Like a chain coffee shop calling its smallest cup “regular”, the Department for Work and Pensions does not offer any jobcentres, only Jobcentre Plus. Norwich is at Kiln House, a six-storey wall built in the 1970s that dominates the corner of Dove Street and Pottergate, which is otherwise a picturesque cobbled lane. Having completed a PhD in English in January 2025, I got to know those cobblestones well. Every Thursday for three months I turned up at Kiln House to sit on the cleaned sofa and wait my turn.
Between January and March 2025, I sent 168 job applications to universities, magazines, publishers, estate agents, cafes, charities, insurers, shops and pubs. I interviewed for six companies (an online streaming service, a tutorial agency, a Toyota dealership, a men’s mental health charity, an offshore wind company, a call center) and got one offer (call center). I applied for these jobs through LinkedIn, Reed, Indeed, Google, and Instagram, and at one point even mentored a recruiter with crazy hair (but his luck was just as bad as mine).
My Gen X parents were supportive but just didn’t get it. I must have been doing something wrong. Hadn’t I tried walking into a local pub and handing my CV to the bar? At the end of his career, my father had worked as a paint mixer at B&Q, a job he valued as much for the camaraderie and personal fulfillment as for the substantial discount on patio furniture. Towards the end of my PhD, I took my father’s advice and submitted an online application. A few weeks later, I heard back: I was rejected without an interview.
Much has been written about the “apocalypse of the ranks”. Alumni posts are at a record low. Unemployment among 16-25-year-olds is at its highest level for more than a decade. More than 700,000 graduates they are looking for benefits. And now Chakelian wrote in Aprilalmost a million young people are now Neets – not in education, employment or training. On May 28, Alan Milburn’s interim historical report found that the number of Neets could grow 16 percent to 1.25 million over the next five years. But the disorienting scale of the problem obscures the ordeal each of these young people endures. This is a mental and emotional state as much as an economic one. One million Neets is a statistic; a Neet is a tragedy.
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Since the coalition government increased tuition fees in 2012, universities have promoted courses in terms of developing “transferable skills”. Newcastle University lists “time management”, “networking”, “presentations”, “critical thinking” and “teamwork”; Birmingham City lists “technical understanding”, “problem solving”, “project management”, “creativity” and, again, “teamwork”. Recruiters love these soft criteria, and websites such as LinkedIn encourage you to list them on your profile. But teamwork is hardly a skill: it’s not teachable (or testable) like carpentry, or filigree, or marking from halfway. Anyone can claim to manage their time or work well alongside others. When a hiring manager is faced with a hundred applications that each rank “problem solving” and “creativity” as unique attributes, their decision is essentially arbitrary.
I took a book with me to my first appointment at Jobcentre Plus, Geoff Dyer’s Out of sheer rage. I had chosen it with a strange semi-irony: after graduating from Oxford with a degree in English, Dyer lived on unemployment benefits during the first half of the 1980s. In part of 2015 for Guardian, he wrote longingly of his time as one of the “dole wallahs,” that “motley coalition of the willingly unemployed.” Mostly this involved afternoon sex, then chilling on a rooftop with a homemade bong. Dyer paints a fascinating sketch of his “idyllic” time as one of the “state-sponsored leisure classes”, not least because it gave him the opportunity to develop as a writer. The gift you got was free time, and the gift of free time was a career.
But 40 years later, I was no dole wallah. I was a Neet. My months on Universal Credit (UC) were nothing like Dyer’s “flourishing and poor contentment”. When I was looking for UC the standard payment was £393.45 per month. And being, like most university graduates, an unmarried person under 35, I only qualified for the ‘shared accommodation rate’ of £393.50, giving £786.95 in total. The rent on my one bed flat was £775.00. I tried to supplement this with a bit of freelance work, writing and editing, but for every pound you earn while on Universal Credit, 55p is deducted from your pay. The only way I could afford my rent and bills was to borrow money from my girlfriend and family. Every bank transfer from a loved one arrived with a pang of shame and a perverse sense of luck. I knew that not everyone would turn to such funds and that made me feel even worse.
To distract myself from the shame, I went all out on sending applications. Within a week I was spending at least six or seven hours a day writing cover letters and revising my CV. I’d wake up early, telling myself it was to spur on my fellow applicants (“Leave them in the dust,” I’d mutter to myself). Indeed, early mornings were a cure for sleepless nights: you try to keep your head on the pillow when you know you have nowhere to be the next day. After a quick sweep of the various jobs, I’ll pick a handful of vacancies and get to work. My goal was always three applications in the morning and two in the afternoon. Some recruiters let you apply instantly (all you need is a pre-saved CV and a finger or thumb to click). Other applications took many hours; several whole days.
However, on more than one occasion, the rejection email arrived within minutes. A 2025 report from LinkedIn suggested that recruiters across the globe are increasingly using AI to screen applications, with 37 percent of organizations that year “actively integrating” or “experimenting” with Gen AI tools. These automated screeners rate applicants based on desirable keywords such as “communication” or “collaboration.” (Of course, you can tell a wider story in the interview, but then you only get an interview if you pass the initial screening.) As of March 2024, the government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology highlighted the danger of these automated screening tools. Published guidance argued that because AI controllers are trained on historical recruitment data, their results are skewed by past biases. This “disproportionately affects parents, people with caring responsibilities, people with disabilities or long-term health conditions and neurodivergent candidates”. For about 20 minutes I seriously considered using AI to write my cover letters, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to the farce of a human using a robot to control a human-operated robot.
Eventually my time as a Neet ended. The call from the hiring manager for the call center solved my anxiety on the spot. The storm that had been blowing in my ears for three months had calmed down with a gentle breeze. The year since then has been relatively relaxed. I spent a lot less time hunched over a laptop. I’ve actually been working a lot less overall since starting the 9-5. When you’re looking for a job, you can’t leave the job at the door: you get that edge-of-the-country feeling in every room, every conversation. It is the ultimate form of unalienated activity: it is your life. But now I can close the laptop lid, lift my head from the desk and enjoy a life beyond the screen. The gift of eight hours of work every profitable day is the five hours of profitable leisure I get every evening. But in one way at least things are the same: I’m still accruing interest on my student loans, just as I was when I was unemployed. In those months for Universal Credit, the interest rate charged by the Student Loans Company was 4.3 per cent; I have accumulated £628.92 of further debt. This may seem like a lot, but then the balance owed is £79,098.58. I could have spent eight and a half years on this.
To be a Neet is to feel a peculiar shame and self-loathing, a feeling of being apart from everyone else. Between my morning and afternoon “sessions” of filling out the online form, I would take a two-hour walk. I initially took these walks to check if any pubs or shops were hiring, but I soon grew to enjoy the habit, noting how the winter sun gave way to spring blossoms. One of my routes would take me through the center of Norwich, past the old Debenhams, an art deco classic that has remained derelict since the store closed in 2021. In February 2026, Norwich city councilors approved plans to develop the site into 377 student rooms, to be operated by a private company. Millions of pounds will be spent on these plans and millions must be given in return. In Norwich and elsewhere, large sums of money pass through the hands of private companies when schoolboys become students. So why, then, do we do so little for those students when they graduate?
(Further reading: Young, down and out of work)
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