Channeling Hope Spawned From Rage

Labor Day. 2025.

I rarely pay attention to holidays. For my early working years, I was employed in leisure industries that usually required working holidays. Labor Day was the goal on those insane summers of sea kayaking and bartending. Memorial Day meant, “buckle up buttercups, here come the tour-ons” and Labor Day meant, “you made it, now you can breath again and see your friends”. This weekend was also the last big money push before all the corporate folks returned to their daily grinds and most of us service industry workers took a few months off and wandered to the Rockies for the winter version of our summer toils.

For my 30s, I was mostly self employed, so holidays were a chance to enjoy a quiet inbox and not feel guilty for ignoring client requests for a day or two. In fact, weekends and late nights were my favorite time to work because I knew everyone else was unplugged and not working. Same with holidays. I enjoy the solitude of working while the rest of the world sleeps.

For the past few years, holidays were simply something I forgot about in the chaos of corporate America and was a chance to sit and read a book without guilt or panic that a Slack notification would be haunting me throughout the day. And the dread of logging into said Slack in the waning hours of the holiday to gauge just how much of a shitshow I was facing in the morning was my closure of a holiday. That’s no way to live and I’m grateful to at least not have that albatross hanging over my holidays now.

But 2025 Labor Day?

This shit just hits different. It hits hard. Everything this year does. But this one is particularly painful. Like the allergic skin rash on my hand that feels like I’m petting a porcupine everytime it touches a surface. Because here’s the cold hard truth, the labor market is totally broken. And my demographic, highly experienced tech leader in their late 40s/early 50s, has been all but removed from the labor market.

Fired because an algorithm indicated that this demographic is now too costly for a market seeking never-ending profit for shareholders and blocked from getting hired by algorithms catering to younger, less expensive workers.

To kick off my weekend, I got a very interesting, but suspicious DM on LinkedIn for an app that I use regularly seeking a CMO. I’m normally cautious for such messages, but this one was very detailed and the social engineering was tight. I gave a quick reply on Friday to send along details, but I didn’t think much of it. Sunday evening, the details arrived and they were solid enough to peak my interest. Solid enough for me to allow an evening of pros and cons for pursuing something like this, all the while knowing the odds that it was fake were still high. Come early Labor Day morning, I went to the DM to send a resume and give a final phishing test and the messages were gone. So was the profile for this “Chief of Staff” who’d gone as far to list a business degree from my Alma mater in his profile.

The only thing I lost was that little seed of hope that I’d allow to sprout from the soil I’ve been trying to compost and heal.

This hacker had done his homework, knew exactly what emotions to play on for someone in my demographic, knew the skills I’d be looking to emphasize for a role like this and knew that such a role was the next evolution for a career path like mine. I dodged a bullet, but I was brought into crypto by hackers who trained me on how to socially engineer someone— and I still allowed myself to believe this bullshit for a short, hopeful span of time.

Now imagine the people who don’t have my background, but do have the desperation of being squeezed out of the labor market. There are millions of us now, floating through social networks seeking a hint of a lead from our network, or a mysteriously perfect “I’m hiring” post from someone looking for a new hire. And of those millions, how many were trained on social engineering scams? Only a tiny handful would know to be cautious. And in the age of AI enabling hacking at scale, you can bet many people fell for this hack or one just like it.

But here’s the thing that’s not really showing up in the (obviously manipulated) labor market metrics, polls or opinion think pieces— every person like me, navigating this absolute dumpster fire on all fronts— is losing hope.

Hope is the one metric that doesn’t show up on any statistic being gathered by the remaining data scientists that track labor. When you go through multiple and devastating hope and loss cycles for months, sometimes years, fighting to prove that your value is still strong and your purpose is still relevant leaves you exhausted. Squandering your remaining glimmers of hope on the obvious social engineering message in your DMs hoping maybe you’re just paranoid.

Depleting your professional prowess on 4-5 rounds of interviews only to be used as leverage by young assholes with God-like money thrown at them by VCs devoid of ethics. Wasting precious hours submitting waves of job applications to ghost job listings left on LinkedIn to make a company look good to its investors or its existing employees— “company must be crushing it if we’re hiring for these positions”.

The devastating truth that many of us are realizing, in real time, is that we no longer belong in this market at all. Maybe we were never meant to be here in the first place (that’s definitely me). Maybe our gifts are meant to live outside of late stage capitalism, tapping into systems of extraction just long enough to make money to cover the essentials for a hot second. Then we exit. Or we’re forced out and we never re-enter.

Because at some point, there’s simply no more hope left to give a market that clearly cares not one ounce for your humanity. There’s no more emotion left for the soulless frameworks of extraction that we’ve been forced to enter in order to “survive”. At some point, the anxiety of not having employer health insurance or a social safety net becomes something you learn to live with and that anxiety is easier to accept as a daily companion than the hope and despair cycle of trying to remain in a labor market that wants to destroy you.

So, for Labor Day, I sit here trying to process the inhumanity of it all. And I turn to my own production studio, that I built with my own two hands this year because, well, I needed to build something. I can see what’s surfacing with my studio and where it’s going to take me.

I can see where rage quitting my industry is about to happen. I can see where rage quitting this labor market and this hellscape version of late stage capitalism is also about to happen. I can see where the two major projects my studio has built this year — The Human Layer podcast and this publication.

I can see it now. It’s already live, I’ve already built it. I’m already working with amazing clients as their strategic comms person. Our podcast is already making a name for itself. I can see it now very clearly, because the fog of false hope for what was has dissipated and the rage of this reality is fueling a new type of hope. A hope that is only possible when the devastating reality that you’re living in is staring you right in the face. And there’s no other option but to walk right into that fucking shitstorm and build your own life raft out.

And make sure it’s big enough to bring others along with you. That’s how we survive this hellscape. Together. Powered by a hope spawned out of rage.