We Were Promised a Future. We Got a Spreadsheet.

I posted something a few hours ago. Not a profound thought, not a carefully worded take – just a short, exhausted sentence.

And then I watched a ColdFusion video that laid it all out properly, with actual numbers and actual economists and the kind of grim, methodical clarity that makes you feel simultaneously vindicated and furious. Because the data is real. This isn't catastrophising. This isn't generational whinging. The numbers are right there, and they are not good, and I am so tired of being told otherwise.

So here I am, with Things To Say About This.

The System Was Not Designed for Me (Or Anyone Like Me)

Here's the thing: I'm 20. I'm in college – not university, not yet, maybe not ever, because the entire premise of "get a degree and walk into a job" has become something of a dark joke at this point. Nobody's laughing, mind you. It's the kind of joke that just sits there.

What I actually want to be is a writer. A poet, a creative – that's the honest answer, the one I've been sitting with since I was 14 and started filling an anthology that now runs to 187 poems. I write fiction. I write essays. I write blog posts at midnight because I can't stop the thoughts from needing somewhere to go. That is the thing I am, at the core of it, before any pragmatic consideration enters the room.

But I also build things – software, mostly: ATProto tools, bots, services – because the creative path looked at the current landscape and quietly closed its door. Coding felt safer. More defensible. The kind of skill that couldn't be so easily dismissed as nice-but-not-viable. I've got projects people actually use. I've got a Ko-fi now – set it up recently, and the embarrassment of asking for money has not fully worn off – because it turns out "builds things for free because he loves it" doesn't cover rent.

The job market isn't interested in people like me. And the financial system surrounding it? Even less so.

The video explains it in three parts: AI displacing entry-level work, economic uncertainty causing a hiring freeze, and the post-pandemic market never quite recovering. All true. All relevant. And none of it fully captures the particular, grinding stupidity of being young right now.

A Number on a Spreadsheet

Because here's what nobody tells you when you're growing up: you are, to the financial system, a liability until proven otherwise.

Young workers, as Harvard economist David Deming apparently explained, are treated like capital investments. And in uncertain times – tariffs, trade wars, actual wars, AI anxiety, whatever the crisis of the month is – investments are the first thing to get cut . Not the senior staff with thirty years of institutional knowledge. Not the executives with the golden parachutes. You. The 20-year-old with the portfolio and the enthusiasm and the frankly insulting willingness to learn for less than you're worth.

And then – and this is the part that makes me want to put my head through a wall – over 60% of companies are apparently posting fake jobs . Listings that don't represent real open positions. Posted, according to surveys, to make employees feel replaceable, or to give the appearance of growth, or to just hoover up candidate data. Which means that a huge proportion of the effort desperate people are putting into applications is dissolving into nothing. Into a void. On purpose. By design.

I don't have a polite way to describe what that is. It is cruel. It is a system treating people like data points to be mined, and dressing it up as opportunity.

The AI Bit (And Why I Can't Ignore It)

I work in tech – or I'm trying to, anyway. The industry I'm attempting to enter is also the industry most loudly and enthusiastically eating its own entry-level pipeline. Some companies aren't hiring junior developers at all any more – just mid-level and up, the logic being that one person with five years of experience plus an AI tool can do what a small team used to do. Which might even be true. That doesn't make it less of a disaster. That doesn't make it fine.

It's an ouroboros. The snake devouring its own tail. The industry automating away the entry points through which the next generation of experienced developers would have come. In five years, where exactly are the mid-level developers supposed to come from, if nobody's hiring juniors today? In ten years, where are the seniors? You cannot skip a generation and expect the pipeline to hold. At some point the people who actually know how to supervise the AI, catch its mistakes, architect the systems it runs on – they retire, and there's nobody behind them. The software industry is, with considerable confidence and absolutely no apparent self-awareness, engineering its own collapse.

Goldman Sachs predicted 300 million jobs displaced by AI. Anthropic's CEO has warned that half of all entry-level white collar jobs could go in the next five years. And it's not just tech: admin, research, basic analysis, writing, translation – the video's list of "at risk" fields reads like a directory of every job traditionally given to someone who is new and still building their CV.

The video features a guy called Andrew – a writer who had his scripts replaced by AI, then tried to pivot to publishing books, and got undercut there too. Three times his skill set was devalued and replaced. He sounds exhausted. Not incandescent, just... worn to nothing by the relentlessness of it.

I watched that and felt it somewhere specific.

Writing isn't just a hobby. I've been doing this since I was 14. It is not a casual interest – it is the thing I reach for when I need to process something real. And I looked at the job market for writers and creatives, looked at what AI is doing to that field, and made the pragmatic decision to build software instead. Because at least software felt harder to automate.

Except now they're automating that too.

So I gave up the thing I love, for the thing I thought was safer – and the safety is evaporating in real time, and I am left holding absolutely nothing. That is a particular kind of demoralising that I'm not sure the economists have a word for yet. They probably will soon. There'll be a study.

And the deeply annoying part? I've touched something like ten different programming languages at this point. Python, TypeScript, Rust (briefly, disastrously), SvelteKit, Bash, VB.NET – the list goes on. I have built things that work. Things people actually use. And I still feel, most days, like I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Like the knowledge is wide but somehow never quite deep enough. Like I'm perpetually one interview away from being found out.

That's not false modesty. It's the reality of learning in public, without a structured path, in a field that moves faster than any one person can keep up with. The imposter syndrome doesn't dissolve just because you ship something. If anything, shipping something just gives you a clearer view of everything you still don't understand.

The Bit That Actually Gets Me

The jobs that AI can do cheaply, it will do cheaply. The jobs it can't do yet are on pause because companies are too nervous to hire anyone at all. That's the squeeze – from both sides simultaneously, with no gap in between to slip through, and no one particularly interested in the fact that real people are being crushed in it.

And if you're chronically ill on top of it – which I am – the whole thing takes on an extra dimension of fun, because the jobs that remain tend to require the kind of consistent, scheduled, present-in-a-particular-chair availability that doesn't exactly flex around flare-ups and bad days. I'd be fine with "we don't care how long it takes, just get it done well." That's how I work. That's how open source communities function. That is not, it turns out, how the labour market is set up.

I'm not failing to find work because I haven't tried. I'm not failing to find work because I lack skills or drive or a willingness to learn. I'm failing to find work because the market has broken in specific ways that target people at exactly the stage of life I'm at – and because the things I'm actually good at (writing, creating, building quietly and obsessively in the background) are precisely the things being automated away first. It's almost elegant, in a nauseating way.

And the advice – god, the advice. Learn a trade. Upskill in AI. Start a business. All technically defensible. All requiring the kind of financial runway (savings, support, stability, the luxury of time without immediate material consequences) that a lot of us just don't have. Tell me to bootstrap my way out of a structural problem one more time. I dare you.

"You have time" is the thing the ColdFusion video says, and it's right, I suppose. I'm 20. Time is, technically, the one resource I'm not short of. But time doesn't cover immediate costs. Time doesn't stop the gnawing anxiety that the skills you're building now might be devalued by something you can't even name yet. Time is cold comfort when you're watching the opportunities narrow in real time and the people telling you to be patient are the ones who got in before the door closed.

What I'm Left With

I don't have a clean conclusion. I don't have a manifesto, or a call to action, or a neat list of things the government should do (though honestly, some form of UBI would be a start, hence all of this).

What I have is this: I keep building things. I keep writing. I keep putting both out into the world because I don't know what else to do – it's not strategy, it's compulsion, it's the only thing that feels like it means anything when everything else is a waiting room. I've got a Ko-fi that people have been genuinely, unexpectedly kind about – and I won't pretend that hasn't mattered, because it has, more than I know how to say properly.

But I'm tired. Not in the way that sleep fixes. In the way that accumulates – from being told the system works when it visibly doesn't, from applying to jobs that don't exist, from pivoting away from the thing I love and finding the new thing is also on fire, from being 20 and already exhausted by the performance of optimism that everyone seems to expect.

We were promised a future: study hard, build skills, do the work, find the job, begin your life. The social contract was clear. And somewhere between the automation wave and the economic uncertainty and the ghost job listings and the AI eating the entry ladder from the bottom up, that contract quietly dissolved without anyone announcing it.

But the expectations? Those stuck around just fine.