I started looking for jobs on Google and ended up just feeling tired
Spending way too much time in the search bar
I sat down at my desk around 9 PM last Tuesday, convinced that I just needed to refine my search terms to find something decent. It’s funny how, even after years of using the internet, I still have this lingering belief that if I just dig deep enough into Google, a secret opening will appear. I spent about two hours hopping between sites. I checked some of those big career portals and even looked at a few government support programs. Everything feels so fragmented. You see a notice about a short-term employment camp for college students, and then five minutes later, you are reading about Jensen Huang’s approval ratings at Nvidia on Glassdoor. The contrast is bizarre and frankly a bit exhausting. I kept thinking that maybe I should be aiming for a tech giant, but then I remember the reality of my own resume compared to those 99% approval CEOs.
The weird gap between AI advice and real life
I tried asking an AI tool for some career direction, just out of boredom. It gave me this long list of sectors that are supposed to be ‘safe’ from AI displacement in the next five years. It was all very logical, but it felt completely detached from the quiet, stagnant feeling of actually being unemployed. One friend told me to look into long-term housing loans for young people through government sites, but navigating those portals is like trying to solve a puzzle where half the pieces are missing. I spent forty minutes just trying to figure out if I was even eligible, and in the end, I wasn’t even sure if the information I found was current or if the application period had closed months ago.
Why local support programs feel so far away
I stumbled upon a notice for a local employment camp for women in Siheung. They were taking applications for about 12 people on a first-come, first-served basis. It sounded like something I should do, but the thought of emailing a contact person and waiting for a response, only to find out it’s already full, made me just close the tab instead. There is this weird barrier to entry for things that are supposed to be ‘supportive.’ You have to have the energy to hunt down the information first, and most days, I just don’t have that. It’s easier to sit there and scroll through news articles about how the job market is shifting or how someone else’s company is doing better than Google. I don’t know if that’s a productive use of time, but it’s what happens when you feel stuck.
Still sitting at the same desk
It’s been another week, and I honestly haven’t applied to a single thing. I keep telling myself I’m ‘researching,’ which is really just a polite way of saying I’m paralyzed by the sheer volume of noise online. I saw a quiz on a youth shelter’s website where you could win a small prize for getting the answers right about their services, and for a second, I actually thought about doing it. It felt like a low-stakes way to feel like I was doing something useful. I didn’t end up doing it, though. I just closed my laptop and realized I hadn’t even checked if there was any milk left for coffee tomorrow morning. The big career questions always seem to take a backseat to the small, annoying logistics of just existing.
That feeling of being overwhelmed by options is so relatable. I’ve found small, consistent actions – like just browsing one company’s website each day – are much more manageable than trying to tackle everything at once.
That feeling of searching endlessly and then realizing you haven’t even addressed basic needs is really relatable. It’s almost like the internet creates this artificial sense of urgency while completely ignoring the fundamentals.
That Siheung camp example really resonates; it highlights how much mental bandwidth is needed just to *begin* seeking help, not just searching online.