Job application depression, witnessed.

So, there's a (Colombian) (STEM) student who I know from around town in the one (college) town that I now live in, and I think he does something in (biology), but he also does large-scale statistical analysis, and I think he has also also taught himself programming for that, to become indispensable to his lab.

But, he recently was saying that he's been down this term because he's put out easily 50-60 applications for internships and fellowships, and he's had nothing but rejection.

I wonder how many of those are posts in academia, and how many are industry-specific. If it's the latter, I am honestly shocked, because it seems like he's so well-prepared for any position with very skills-heavy STEM preparation.

I was telling him that I transitioned into eldercare 5+ years ago because I was hoping to avoid a lot of that, and then after decent eldercare work severely shrunk due to chronic sectoral mismanagement, I just went into restaurant work, since I didn't feel like being in that mental space of job applications, it's so much wasted time and effort for any sort of traction at all through jobs that are often okay at best, and often short-term.

I told him, too, that it's been hard on me not to have a profession, and I do talk to people in different lines of work and I do keep my eyes open on the look-out for opportunities, but I just don't want to go back to that indefinite awful process, and that in some ways when I look back on the past few years, I feel happier with my time choices to have d*cked around and done research and writing and whatnot, than to have spent it on that, especially now that some of my research choices have been paying off.

I mean, you never know when you're going to die, and can you imagine kicking it when you're in your third or fourth cycle of indefinite employment hell, and everyone looks at your coffin and is like, what was that all about, they never did anything or got anywhere, they didn't even really have a job, what were they doing all that time.

That's what I call a wasted life.