'What is UP with this non-existent job market?': A 58-year-old Redditor's rant strikes a nerve across all ages

A post on Reddit’s r/jobsearch has cut through the noise of daily job hunt complaints to capture something specific and frustrating: the sense that the job market isn’t just slow, but frozen.

The original poster is 58, has been getting no response to applications for jobs they describe themselves as perfect for, and is starting to wonder whether age discrimination is the main culprit. They floated a theory: the labour pool is shrinking due to boomer retirements and reduced immigration, economic growth is happening without new jobs, and if you’re in the unlucky 4% who are unemployed, you’re essentially waiting around for someone else to retire before a slot opens up.

“Not looking for tips here, just need to rant,” they wrote. What came back wasn’t just sympathy, but a wave of people from very different life stages all saying the same thing.

Age isn’t the variable, but the market is just broken

The original poster’s implicit theory that perhaps being 58 was the problem was quickly complicated by the responses.

“Young people are complaining too. Even people in the sweet spot of being experienced but not past 40 aren’t doing great,” one commenter wrote. To which someone replied: “Yup. Apparently all that experience that was supposed to sweeten my chances for better employment was for nothing.”

Another commenter was more direct: “I have 12+ years of work experience, am under 40 and never had any issue getting a job before this terrible job market. There is no ‘sweet spot.’ This job market is all-around terrible.”

The receipts

Several commenters offered their own credentials alongside their frustrations, almost as if anticipating the usual advice to network more, update your LinkedIn, or polish your resume.

“I’m 30 and have been job hunting since my first career layoff in October 2024. This market sucks hard and has not remotely improved in all that time,” one netizen remarked.

“PhD, 33, seven years of experience in my field. Can’t get a call for an industry job. I just have to work academic jobs that are lower pay,” another stated.

Taken together, these responses map out a job market where age alone does not explain the silence. A 30-year-old with no obvious liabilities, a PhD with seven years of specialised experience, a mid-career professional under 40 with over a decade of solid history, all of whom report the same thing as the 58-year-old original poster.

The bigger picture

One commenter stepped back from the individual experience to offer a structural diagnosis that aligned closely with the original poster’s own theory. “Just look around. Everything in the economy, sans the stock market being propped up by AI, is terrible. Companies are at best holding firm; most are laying people off. No one has any faith to make significant investments in growth. It’s a horrific job market.”

The original poster asked whether age was the culprit. Reddit’s answer, backed by people ranging from 30 to late career, is essentially: it might be a factor, but it’s not the factor.

The market is broken across demographics, experience levels, and fields. The shared experience of sending applications into silence, of matching job descriptions and hearing nothing, of watching the months pass without a meaningful response, cuts across the variables that job seekers are usually told to optimise.

There’s something almost clarifying about that. If the problem were age, or credentials, or communication skills, or any of the individual factors that job search advice fixates on, there would be a solution. The thread suggests the problem is something larger, and that the people feeling it are not imagining it, regardless of how old they are or how impressive their resume looks.

Read related: ‘Is the job market really that bad, or is Reddit just depressing?’ Reddit answers — and the truth is somewhere in the middle