As the class of 2025 graduates from university, filled with hope and ambition, the media is adamant about informing them of the unravelling job market they’ve found themselves in. Over the past few weeks, numerous articles have highlighted how AI is exacerbating the already dire job market worldwide. Last month, the Guardian reported that “university students in the UK are facing the toughest job market since 2018”, as businesses use AI rather than hire people to cut costs.

Similarly, the Economist released an episode of their podcast, The Intelligence, titled: “Job prospects for graduates ain’t what they used to be – and the trend started long before AI”. In the episode, hosts Jason Palmer and Rosie Blau speak to senior economist writer Calum Williams, who stresses that, “For the first time in history, Americans between the ages of 22 and 27 who have bachelor degrees or higher, actually now face a higher unemployment rate than the national average.” What’s been driving that change is not solely AI, but “an increase in semi-recent graduates who are still unable to find their first job. We reckon that the social and political consequences of this broad development will be quite profound.” This is not just an US phenomenon, Williams asserts, but can be found in the UK, EU, Canada and Japan.

The equation that we were taught as children – that you go to university, get a job, become successful, and earn good money – no longer adds up for many of us, and honestly hasn’t for a long time. Over the last few years, it’s become increasingly popular to pull elaborate stunts on social media to get graduate jobs, like those who walk around London with banners on their chest promoting themselves and their qualifications or graduates who record themselves looking for employment on TikTok, with the videos often ending in tears as they make desperate pleas to their audience (or the audiences they hope to attract with this content) for a job.

I graduated with my MA in 2023, and some of my peers are still struggling to find full-time employment. It is almost incomprehensible to me that the job market is even worse now than it was then. It’s clear that the problem is not going to improve soon, and offering young people advice and tips – as annoying people on LinkedIn often do – can at times suggest that the problem lies solely with them, rather than in the job market. So, how do we actually support young people at this crucial time, when work remains a site where many derive a significant portion of their value and self-worth? One thing we can do is tell them the truth about work.

“The journey of emerging into adult responsible contexts [the working world] involves at some point the need to do some sort of deprogramming and unlearning as the fantasy of your working life becomes deconstructed by reality,” 25-year-old Olivia tells Dazed. Olivia graduated with her MA in 2023 and started working at her university shortly after, but she recently quit her job. Her last job made her acutely conscious of the structural violence of late-stage capitalism, and shaped her plans for the type of job she’d like to do next. “[It is important to look at] how you are being valued at a place where you swap your time, skills, mind and body for money,” she says. “And I use those words with a lot of intention.”

Framing work in the way that Olivia has is beneficial to understanding the oppressive nature of work under late-stage capitalism because you are exchanging your limited time on earth and your health, which can be seriously jeopardised by doing a desk job, for money. And this is, of course, not by choice. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that “we are coerced into work on pain of homelessness, starvation and destitution.” In other words, we work because we have no other choice. This isn’t to say that work isn’t fulfilling and deeply enjoyable for some. It can provide a sense of purpose and optimism, especially when you’re doing something you love and feel passionate about. But the amount of time we’re expected to expend on our jobs (and lack of choice) can significantly sour that devotion.  

When you start to understand work in this way, it becomes less desirable, and young people who are now in the privileged position of acquiring graduate jobs are also becoming more attuned to this. Williams reported that job satisfaction among young graduates has “fallen quite sharply” in recent years, which also correlates with the rise of trends like ‘quiet quitting’ on social media; however, economists aren’t entirely sure why young people are so disillusioned. When I spoke to young people earlier this year about what would make them happy, those in full-time employment craved freedom, specifically the kind of freedom they experienced at university, when they had the space to decide how they truly wanted to spend their time.

I would argue that young graduates’ dissatisfaction with work is potentially connected to the fact that their priorities differ from those of past generations. As older people were marrying young and able to buy their homes and have children on their salaries, they were able to acquire symbols of the “good life”, as theorist Sara Ahmed describes it, even if it didn’t really make them happy. Gen Z (and millennials) struggle to receive the economic benefits that previous generations achieved through work, which potentially makes them less resilient to its brutality. It’s also important to note that the markers of the “good life” have changed in the social media age, where we are confronted 24/7 by influencers who are always on holiday, live in big homes and wear enviable clothing. They could not afford their lifestyle through a traditional nine-to-five job, and it makes one question the point of having one when you could just become a content creator.

25-year-old Sandra works at an environmental organisation that has implemented a four-day work week, and it has radically changed how she views work: “By them doing that [implementing a four-day work week], I’ve realised that having a work-life balance is the most important thing to me,” she tells Dazed. Even though Sandra really likes her job, she believes it is vital to think about what you want for your life outside of work and not to neglect it because: “No matter how good a job is, at the end of the day, you are dispensable to them.”

As we’ve already established, under capitalism, everyone needs to work; and detailing the ways work under this system is coercive and detrimental to one’s health doesn’t change that fact, if anything, it’s just depressing. The intention of this article is not to depress anyone, but rather to prompt an examination of our feelings about work, as it often defines so much of our self-worth, creating fears about how others see and value us. You are not a failure if you can not find work in our incredibly fucked-up job market. You are more than the work you do and what you produce, and the same energy that goes into your working life should be expended on your personal life. Of course, our personal lives do not provide us with income, but they do equally (if not more so) provide us with the tools we need to stay alive: our friends, family and our communities (if we invest in them).