It Is Soul-Crushing’: Young People Are Describing the Job Hunt in Terms That Should Alarm Policy Makers

A young woman with a Cambridge degree is making lattes for people her own age who have secured office jobs in a London café. In July 2025, she received her degree. After submitting over fifty applications to the professional world, she was only given one in-person interview. She is not an anomaly in this early 2026 scenario. She is the standard.

Lucy Gabb attended one of Britain’s most prestigious universities. Her dream job would be in publishing. She discovered that entry-level positions required experience that could only be obtained while not enrolled full-time in school, which was logically impossible for anyone who followed the traditional route of education. “The job search is all my friends are talking about,” she said to the BBC. “Studying for so long and not making any progress can be extremely depressing.” The phrase “soul-destroying, soul-crushing” has become so common in young people’s job search descriptions that it begins to feel more like a collective diagnosis than personal frustration.

Since January 2025, Poppy Blackman, 22, has not had a job. Since applying solely within her field of fashion and art design has not produced any results, she uses four different CVs she has written for various sectors to apply for an average of fifty positions each month. She no longer wants to work in the field she studied. “Not a day goes by when I don’t apply for at least a few jobs,” she replied. “It does get pretty miserable after a certain amount of time, always doing the same thing, looking on the same websites, applying for similar jobs.” Anyone who has spent months looking for a job will know that the routine is numbing in a particular way: the same silence, the same keyword-optimized applications, the same portals.

Economists and policy analysts are genuinely alarmed by the numbers underlying these stories. In the last quarter of 2025, youth unemployment in the UK among those aged 16 to 24 reached 16.1%, the highest level since 2014, when the labor market was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, and above the EU average of 14.9% for the first time. With the COVID spike removed, the number is an 11-year high for individuals aged 18 to 24. Former MP Alan Milburn, who oversaw the government’s Young People and Work review, put his observations succinctly: this could put “a generation on the scrapheap.” He went on to say that 45% of 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in school, working, or receiving training have never held a job, and that not joining the workforce by that age has what economists refer to as “scarring effects”—long-term harm to lifetime earnings, job stability, and social mobility that can last for decades.

Young job seekers find it frustrating that the causes are complex and mostly beyond their control. Employers in the UK were subject to a significant increase in national insurance contributions starting in April 2024, which went from 13.8% to 15%. The payment threshold was lowered from £9,100 to £5,000. Since 2024, hiring someone who is 21 years of age or older has become more expensive by about 15% due to the combination of that change, growing minimum wages, pension auto-enrollment, and new employment rights legislation. The rise is 26% for those aged 18 to 20. The result is straightforward, according to Martin Beck, chief economist at WPI Strategy: employers freeze hiring when demand is low and costs are rising, and entry-level jobs are the first to go. The impact is first and most fully absorbed by young people.

The AI component, which is still evolving and difficult to measure, is undoubtedly changing how young people view the application process. After earning a first in history from Oxford, 21-year-old Jack has applied to over 100 jobs, graduate programs, and internships. In all those applications, he has conversed with precisely one human. A chatbot conducted an interview with him. “You hear back from maybe 10% of applications and usually it’s automated, so you don’t even know what you’re doing wrong,” he replied. An entire cohort is already familiar with the conundrum he outlines: entry-level positions demand experience, which can only be obtained in entry-level positions. “I’m exhausted and frustrated.” According to PwC’s youth employment index, AI hasn’t yet completely replaced young workers in the traditional first-job sectors of retail and hospitality. However, youth employment in the IT sector has decreased by about a fifth, while adult employment has remained relatively stable. This particular trend is worth keeping an eye on as AI capabilities grow.

As all of this takes place, there’s a sense that the policy discourse hasn’t kept up with what’s really going on in living rooms, bedsits, and café jobs across the nation. Reporting on the government’s Young People and Work review is scheduled for the summer. The UK is “sleepwalking into a quiet epidemic” of unemployment, according to Tesco’s UK chief. According to LinkedIn data, job competition has nearly doubled since 2022. Soul-crushing, soul-destroying, drained, and trapped are not melodramatic terms used by young people. People who have fulfilled all the requirements of the system and are still waiting outside a door that won’t open provide a clear account of a structural failure.