This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse Blog.
If you have applied for hundreds of jobs and still find yourself out of work, you are certainly not alone. In many industries, it is absolutely brutal out there right now. U.S. employers have been laying off hundreds of thousands of workers in 2025, and there is immense competition for any good jobs that do happen to be available. So if you have a good job that you highly value, I would hold on to it as tightly as you can, because you don’t want to end up among the desperate hordes that are scrambling for work in this very harsh economic environment. For example, a 46-year-old woman in Florida who was laid off last September has applied for 900 jobs without any success at all…
Jennifer Smith, 46 years old, says she has applied for 900 jobs since being laid off last September from a financial-services provider in the Tampa, Fla., area, where she led the user-experience department. She has landed just one interview and no offers. This has left Smith, who has three children, increasingly anxious about her finances.
Smith decided this past week to sell her five-bedroom home and trade down to a smaller house. While severance pay has helped, it is about to run out, and Smith has been paying soaring premiums to keep her health insurance.
I feel so bad for her.
Searching for work in this environment can be just as exhausting as a full-time job, but you don’t get paid for it.
If she doesn’t find a job soon, she could potentially lose everything.
Of course, there are countless others that are in the exact same boat.
On the other side of the country, 61-year-old John Comber says that he has applied for about 500 jobs since late 2023 with no success…
Some older, out-of-work Americans are wondering if they will find jobs again.
“I’m considering myself semiretired at this point,” says John Comber, 61, a software quality engineer in Sandpoint, Idaho. He hoped to work another decade and thought he would easily pick up more work when his last contract work wrapped up in late 2023. Instead, he estimates he has applied for 500 jobs with no hits.
This isn’t a bum with no skills that we are talking about.
Comber is a highly skilled software engineer.
But this is the economic environment that we live in now.
It is being reported that the number of Americans that have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks is now at “the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge”…
Job seekers are out in the cold this summer. Especially the ones who have been hunting for a while.
Beyond the headline-grabbing top-line numbers in the jobs report for July was another striking piece of data: The number of people unemployed for at least 27 weeks topped 1.8 million, the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic’s unemployment surge. The median length of unemployment in the U.S. has also ticked up, from a seasonally adjusted 9.5 weeks in July 2024 to 10.2 weeks last month.
Wow.
And that figure is only going to go higher, because employers all over the nation are feverishly laying off workers right now.
I shared this on Friday, but I feel like I should share it again in this article. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. employers have announced 806,383 job cuts so far in 2025. Compared to the same time period in 2024, that is a 75 percent increase…
So far this year, companies have announced 806,383 job cuts, the highest YTD since 2020 when 1,847,696 were announced. It is up 75% from the 460,530 job cuts announced through the first seven months of last year and is up 6% from the 2024 full year total of 761,358.
How are you going to spin those numbers to make them look good?
You can’t.
This reminds me so much of what we witnessed in 2008 and 2009.
Most of the country is living on the edge financially, and so a job loss can be absolutely catastrophic.
Once you are out of work, it can be so tempting to turn to debt to bridge the gap.
Of course these days many Americans are piling on tremendous amounts of debt without even being out of work.
As a result, U.S. households are now more than 18 trillion dollars in debt.
Take a moment and think about how crazy that is.
When you break that down, that is approximately $53,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
We are literally drowning in debt, and one recent study discovered that about two-thirds of all U.S. adults “lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends”…
- Two-thirds of Americans with debt lie about or hide their financial struggles from family and friends
- The average American carries $42,000 in debt but understates the amount by $6,565 when discussing it
- Shame drives the secrecy, with nearly 30% citing embarrassment as their main reason for hiding debt
- Financial deception damages relationships for 73% of people with debt, often causing arguments and isolation
Most of us try to hide our financial struggles because we are ashamed.
But it shouldn’t be that way.
If we could just be open and honest with one another about what is going on, we would find that there are countless others who are going through the same thing.
The entire economy is failing, and if we can get people to understand that, they won’t be so quick to blame themselves for their troubles.
Unfortunately, right now, conditions are moving in the wrong direction very rapidly.
Residential investment was down during the first quarter of 2025, and it was way down during the second quarter of 2025…
In May, Citi Research recalled that the late economist Ed Leamer famously published a paper in 2007 that said residential investment is the best leading indicator of an oncoming recession.
“We would be wise to heed his warning,” Citi said.
In fact, residential fixed investment shrank 4.6% in the second quarter, according to data released Wednesday, after contracting 1.3% in the first quarter.
One of the primary reasons why residential investment is way down is that home sales are way down.
In fact, during the second quarter, home sales were the lowest that we have seen in 13 years…
America’s spring homebuying season just hit its weakest point in over a decade — marking the slowest market since 2012 and sparking fears that a full-blown price collapse could be next.
Spring is traditionally the hottest time for pending home sales but that’s no longer the case in the in the now struggling US housing market.
In 2025, April through June brought the lowest sales in 13 years, according to Redfin.
Let’s get real.
The housing market is in a depressed state.
And if we stay on the path that we are on, the rest of the economy will be in a depressed state soon, too.
Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this point, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day.
If you still have your spot in the middle class, you should be very grateful.
Because soon, even more Americans will be applying for hundreds of jobs without any success at all.
Michael’s new book, entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next,” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book, entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next,” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com, including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. When you purchase any of Michael’s books, you help to support the work that he is doing. You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream, and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
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