Nobody's Hiring, Nobody's Firing, and Gen X Is Done Waiting

The job market is stuck right now, and a lot of our fellow Gen Xers are stuck right along with it.

But first, a quick word from today's sponsor, who helps keep the lights on.

Nobody's getting hired. Nobody's getting fired. Most people are just hanging on to the job they've got, even the ones who mentally clocked out a long time ago.

I know that feeling.

This week's numbers were kind of a bummer.

Marketplace reported on Oct. 8 that employers added just 29,000 jobs in September. And 27.1% of unemployed Americans have now been looking for work for six months or longer, a number that's been creeping up for years. Meanwhile, weekly jobless claims dropped to 197,000, the fourth straight week under 200,000 and the longest stretch like that since 1969. Economists call it "low-hire, low-fire."

I call it a traffic jam where nobody's moving and everybody's honking.

Vicki Salemi, a career expert at Monster, put it better than I could in that same story…

Then there's the Gen X part. A day earlier, Eagle Hill Consulting put out its quarterly Employee Retention Index, which tracks how likely people are to stay with their employer over the next six months. Gen X dropped 5.3 points to 93.8, the second-steepest fall of any generation (only Boomers dropped more). Gen X also reported a 7-point drop in how they feel about their workplace culture, the biggest of any generation, and it's sitting near a three-year low.

Translation: a lot of us are halfway out the door with nowhere to go.

It's funny: when I read reports like Gen X checking out of work in 2026, I know the exact feeling.

But for me, that was back in the early 2010s. I slowly started fading, and I had a really hard time staying engaged in my work for my company 'cause I just had it. I was just burnt out about the whole thing. Here we are 15 years later, and there's a whole new wave of people experiencing this exact same thing.

I've been there.

Being checked out and being burnt out are not the greatest feeling.

For me, there was a lot of guilt that went along with that. We're raised to be good employees, and there is a dishonesty about it. You have some sort of a tug-of-war in your psyche with the other side of you that feels like you were duped, and maybe you got passed over for younger people, or maybe you got taken for granted by the company. There's a tug-of-war between the guilt that you feel and the cynicism and sick-of-it-all attitude.

So there's that.

For me, at one point it wasn't necessarily about not doing anything.

It was just about not going above and beyond anymore. I mentioned one time to my manager, "Look, I'll keep supporting all the people I need to support, but I'm done giving fresh creative ideas to you that either end up in the wasteland, disregarded, or someone else gets the credit for."

Looking back, that was me quiet quitting before anybody called it that.

By then I'd been at the same company for 17 years, working as a mechanical draftsman.

I'd mentally walked away from that job long before they let me go on July 3rd, 2013. What kept me afloat was the stuff I'd been tinkering with on the side, a freelance client and some music-related projects bringing in a few bucks (I wrote about that here). It wasn't much.

But it was mine, and it was already running.

My podcast guest Fernando Labastida knows the frozen-out part too.

He got laid off in November 2023 from his job as head of content at a packaging company, and did what we're all trained to do. "I was like sending hundreds of resumes out. I got zero bites, right." So he quit trying to squeeze back into the same box and built his own lane instead. His first client came from a guy who'd downloaded a free ebook Fernando wrote back in 2009 and held on to it for 15 or 16 years.

Somebody had been paying attention the whole time. (Here's Fernando's full story if you missed it.)

PLEASE don't quit your job tomorrow because of a newsletter.

In a market like this, a steady paycheck is worth hanging on to while you figure things out. But waiting for the ice to thaw, or for your company to suddenly start caring again, isn't much of a plan either. What helped me was having something small of my own going before I needed it.

That's what I mean by building your own exit.

Nothing crazy, just a few small first steps:

None of this is fast, and none of it is guaranteed.

It took me years of tinkering, and plenty of it flopped. Some of my side projects made about $10 every three months. I wrote about the real cost of a career change at 50 a while back, and it's still true. Small and boring is fine.

It just has to be yours.

If you want to see what that looked like for me, I put the five things that actually worked into the Gen eXit Playbook.

It's a short read, and it's free. And if a newsletter is the side thing you're curious about, the AI Newsletter Fast-Track walks you through getting one up and running in a couple hours.

Hit reply and tell me: are you skating on thin ice right now, or already building your way off the pond?

Have a good one,

Corey