Condolences... (although I will admit feeling a wee bit of "relief over evidence I'm not the only one"...)
Employment games surely are a special case of the games selves feel compelled to play under the madness-inducing burden of their separation.
You got your owner role, managerial roles, worker bees, etc.
Each needs to "know how to act" in varieties of inter-role settings, e.g.:
- when no one is looking
- when others are looking
- in the presence of a specific other role (with, of course, wiggle room for specific role player quirks)
- when "shit happens" leads to unique, realtime inter-role settings
And it's lies. All lies. All pretense of role conformity atop cauldrons of inner bristle.
And fear motivated/driven, e.g. of not securing survival needs, of appearing to be a lesser person than someone else.
So... tiring....
And then looking - and maybe applying, and maybe interviewing - for a job is another Herculean test of patience in trepidated kowtow to others.. all the while knowing it'll almost certainly lead to roughly the same misery dynamics.
And the internet hasn't helped. Or, well.. I guess maybe it did before becoming yet another monument to greed (e.g. remembering the time I landed a Perl-centric job through a Craigslist posting...). But now it seems an introduction to contortionism, what with all the deceptive links, the modal "please let our cookies fuck you up the ass" popups, advertisements javascript-mediated inserting themselves into what you're trying to digest such that content you're reading jumps elsewhere.. again.. and again.. ooops, there's a modal "You must create an account and/or subscribe to continue!" popup. And now advertisements related to questionable search query terms
you hoped the browser wouldn't remember are inserting themselves in da html agains.. the dismay over such inaccessibility to possibilities for not having a LinkedIn account due to now-distant-past feeling that was such big waste of time bullshit (but of course the social inertia to persist therein doesn't care about your possibly genuinely superior view of such nonsense... *bleat*, goddamnit... *BLEAT*....).
Well... sorry... it occurs to me the above offers no help... if anything, possibly pours methanol on wounds.. salt in eyes....
I too am very dissatisfied with the current state of internet job seeking (which is how all job seeking occurs nowadays). I'm currently on Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn (vomit), etc and all these companies also have their own websites on which I'm expected to register and re-type all of my information. On top of that, if I don't kiss their *specific* ass enough in my résumé, application, cover letter, etc, I'm not getting the job. I'm not a particularly outstanding employee but I'm quite capable and reliable and it's really upsetting to just not be able to find employment I don't hate. Before I took this job I was unemployed for six months due to the Plague and honestly it was the best six months of my life.