There once was a time when having lots of experience, being good at your job and having an arsenal of transferable skills would normally save you from the dole queue. If you’d built a career in a certain field, picked up new skills and worked all kinds of ungodly hours to keep your clients happy as a freelancer, the feedback you’d get would mean work came to you. Even if you had a dry spell, it was never long before your calendar was packed again. This of course stopped being the case for freelancers across the planet once generative AI tools like ChatGPT started to gain momentum in 2023.
In my case, work started to dry up in April of that year and has never truly picked up again. In my first post-AI tax year, my income fell by £10,000. The following year, it dropped by yet another 10k. This is why I’m now barely earning enough to cover the essentials, and even then the figure has been boosted by carrying out humiliating activities such as completing surveys on my phone for the equivalent of a few pounds an hour on a good day when I'm not screened out to high heaven.
One Brick Wall After Another
Believe me I have tried. I have contacted scores of digital agencies to ask if they have any interest in human writing. I have got in touch with tonnes of small to medium businesses and heard nothing but crickets. Hit up a load of recruitment agencies but I'm no good with forklift trucks or wiping bums. I’ve even done what lots of people suggest you do and applied to various local retailers including not only supermarkets but independent shops in my local area too. Repeatedly.
I’ve been turned down by Farmfoods, I’ve been turned down by Card Factory, I’ve even been turned down by Vision Express. Can you imagine how many applications even a part-time job in your local supermarket gets in this climate?
Remember that pubs, restaurants and shops are closing en masse because it's £10 to get off your nut on supermarket booze in the comfort of your own home, or £20 if you want a TV dinner from the higher end of edibility to accompany it, and more and more people just snap up the practical household goods they need from Amazon without even stepping out their front doors or getting off the sofa. Quite easy to see why those circumstances might cause a lorra, lorra jobs to vanish into the ether.
Plus, I’m not sure failed copywriters are part of their target demographic. I’m either too overqualified or underqualified for every job I see advertised in my local area – not that I can find that much to apply for in the first place. I just want to work and nobody will let me.
"Just Go And Stack Shelves!"
There’s an ongoing urban myth that entry-level jobs are easy to do and therefore must be easy to get. People also think they have an unlimited supply of jobs to cover everyone who's been on the bones of their arse at any given time. Believe me, it’s been just as hard to acquire a basic retail, hospitality or office job as it's been to get my writing career back off the ground.
Once months of rejection turn into years, you end up feeling like a worthless, penniless, anxiety-ridden, insomniac-ridden piece of excrement who can’t stop thinking about unemployment for five minutes. You start boring everyone around you to tears because you only ever bring up one topic. You sleep excessively when you can. You lie in bed with your heart racing for hours on end when you can’t. When you’re in the grip of unemployment-related anxiety, it’s all-consuming. You can’t think about anything else and it gets hard to even breathe. You'd have to be completely insane to choose it over employment.
Yes, there are still people thriving in the writing world. But they are few and far between. I’ve been on LinkedIn for some time and the struggle is real. Even the people who have managed to weather the storm have admitted there have been times when they just wanted to jack it all in and may still do so.
The AI Problem
Much of this is because so many business owners and content managers are fully convinced that generative AI can just do the job better. They can‘t. I can tell AI content from a mile off and it appears that the general public can do so too. From “it’s not just X – it's Y”, to “it remains a cornerstone” to “it’s testament to”, it’s increasingly easy to spot artificially generated writing, and the word on the street is that the general product-buying public are showing more and more contempt for businesses that take the cheap option and shove creatives to the sidelines to save a few quid. So stop f**king doing it!
I have a 99.5% rating on the freelance site People Per Hour, with reviews stretching back 15 years. I have covered a huge spectrum of industries and penned tens of thousands of articles, blogs, press releases and web pages over the past decade and a half. I’ve helped a shitload of businesses to build customer trust, soar up the search rankings and sell more than ever before. And yet I can’t generate a f**king whiff of interest in my services as of late January 2026. Am I invisible? Probably not, there’s just too much competition left for the miniscule number of human writing jobs still on the market. If I apply for a writing or editing job I see on LinkedIn, I can guarantee I’ll be up against several hundred of my fellow writers if not thousands.
Of course, lots of sneering people who haven’t been this unfortunate tell me to “pivot” or “adapt or die”. One even called me a “weird little goblin”. He got blocked immediately. Pivot into WHAT? The way things are going, there’ll be about three jobs left that involve a computer if we don’t put the brakes on this AI thing at some point in the near future. But the entrepreneurs ain’t giving up on it any time soon – there's billions at stake and they want their return on investment. I’m not sure the general non-business public even give a toss about it. There’s only so many times you can draw a convincing but “off” photo of Donald Trump eating a cheese and pickle sandwich in Sunderland or make a video of Gyles Brandreth twerking on the moon before you get bored and do something more old skool, wholesome and productive like doomscrolling on Facebook for five hours.
Thanks For Nothing, Successive Governments
And no, this isn’t a pity party. My experiences on LinkedIn have told me I’m far from the only creative that feels like they’ve been chucked on the scrapheap to burn to nothing whilst the Government offers absolutely nothing in the way of guidance or support whatsoever. Successive UK Governments have looked the other way whilst writers, translators, artists and animators have seen their incomes plummet to the ground. Some have been forced to sell the houses they’ve worked tirelessly to afford for decades. And that’s before we even think about the devastating environmental impact of AI and the enormous amounts of water and energy the data centres they depend on require.
By writing this article, I’m hoping to give those in the same predicament a bit of comfort, summarise the absurdity of clawing your way out of un(der)employment in 2026, explain how tough things really are to the “pivot” and “just get a job stacking shelves” crowds and use it as an outlet for my own ongoing frustration. I also missed the simple act of writing, because there is absolutely zilch of it to do professionally right now.
Scraps of One-Off Jobs
Yes, there have been a few writing jobs in the past few years. These have generally involved humanising and improving on the fartings out of ChatGPT and whatnot. But they’ve been sadly few and far between. Nowhere near as much as you need to cover the bills and live a meaningful varied life you don’t slowly start to completely despise.
Jobhunting has always been tiring, but now it’s completely exhausting. It’s hours of toil a day knowing the chances of any sort of positive outcome or even acknowledgement are tiny at best. How do you stay motivated when you know you’re up against hundreds or even thousands of other applicants and being filtered out by algorithms and AI systems before your application is even seen by another human being? This does an untold amount of psychological damage to you over time. Even sleep isn’t necessarily a break from it all because before long, you start dreaming about it too. The longer it goes on, the more the happy days of having enough cash to pay the bills, eat AND leave the house to create any meaningful memories seem a distant memory.
Time flies when you’re having fun? It somehow speeds past when you’re starting to completely resent your life too, which is ironic considering how long the days can feel. Some people say your job is to get a job when you’re out of work. It's more like having three full-time jobs you don’t get paid for. And it’s exhausting.
The Irony of AI
And here’s what’s really ironic. Some of the biggest and best-known figures in AI have expressed concerns about what it means for the future of humanity. Even Sam Altman has talked about its impact on jobs and society, and he played a pivotal role in forcing it down our throats in the first place. He suggests UBI or Universal Basic Income could be used to ensure we still have money in our pockets once jobs are as rare as rocking horse excrement. But this may well depend on the goodwill and generosity of billionaires, which has always been thin on the ground to say the least. This just emphasises why those who worry about the coming years and how AI could destroy everything positive we know about life and have been able to take for granted until now aren’t being “Luddites” - our worries are perfectly rational.
AI might be boosting productivity, but at what price? It’s getting harder and harder to see how it’s going to replace the jobs it’s already starting to burn through. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen headlines about AI eliminating graduate jobs as well as entry-level white-collar jobs that give people a foot on the career ladder, how it’s impacting the UK more than other big economies and how more than a quarter of Britons think it will take their jobs in the next five years. All of this because some billionaires in Silicon Valley wanted more.
What On Earth Are We Supposed To Do?
Businesses are using AI to freeze hiring, reduce employee numbers and demand more output from fewer people. This means we’re now navigating a labour market where effort, experience, loyalty and past successes often count for absolutely f**k all. We did everything we were told to do. We studied and worked hard, spent years building careers and now find ourselves thrown under the bus with no help or guidance on what to do next whatsoever.
No, I don’t know what the solution is. The genie is out of the bottle and AI isn’t going away. But what we can do is put more pressure on Governments to come up with new strategies to save the lives and livelihoods of those who’ve already been crushed by this thing as well as those who may well be in the same predicament sooner than they think – and that includes that troll who called me a “weird little goblin” for failing to embrace this. We do need money to pay our taxes to keep the economy going AND to buy the things these tech bros are flogging in the first place - unless they're all just planning on hiding in their underground bunkers whilst the rest of us povvos perish in about 2029.
Just because these bastard robot c***s CAN do something, it doesn't mean they should. Especially the price is mass unemployment, poverty, destitution and despair.
Trust humans to make themselves obsolete.
I may have been out of work for three years with no end in sight – but I could soon become the norm rather than the exception.
Unless, of course some AI-sceptic content manager sees this and thinks "my God, that guy can write!", as I am seeing this as a bit of a showcase for my unique wordsmithery too, admittedly.
Happy to talk if so.
This scored 96% human on one of those BS AI detectors by the way.
Was 100% me though.
See you down the food bank!
