For me 2022 has been diabolical. A full-tilt shit of a year. One that’s made me mourn for the comparative certainty of lockdown. 

Mostly I’ve been looking for a new job. Which, it turns out, involves more work than an actual job, but for 100% less money. Worse still, it means spending day after day on Linkedin. Navigating an endless loop of humble-bragging and pound-shop euphoria in the hope that someone’s looking to hire a professional grouch. 

So far, no good. Apparently to fit in you need to be comfortable celebrating a Q4 growth chart with a gurning, mad-eyed fervour usually reserved for faith healers. 

It’s funny, everyone I know tells me they think Linkedin is ghastly  — riddled with pretend enthusiasm, as sincere as a Starbucks cashier. Yet everyone I know must participate as their jobs demand it.

Modern life eh? An endless scroll of immodesty, a hamster’s wheel of sycophantic back-slapping. Everyone dutifully posting away, waving while drowning in a saccharine soup of Mid-Atlantic buzzwords and toxic positivity.

That said, my main gripe about 2022 is not that Linkedin hasn’t found me the right job. It’s that my woes are completely unremarkable. Of course, they don’t feel unremarkable to me  — over the last three months, I’ve spent 643 hours theatrically sighing   — let’s be clear: I’m in the biz of miz. But compared with what else is going on in the UK of Englands, my continued under-employment is small potatoes. 

Ermine draped toffstress Michelle Mone has legged it with 122 million of government money, while the nurses who saved millions can’t catch a break (even after dutifully posing for photo-ops with the very ministers who now ignore them). FIFA’s gamble that exciting football would obfuscate Quatar’s medievalism was seemingly successful. Putin is already aiming his new year’s fireworks at Ukraine. While slowly and very publicly, Musk has gone completely doolally-tap. 

Oh and no one can afford heating. Or food. 

Those looking to the metaverse to save us all have had a rude awakening too. Seduced by Gucci’s ostensible success, many marketing companies enthusiastically reconfigured themselves to be experts in something that doesn’t yet exist. Forgetting that Gucci’s web3 efforts are reputational (quite important in fashion) and that they’re already experts in flogging the Emperor’s new clothes, marketeers assumed every brand would want a piece that action  —  without really knowing what that action even is, or what it does.

I can’t count the amount of big brands I know that have pulled their ‘metaverse spend’ over the last few months. Presumably they figured they’d be laughing all the way to the crypto bank, only to find it boarded up.

We can all feel that the public mood around Santa’s birthday this year is subdued. According to the PWC’s consumer insights, ‘spending across every age group is lower than pre-pandemic levels’. Cost of living, record inflation, transport strikes, nurses strikes… I know right. At a Matches sample sale last week I saw a pair of Yuketen Blucher Rockers for £160 and I DIDN’T buy them. 

Jokes. I’m painfully aware that for some £160 is more than their entire Christmas budget. And there’s the rub. I am miserable, but I don’t deserve to be. I do feel low and lazy and worried without the cushion of a regular pay check. But then, I guess, welcome to the real world Me. Thems the breaks. And not everyone has the luxury of a girl like mine who (as well as being gainfully employed) has literally just surprised me with a Comme des Garçons Homme sweatshirt as a pre-Christmas treat. 

Perhaps I’ll post a picture of me in it on Linkedin. Thumbs up. Full grin. After all 2023 is going to be just awesome! I literally can’t wait to share the amazing times ahead with my customers! In fact I’m so excited I think I’m literally going to pop and my guts, half a metre of shit and a pint of piss will land on your face, followed swiftly by my new white paper on Generative AI.

If this blog has ever made you smirk, eye-roll or anything in-between I thank you for your attention and patience. 

I wish you all a fabulous Christmas and New Year. 

I expect mine will be rubbish. 

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Hat: Engineered Garments
Sunglasses: Gucci
Chain: Toga
Sweatshirt and trousers: Comme des Garçons Homme
Blazer: Studio Nicholson
Sneakers: Nike x Undercover