My loser year.

A song of digital tears and flops, ups and downs and unemployment

Later edit: I received two types of feedback in private after I published this first part of the story I wanted to share with everyone whether you know me or no. The text is written with passion, doesn’t sugar coat any details, would be a LinkedIn suicide if posted there.

The second point of view I got is that it is a good text, carries a shit ton of emotion and a chocked type of pain lived by the author. Another voice mentioned the lack of positivity but I must specify, the story ain’t finished yet.

I assure everyone landing on it that there is a silver lining and a positive key by the end of what I have set myself to write up. Maybe a few learnings and learned lessons on humility, resilience, support and kindness from family, friends and strangers alike. This story is relatable - or so I like to think. Sure, the topic might be the losing of a job and the quest of finding employment at a first glance and if read on diagonal. But that’s just the motif of this publishing crime. The trigger of a story that is simply voicing what many think but don’t actually say unless in private and with heavy filters on.

Life is not all about rainbows and roses. Life is complex, boring, unpredictable and better than any novel or substack post. Thank you for landing on this page and offered me the most invaluable and valuable gift we all have to give: time.

Prologue

It’s April 3rd 2024 and I’ve just put my 2 years old daughter to sleep. My wife is not home for the past few days, traveling for her business. I’ve just made a cup of tea and I’m winding down because a 2 years old missing her mama can take a toll on the strongest of us. I’m on my phone catching up on all my notifications, the TV is on giving me recommendations on what to watch. Suddenly I get a notification from the Outlook app on my phone and I see a meeting invite for the next morning at 9am with my boss and the HR rep, a sweet and kind lady who was only doing her job and felt visibly uncomfortable being there.

I went to bed that night making peace with myself. I knew there was something in the air lately and I was prepared for bad news, but then again one never knows so I kept an open mind. So to no surprise on April 4th 2024 I was terminated from my job where I had just hit the 6 months mark. I did not feel sorry for myself nor did I get the same mixed cloud of feelings of anger and panic I felt on my first layoff experience back in 2023. I felt relief instead. The place was not the absolute definition of something I was vibing with and 6 months had been enough for me and it really would be so much better if we’d listen to our heart more than our brains at times.

I left that meeting happy. My OCD brain was still catching up though because I had so much stuff to cover on the projects I was working on and being that I just had been terminated, I didn’t have to do anything else other than prepare the computer for the courier to pick up and return it to the company.

I was not feeling like this guy at all.

Next few days, weeks, months

It’s amazing how energized one can feel after getting out of the bed with a toxic “it”. “It” can be an ex of any sort: girlfriend/boyfriend, spouse, business partner or employer. I’ve enjoyed that state of beatitude for a few days in order to recover from what the cool kids on Linkedin call burnout. But I was aware that the context of the job market in 2024 had only gotten worse since 2023. After my first layoff I was able to interview a few times, did not get a lot of rejection emails and within about 3 months I was able to secure and sign a job offer. I was so stupidly eager to get back in the saddle that I even declined a recruiter who was offering me a job interview for a job that had a pay range $50K higher than the job offer I had just signed and where the digital ink on the Docusign app was still fresh. Because I have principles and I’m honest. Because I have a word and I committed to my new employer - I said to myself. And how stupid I was looking back at this moment now. I will never know if I would’ve gotten that other higher paying job. But lamenting on “what ifs” is like wishing to win the lottery jackpot without even playing.

I went back into job searching a week or two after I got let go. I was taking it easy spending time with my little one, driving her to/from the daycare, being the father I never had. [Not to say my dad sucked at fatherhood. My dad, like any other dad, had his best dad ever moments. Absolutely love the old man especially since I became a dad myself. He just wasn’t there as much as I’d wanted him to be.] But the first thing I’d notice on my job search was the lack of new jobs being posted on your usual platforms. Pretty much same AI written - not even edited - job posts would rotate every week. Soon the rejection emails started pouring in my inbox. I was still ok. I NEVER LOST MY COOL.

May, June, July, August. I’ve had a routine built around job searching, household tasks, being a parent and a partner to my wife. I’d start an online business and that gave my mind something to be busy with. Gave my creative juices something to be spent on. I’ve dedicated time to learning actual AI skills at a deeper level and enrolled in a few online courses on Prompt Engineering and was excited to learn new things for myself for the first time in years. But I still did not locked in not a single job interview. In months. I looked around, talked to people in the same boat. The common storyline was similar. The job market was in a pickle and nobody knew what’s going on to be able to apply any fixes. Lots of self-proclaimed LinkedIn gurus would pinpoint it on the candidates. Then you’d see the trend of “I’ve been laid off” posts generate thousands of impressions, likes and reposts on Linkedin giving the authors that 5 seconds of fame mirage but only that. I started being active on LinkedIn and went on to showing myself to the world through my written stories. I’ve doubled my followers on the world’s most cringe social media platform and silently was trying to build a brand around me to help me position myself as a worthy candidate, meet new people, network more, open all sorts of doors to all sorts of opportunities. But it doesn’t work this way. LinkedIn is a corrupted beautiful once upon a time idea. Now it’s just a cemetery of lost hopes, ghouls wearing “#OPENTOWORK” profile badges and engagement pods fighting off for impressions. I must admit, I tried that game. But what is missing and is always off about this professional Facebook is that you can’t bring your true authentic self forward.

Anything you write, comment, like and repost out there is monitored by former and future employers. This can be good or can be bad. Good if you’re selling your soul and you turn into a hypocrite just to please a bunch of mediocre nobodies. That might get you somewhere. Bad if you’re outspoken and daredevil enough to say you had a bad day at work and that gets you fired the next day. Listen, I don’t want to be misunderstood here, when I use the word mediocre I don’t mean it in a negative way. Sure sounds like it when you add “nobodies” next to it, buuuuut… the point is we are 8.2 billion on this rock some call flat and I don’t need a statistics diploma to affirm that maybe 7.5 billion of us are at best mediocre. With this perspective, being mediocre sounds like being normal. And that’s a good thing.

LinkedIn is one of the root causes of the current state of the what was once the job market. It’s the gasoline that keeps the destructive fire burning. It’s the poison that kills people’s spirits post by post. I’ve been on it for over a decade, I’m ready to let it go.

//to be continued