The economy is not conspiring against you, it is just another case of finding external causes to shift the pressure off of you. Even if job growth is down, etc., it is highly unlikely that the skeleton crews employed at Burger King and the Gap are affected in any meaningful way.

I would argue, based more on our IM chats than this post, that you've been thinking and talking about getting a job for a year. For quite a while, you were waiting because you heard that one guy might leave his job and, when he did, you'd get the position. So for weeks/months, you wouldn't apply anywhere else, because he might leave. So, subtract that time from the year.

People who leave your life because you can't spend money on them are better off gone. If anything, I think the low self-esteem that your joblessness causes YOU would be the bigger reason, if applicable at all. Not quite the same thing. You can't blame your negative self-image on not having a job, but certainly it's a good bet that it is why you don't have a job and why anything else may have happened. But I think your aim here is off. If you need a job to be complete, you're admitting you're incomplete now. Sort of like people who think their life will be better when they have a boyfriend. It won't. They'll just have a distraction that makes them forget what's wrong for a while (see also: drugs, alcohol).

If anything is *wrong* with you, it is that you confuse thought with action. At your age, with no experience, your have two options for getting jobs: 1) submitting applications constantly and 2) asking friends who have jobs at places you'd want to work to ask their boss if there's an opening. Anything that is not those two activities is thinking about jobs (a passive activity that will yield no results). Bribery is fine, too. Tell people you'll buy them a video game if they land you a gig where they work (once you earn enough to buy it, naturally).

You've told me you couldn't apply for a job because that guy might leave, and then when you gave two weeks notice and in that time they might give it to someone else, which is not true, but irrelevant anyway as that guy has yet to leave, and you didn't get the job.

In late October, I told you to start applying for seasonal holiday work, and you said you wanted to focus your time on something that would last further than the holidays. Again, overthinking, since applying for holiday work doesn't stop you from being able to apply elsewhere or continuing to look, and getting a better job means you could just quit the temporary one. I think it was the last week of November when you finally told me you think you should go for retail, at which point it was sort of passed the window.

Now, of course, all retail jobs are locked up, and any positions that were unfilled before the holidays will be occupied by seasonal people kept on after the holidays. So, your focus now should probably be fast food and things like drug stores, jobs that don't hire as many seasonal workers basically.

Even your angst about jobs is not actively manifesting a job, but fills more of the "been looking for a year" thing you fall back on. When was the last time you submitted an application anywhere? Since that time, you haven't applied for any jobs. So, in that time, you haven't been looking for a job, only thinking about it.

When I've been applying for jobs, I send about 2-3 resumes a day with custom cover letters. It takes 15-20 minutes, tops. It is a shotgun approach. I don't send them out and start wondering what they are thinking, why they aren't calling me, question what i said in the letter to make them disinterested, etc. At my old job, I remember we'd put up a job listing for a job that the CEO hadn't approved, and he'd reject it, so we'd just toss all 50+ resumes for that job away, without replying.

Every day you don't have a job is a day you need to have applied and put actual energy, not thought, toward looking for a job. You live near BK, what's the manager's name? You should know his if you want him to know yours, so that when the next opening happens, your name is top of mind. It's a delicate balance, though. If you annoy him too much, he'll make sure to never hire you.

I think everything you're ascribing to your job search are things you need to work on, because you are just using the search to account for them. I'd hazard that any depression, low self-esteem, etc., exists with or without a job. So, why are you depressed? Why do you have low self-esteem? And not rationales as to why you *should* be depressed, or why it's justifiable... again, too much thinking. Just core reasons. Then you can work on them.

You can't directly control whether you have a job, but the rest is entirely up to you. And, once you work on those, the job thing will sort itself out.

On the job front: apply, apply, apply. If you didn't apply for a job today, you aren't looking for a job today. And if not having a job makes you depressed, then not looking sort of points the finger at you, no?

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"Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there." -- Josh Billings.

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