. It took me until September to realize I don’t want anything to do with marketing, yet the only jobs that popped up were marketing. I tried to weed those out of my listings, but now I only get shown jobs for customer service.

I most likely applied for one customer service job since I’m desperate. That didn’t mean I only want to see that one job category. I can’t have a conversation with my computer or app saying I want to be shown a variety of jobs, and it’s frustrating.

I wonder if Zip Recruiter works the same as social media platforms. It assumes an identity of you after a few clicks and takes off running with it. This website doesn’t seem to understand I’m a multi-faceted human being that wants more than one job type. Let alone the fact that writing jobs are non-existent on the site unless it’s for medical, technical, marketing, or law.

Maybe I’m not using the website and app correctly, but why should I have to figure out how to correctly use it to get what I’m looking for? That should be their job. It seems they let the computers do the hard work, which takes away from the quality of the results.

On the plus side, they estimate the unemployment rate may skyrocket soon, so perhaps companies like Zip Recruiter will develop better algorithms when the consumer base is doubled.