Something absolutely catastrophic is happening right under my nose, and most people are completely oblivious to it – and it feels kinda like watching kids play with sparklers while your house burns down around you.

The job market as I knew it. . .as you knew it. . . as we all used to know it. . .

It is gone, my smart and equally cynical friend.

What am I saying? Gone?

More like Kaput.

Finito.

Deader than my social life.

Not struggling.

Not “challenging” – oh, how I love these euphemisms that corporate schmucks throw around.

Dead.

And if you’re still playing by the old rules, and you’re sending out resumes like my desperate ex texting me in the middle of the night, hoping for callbacks that’ll never come, waiting for HR to notice you, well, my friend, you are more extinct than the dinosaurs and you only have to find the right comet to hit you over the head with.

But the thing is that you don’t know it yet, and that is both kinda tragic and, um, slightly hilarious at the same time.

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The numbers don’t Lie (but the politicians do)

Let me paint you a picture rather bleak picture of 2025 that nobody wants to address – well, with nobody, I am actually not including mister @DreesMarc, the Obi Wan Kenobi of recruitment statistics, technobabble, and truth-seeker pur sang, and trust me, it is uglier than your last date who looked “totally different” in their profile photos.

Let me start with the US Over 95,000 tech workers lost their jobs (I hate that word: tech workers, sounds awful, kinda like they’re prostituting themselves), they were obliterated in mass layoffs throughout 2024, and another 26,000+ were already gone in early 2025. To me, that doesn’t sound like no market correction, mein Freund, that is more like a systematic execution of an entire workforce, and it makes the Red Wedding* look like a pleasant Sunday brunch.

There’s always rain in Britt-ain 42% of employers are “kicking hiring decisions into the long grass” – lemme mansplain this limey-lingo for you. . .They say, they’re not hiring. End of story.

The most recent data shows that permanent staff vacancies falling at the sharpest rate since August 2020. I’m talking about a hiring freeze that is so severe it makes what happened with our jobs during the pandemic look like a warm-up act.

But here’s the part that will make your blood run cold. 32% of UK employers were planning redundancies or recruitment freezes – and that’s the highest level seen in a decade, outside of COVID-19 .

Across Europe Business failures in Europe (that’s nearly a pleonasm) are multiplying like Pfizer rabbits on a high dose of Viagra, particularly in heavy industry and logistics. Companies over here (yeah, I’m from ‘here’) are scaling back and in some cases they’re disappearing entirely, like my patience when someone starts explaining their crypto portfolio at a dinner party (again).

This ain’t a recession, mes amis, this is a full-on reset.

• Just watch GOT you twat.

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Why everyone got it wrong

I have been sold a lie for decades that was so massive that it makes Nigerian prince scams look mighty credible.

You know it. ..

They said:

“Go to school, get good grades, land a ‘stable’ job, and climb the corporate ladder like a monkey’s ass.

Rinse and repeat until retirement.

That is assuming retirement still exists by then, which is about as likely as finding a unicorn among my readers.

The game changed while I was looking the other way, probably scrolling through social media like everyone else with the attention span of a goldfish. It started with the ‘working from home’ trend. Remote work was to become the new normal, but it also made entire workforces replaceable. And the thing was that the gig economy didn’t supplement our traditional jobs because it cannibalized them. It turned once well paid white collar jobs into algorithmically monitored, per minute billing, barrel scraping hunger games.

And the people in charge saw this coming years ago, sitting in their ivory towers, running complex business scenario’s, and sipping champagne while the Titanic was already taking on water.

They just didn’t tell me – or you – about it, those bastards.

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The reality nobody talks about

Here’s what’s really happening behind closed doors. . .

Companies aren’t hiring – they’re automating Why pay a human 50k a year when an AI or an automation tool like Zapier or n8n can do the same job for 50 bucks a month? It’s basic math, people, and even I can do basic math after my sip of scotch.

Remote work killed geography-based advantages

My competition isn’t just the person down the street anymore – it is now someone in Eastern Europe, India, Vietnam, South America, Africa who is willing to do my job for 20% of my salary while I’m still figuring out how to make ramen in my microwave.

The ‘skills gap’ is a myth

Skills gap? What gap? There ain’t no shortage of qualified people, but there’s a shortage of companies who are willing to pay what qualified people are worth ! They are all expecting a Michelin-star meal for McDonald’s prices.

HR departments have become elimination machines

Their job isn’t to find me anymore. Yeah, maybe 20 years ago or so, then they outsourced it to external recruitment agencies, but now their role is to filter me out like a coffee filter through their AIs, except they are less useful and infinitely more frustrating. The average job posting gets 250+ applications, and we are all competing with people who probably have degrees in subjects that didn’t exist when we were in school.

Our resumes aren’t read by humans no more. They are being selected or (mostly) rejected by algorithms before the human ever sees it, which is both efficient and sad at the same time, and if I hear someone say that AI in recruitment is totally unbiased, and that humans are biased, I am strongly inclined to hang that person up by the eye-lids and force-feed them my masterclass in statistics. Over ‘n over ‘n over again.

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What the smart money is doing right now

While everyone else is panic-applying to jobs that don’t exist, and even trying to fight fire with fire by using AI to mass-spam recruiters, the people who saw this coming are doing something completely different. . .

They are not looking for jobs.

They are creating their own economy, and frankly, it’s about friggin’ time.

The freelance economy is about to explode in ways that nobody could have ever anticipated – not because it’s trendy like the ‘gig-economy’ was, but because it’s the only viable option left that doesn’t involve living in your parents’ basement until you’re 40.

Traditional employment will become extinct, and the survivors will be the ones who never needed it in the first place – kinda like how cockroaches survive nuclear disasters (ever thought of that – becoming like a roach? Just picture mister Miyagi from ‘karate kid’ saying to Ralph Macchio ‘not be like water, not be like rock, be like roach!’).

And with this observation, I didn’t want to end and leave you out to dry.

For once, I actually want to give you some unsolicited advise based on a bit of experience that I have with the subject of becoming and being a freelancer.

So, here it is.

My roadmap to independence, and I’m sharing it because misery loves company:

Stop being an employee. Start being a service provider.

This part starts in your head. And you need not be a freelancer to start to think this way. Think of it like this, employees are costs to be eliminated, and service providers are solutions to be hired because they fix a problem – well, at least until they figure out how to automate those too.

Build skills that can’t be automated – yet

Focus on creativity, and relationship-building, and complex problem-solving – basically, anything that requires a human brain that hasn’t been replaced by ChatGPT’s smarter cousin. And this part requires more than hard skills, because real success in this part requires more soft-skills than hard ones.

Create multiple income streams immediately

The days of relying on one employer for financial security ended years ago, probably around the time when companies started calling employees “human resources” like I’m some kind of commodity. This means that sometimes you have to work your balls off (sorry ladies) when you have two clients hiring you for three days a week, when both jobs actually require you to have your full attention. Success doesn’t come cheap, and a willingness to work hard should be part of your mindset as well.

Just axe yourself the question: what would you rather do. . . be unemployed (with minimum to no benefits), and staring out the window all day, shooting crack, drinking yourself into oblivion or do macramé, or would you rather get up at six and work until eight?

Network like my life depends on it

And trust me, it does. In a world where traditional hiring is dead, the only jobs left are the ones nobody posts publicly. They are passed around as if they were secret recipes.

To be transparent, this is where I sometimes fail as well.

I am a hermit. Though you can hear me complain a lot about having to slave away in my attic (or basement – depending on the weather), I actually like living a secluded live. But as a freelancer this isn’t the right strategy of course. I need to be seen by people. In the flesh. And that is why – if you’re not any good at networking – you’ll see that the somewhat lesser gods walk away with the deal while you’re left to rot in your. . . whatever it is that you like to rot in.

But I have found a way to deal with it.

See, I don’t like networking events, because the kind of talks you’re having with total strangers is only going to be about the weather, football, kids – yes, boring stuff. And since I know didley squat about football and other sports, this ain’t for me bub. My approach is different. I’d like to think that I know what I am talking about, so what I like to do instead is to be out there sharing that knowledge. I am a teacher by nature so this comes easy. And there are always people willing to listen.

But left or right, even though, you are a hermit like me, sometimes, you just got to get out there and do your thang, cause otherwise you’re not gonna get noticed.

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The underground economy is already here

And no, it doesn’t involve selling dope or counterfeit money.

The most successful people in 2025 won’t have traditional jobs – they will have clients who actually pay them for what they’re worth. They won’t have bosses breathing down their necks, and instead they’ll have partnerships that. . . . also breathe them down their necks. . .ok, this doesn’t compute, but the point is that you won’t have a salary that barely cover rent, but you’ll have revenue streams that you can play with like a real entrepreneur (pun intended).

And if you think you’re going to have the luxury to sleep on it for a few nights and then make a decision, you need to wake up fast my smart assed friend, ‘cause this ain’t some distant future scenario straight out of a science fiction novel. It is happening right now, today, and while traditional job seekers are still playing musical chairs on a sinking ship – the music stopped playing months ago.

The question isn’t whether the old job market is coming back, and I think that it ain’t, and frankly, good riddance, and if this is the ‘new social contract’ that Sam CTRL-ALT-DELETE-man was talking about, I am all for it.

The question for you is, however: are you going to adapt to the new reality, or are you going to go down with the ship like a tragic hero in a Greek myth.

The clock is ticking, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on going down without a fight.

Signing off and feeling feisty!

Marco

I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.

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