As 2025 winds down, I can’t shake the thought that my two-year graduation anniversary is looming. For some, the end of the year is about resolutions and fresh starts. For me? It’s a reminder of the career and clarity I still don’t have.
I’d seen the TikToks and read the Substack essays about post-grad depression—the fog that settles in when you don’t land your dream job right out the gate. (Fun fact: the unemployment rate for recent grads is the highest it’s been in a decade, if you don’t count COVID.) I thought I’d be immune.
“I’ll travel,” I told myself.
“I’ll learn to code. I’ll put out an EP. I’ll grow my small business. Hell, maybe I’ll move to Germany for a master’s!” (Yes, I studied for the GRE… lol.)
I felt brimming with possibility, like the world was waiting for me to step in.
But as days shortened and weeks blurred into months, I lost myself in aimless ambition. Hours slipped away while I sat hunched over my laptop, scrolling for answers to the hollow in my chest. And no matter what I did, guilt gnawed at me. The voice in my head kept saying: If you’re not being constantly productive, if you’re not applying, improving, selling yourself, you’ll have nothing and no one to blame. Your failure will be your own fault.
The naive dream of some perfect career just falling into my lap dissolved. What was left behind was a black hole.
Powerlessness.
art by bahira motaz
Powerlessness, I’ve realized, isn’t just about my stalled career or the gap between ambition and reality. It’s something bigger—something that feels stitched into the air we breathe.
Every day, tragedy scrolls across our feeds: wars, injustice, corruption, climate disasters. The people who are supposed to lead us often seem to fail us, or worse, act against us. We live in a constant flood of information—so much noise, so much urgency—that it leaves us paralyzed. There’s this collective ache of helplessness, as if no matter how loudly we shout or how carefully we vote, the world still spins toward chaos.
And then, layered on top of that, is the personal. If I can’t even secure a job that matches my degree, if I can’t even control the outcome of my own life even after checking every box off that early 20’s checklist, how am I supposed to believe I have power in the larger story of the world? It’s a terrifying double bind: powerless in the small things, powerless in the big things.
That’s the knot so many of us are tangled in—this question of agency, of wondering whether we can meaningfully shape our futures, let alone the future of society.