Hi everyone, 23 y.o here with a substitute teaching gig. Still living with my parents. I pay for my own car insurance and the stuff I own (like my phone), but the rest, like housing, is provided by them. This school year has been a lot slower in my district and I haven't been getting full weeks of work, so they've been asking me repeatedly to get a full-time job. That's not the part that I inherently mind (I am getting to the age where I need to consider getting one of those) but it's more just the journey is what's so stressful.
I've looked on pretty much every site I can think of. Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Monster, ZipRecruiter, some sketchy sites that probably stole my data...and I make sure to apply to at least 5-10 jobs a week. That's a lowball too, I usually will apply to 3-5 per day. But in the time since the school year started, I've only gotten 2 interviews. It's no secret the job market sucks right now, but it's still incredibly frustrating.
What makes me the most upset is that my parents treat my inability to land an interview as some kind of personal failing. I will admit I'm not the most go-getter of personalities but I am genuinely trying to apply as much as I can, even to jobs I don't really want to have, like food service (which I've worked 4 times in my life and each time has made me pretty miserable). But because the progress isn't physically tangible, they insist I have to be more aggressive and that I'm simply not trying hard enough. My dad even gave the Boomer-GenX strategy of "walk in there and ask if they're hiring". It's 2026! Everything's online now!
What's more, the two interviews I have landed, one was part-time which didn't fly by my Mom because it must be full-time, and the second one was door-to-door which I turned down because my family was concerned about being a door-to-door saleswoman in this day and age. It just seems like I'm trying to find a needle in a haystack.
For the record, I love my parents dearly. They're awesome people and without them I probably would not be able to even type this up. It's just this one specific disconnection that really frustrates me to no end. I guess I'm just looking for siblings in arms that understand the struggle here. Idk, maybe I am just being a spoiled brat without realizing it, but that doesn't make the process any more slow and infuriating. The funniest, but also probably most stressful thing is that I'm not even unemployed, so it just adds to the mental stack.