Why I Gave Up

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the decline.

Hi, my name is Stick. Don’t fact-check that. I spend most of my time doomscrolling online without taking much information in. I write movie screenplays and Substack blog posts every two weeks. You may not know this, or you might’ve already detected it from sheer proximity, but my mental state has gradually deteriorated over the past year. There are not many options left for repair. I’ve learned to live with it.

Firstly, The Job

It has been over a year since I left my previous full-time job. Hours were changing, raises were minimal, and I was feeling the urge to return to university. Back then, I thought I could find a new place to work within a month or two. Then I thought I could find something by the time the next college semester began. Then I thought I could find part-time work before the year was over.

I’d like to say that I really think I tried. I did my research, applied to any local position I felt I was reasonably qualified for, and even a few where I wasn’t. There was maybe a five to ten percent rate of interviews from applications at first. Half of those interviews never followed up, not even with a rejection email. Eventually, things dried out. Three in four applications did not get back to me in any form ever. Sometimes months would go by and I’d see the same position still listed. Maybe they’d notice me this time if I just applied again, and again, and again.

2025 drew to an end, and I tried to cope with my unemployment by losing myself in hobbies. I practiced instruments, read books, learned Japanese, sang in choirs, wrote SubSticks (lots of them). It couldn’t quite fill the pit created by that feeling of being stuck. Applying to places wasn’t getting me anywhere, and no one was offering feedback as to why, other than agreeing that things, generally, are very bad. So, facing a new year of challenges, I did the one thing no one expected: I gave up.

I pretty much stopped looking. Job websites and interviews feel like dating: I suppose it’s important for practice and personal growth, but I’m not feeling anything, and despite my best attempts to be active and present, no one wants to show interest. I figured I’d just keep going to school, and eventually find my own work.

I have a young relative. He was decently smart, and when he got old enough to find his first job, he couldn’t. Even minimum wage places were ignoring him, probably because his competition held Bachelor’s degrees and were twice his age. Now he bets on basketball games. I don’t gamble, but I don’t blame people for going all in on TikTok/YouTube content creation, cryptocurrency trading, and sports betting. They see the job market and reasonably conclude that they want no part in it.

A lot of it could be chalked down to my personal laziness, general lack of intelligence or motivation, and that I probably could get a nice income if I would only pull myself up by my bootstraps. Try harder. I’m just afraid of putting in real effort, right? Send me another meme about how I’m “afraid” of job applications, as if I’m among a large subset of people who have decided to be indefinitely unemployed for no reason at all. I don’t mind work; I feel gross when I’m not doing it. But does the weight of the reward match of amount of effort I’m motivated to put in?

My job was laboratory work. It wasn’t a fake “office job”, it had real effects on the workplace around me. I spent half a year getting the basics down independently, always helping outside my department when there were employee shortages. The work wasn’t too difficult; I never wore out my back. It risked becoming stale, but it was still specialized. I thought being trained in that kind of thing would mean something.

No employer seems to care about “training”, even the ones adjacent to my previous position. I’m trapped in a middle ground between too much experience and not enough. To get any higher, I’d need an expensive degree in a very specific field of study that varies from job to job. I’d basically have to pick one and hope I get lucky, otherwise, oops! Guess I’ve wasted half a decade of my life!

It’s kind of infuriating. Spending years adjusting to a particular paid skill only for it to mean absolutely nothing. It’s not just that I can’t get ahead, it’s that I’m still apparently on the same level as a high schooler. I can’t get past a starter salary. I will never make enough money to own a home.

Even when I had the job I was losing. Any raise I received did absolutely nothing to combat inflation, and there was no reward or even acknowledgment for being one of the only people in a hundreds-sized company who knew how to do my particular job. I had to train my replacements.

I had, and still have, no reason to believe things are going to get better. So I stopped looking. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped doing anything at all. It just means I’ve pivoted to something far riskier.

Secondly, The Writing

Without a job and losing my grip on being able to get one, I went back to the drawing board and decided to do what I felt I was reasonably decent at: writing.

I wrote plenty last year. The only reason I was able to write so many SubSticks was that I was out of a job. I wasn’t writing many scripts, though, so a few months ago I returned to the biweekly release schedule, which is a lot easier on me. Writing is a hobby, but now that it takes up the majority of my day, I seem to have made it my own job.

I don’t get paid to write, and more often than not it costs me the occasional hundred bucks to put something through a contest or coverage service. I can’t put it on a resume. Still, I sit down, or occasionally walk around outside, and spend more than half my day writing. The newest draft of Project Analog was made this way. It was difficult and a bit of a mess, but it was proof that such a thing was possible. I’m working on something else right now as you read this.

Though it was a hobby, now it seems I have no other choice. It’s either this or twiddling my thumbs waiting for application responses, or playing more video games, and I do too much of that already. The fact of the matter is that I have an unusual amount of free time and I cannot afford to waste it on any other pursuit than this. After all, if things had worked out in another way, I might never have been able to do it again.

I am in a unique position, not poor, homeless, or destitute. Though I do not live in a basement, and personal circumstances mean I am the sole caretaker of the house most of the time, I do not pay much rent. More importantly, I am not limited by familial obligations. I am not in a relationship, and do not need to worry about making enough money to enable a wife to stay at home. I have no children to feed. Other than the aid I provide family members and relatives whenever prompted, I am alone.

Do I like this arrangement? I don’t know. I was always told not to “get set in my ways”, but there’s not much I can do about that if a prospect fails to manifest on the horizon. I tried the normal path. I worked a regular full-time job in a professional environment while learning skills I thought I could put to good use. I saved up a ton of money, put myself in as many social situations as possible. It just did not work. Nothing came of it. At that point, I see other artists in my sphere held back by their time-consuming jobs and big families to provide for. Why shouldn’t I abuse this privilege? It’s obviously a bit early to call it quits, but no better time to build “momentum” than as early as possible.

It’s a shame, then, that such momentum is being used on a career like writing. Not only is it famous for not paying very well, the barrier to entry is thin. Then again, writing is not all that I hope to do. Breaking through, “making it” in a way I would deem satisfactory, is a nigh-impossible task, but considering my odds with other things like basic employment and relationship formation, it probably couldn’t get much worse. The industry’s in a bit of a rough patch. Hollywood fellowships and grants continue to explicitly promote “marginalized” groups. Maybe I’d fare better with a Jewish-sounding pen name. Yet I must keep writing. I have to believe it can indeed go somewhere.

It’s all I can do anymore.

Thirdly, The Prospects:

In the end, sitting at my computer all day and writing scripts no one will read seems like an easy way to waste an entire life. It’s not like I’m a painter, where I can get immediate responses from showing my work to someone. I try to share my writing in small doses via the treatments I publish here (which I hope you guys are enjoying), but even those are specialized summaries. You can’t buy a script and put it on your bookshelf (actually, you kind of can, but the movie has to be made first). Revisions are constant and competition is fierce. My only ways in are luck or nepotism. As long as I’m not terrible, quality or talent doesn’t factor in all that much.

Even if I did consider myself “good” at it, or I simply find satisfaction in doing it, does that mean it is what I am meant to do with my life? Plenty of other people felt the same way about their passions and they went their entire lives not living to their full potential. Nobody wants their careers in adult life to be menial, but sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. At least most of them acquired opportunities to earn a living.

The psychological truth behind why I’ve “given up” is that I can no longer envision my future. I always used to make important decisions by peering into potential futures, determining how easy it was to see myself in a new scenario or position. Now everything is fog. It’s hard to picture me working a new job because it’s gotten more and more difficult to conceptualize getting a job at all.

Everything used to work out the way it was supposed to as long as I stayed vigilant and sought out opportunities. I’m not sitting, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for an adventure to burst through my window. When I’m out searching and such things stop showing up, I’m forced to accept a new interpretation: if God wants me to do it, He will open my eyes to it as I search. Because that hasn’t happened yet, I’ve interpreted my failure as a divine command to try something else, and the only something else I can think of is going all in on writing, becoming a tortured, starving artist.

Now that the world is like this, where one in four unemployed people have been job searching for over half a year, the outcome simply feels like it’ll be the same no matter what I do. If I grind, if I slack around, it doesn’t matter, because I’ll never be able to afford the lifestyle my parents acquired on far less. At least one of those options allows me the free time to write movies. Sometimes it all feels like it’s not my fault; it’s just out of my control.

Is it?

Read The Lost Generation here.

My demographic seems to have been discriminated against and locked out of key fields. Thousands of people like me have been displaced by institutions that softly and politely advocate for our extinction. I don’t live in a blue state, so only part of me is convinced of these terms. There’s no way I’ve been shut out for everything, and that’s probably true, but now there’s a seed of doubt. Surely my race hasn’t been a factor in my rejections, but I did have to specify it on every application. Are we sure it didn’t affect anything at all? Those writing fellowships are direct about keeping me out. How many others are doing it without telling me?

Because of this doubt, this paranoia that I may have been suppressed without my knowledge, how can I determine how much of my current position is my fault versus it being because of the system working against me? Am I like this because of my own incompetence, lack of drive? Or have I not done anything wrong? Does that mean that no matter how hard I try, nothing will change, the outcome will be the same?

That kind of thing paralyzes you. You no longer know if you’re in control. You freeze up, and all motivation ceases.

Like dating or writing, there’s pretty much no feedback, no way of knowing how you need to improve or if you’re just in the wrong spot or if it’s everyone else. It’s no wonder that everyone is opting to go their own way, that I’m deciding to write on my own while attending school. It’s the only way to ensure I have as much control as I can.

One of the only metrics I have to prove my writing is in a good spot is if I place in contests, but that doubt seeps in there too. I had to label my race during the submission process. Am I being hindered there as well? I can’t rely on merit at all anymore. All I have is blind faith that everything will be okay if I try hard enough. Maybe my writing is bad. It often is, truthfully, as it takes years to iron out a script into a satisfactory state. What does it mean for all your effort to be wasted because your skill hits a low ceiling? What else would I have then?

Comparison is bad, yes, but I’m at the age where my brother bought his first house. My best friend has two children. Half my high school class is married. I feel like I was wired to get a head start on life, to build something, and it just didn’t happen. That kind of thing raises alarms. It’s like when you’re taking a test and half of the class is getting up and turning theirs in while you’re still only halfway through. A panic seeps in: you’re falling behind.

It feels like my life is being stolen from me.

What Now?

Without any guidance or hope for the future other than banking on luck, I am slowly drifting towards a path of self-destruction. The gap in my resume grows ever larger. I go on walks reminded of suburban isolation. I’m buying fewer groceries and eating less food because of anxiety about burning through savings. Most of the standard dreams of progression I had two years ago are gone.

I threw myself back at college because I needed to be around other people my age again, and I needed something to do that wasn’t driven purely by internal motivators. It’s costing me a lot of money, a contradiction of my financial fears, but maybe that doesn’t really matter. If saving up all this money brought me to this position, what was the point of doing it in the first place?

Sometimes I feel like I missed some pivotal milestone. Maybe it was COVID, maybe it was the mission, maybe it wasn’t getting a better degree. There’s a gap in my timeline that I can’t refill. I want to grow up but the world won’t let me. I’m content to build something fruitless while everyone else either flourishes or suffers alongside me.

Obviously, this whole post is a bit of an exaggerated bout of self-loathing. I still look for jobs sometimes. I still think marriage might be possible someday. I still hope for a career in Hollywood in a potential future where AI doesn’t turn humanity into driftless zombies. On some days, I still feel like things could get better.

But that hope is starving to death, and I’m not really feeling the hunger pangs anymore.