Back then if you were laid off and job hopped in a few weeks, you could find another job in a few weeks or months. Now if you get laid off it looks more like this:

You then spend 1-2 years just to find some shit job. The good jobs do not hire the unemployed and the shit jobs do not really anymore either. Thus you spend 1-2 years just firing off a bunch of applications and getting ghosted all over the place. Amassing a mind-boggling sum of consumer debt just to survive.

You then get that shit job. It is at some shit small business and it is a very toxic environment. You are making half the money, have zero PTO and benefits, and you have a boss who loves to be a micromanaging dictator and yelling at you for the smallest of things. Every day when you wake up and see what time it is, you will get physically sick. That being said you will show up for your job which will be Mon-Fri from 8AM to 6PM with weekends off meaning Sat-Sun. But you are glad for what you got. You pay off your consumer debt and with 2.5 percent the debt still goes up over the minimum.

You now have to spend 2-3 years to suck in that shit job and prove that you are not some idiot and will not jump ship so fast. It will also kill every ounce of motivation to find some new job since it is going to be so hard and all of your energy is going to be eaten by that job. It will all come down to surviving.

Then finally you land that great job. But then you have to dedicate a significant amount of that pay to pay off the consumer debt!

I am worried about this being the new normal. Whether or not you are working now cut every other expense you possibly can and increase the emergency funds. And spend time building a network today so when your time comes you can do that.