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A woman with a master’s degree walked into a sandwich shop, filled out a paper application, smiled, and handed it back. A giant “Now Hiring” sign hung in the window. Writer and educator Karen D. Garman describes the moment in an essay first published by HuffPost. She holds a master’s in interdisciplinary arts, speaks two languages, and has decades of experience, personal and professional. She was ready to work for minimum wage. The shop never called.
The sandwich shop was one of many. Garman says she has applied at hardware stores, pet supply chains, and garden centers. No one writes back. “I don’t need a career. I need a paycheck,” she writes, yet the system seems to think she is aiming too low, playing the game wrong, or not existing at all. Her résumé vanishes into online portals with no human on the other end. She has rewritten it more times than she can count. Then she started cutting things out of it.
Leaving off her degree made no difference. Neither did stressing her “people skills,” or chasing QR codes, job portals, and listings that led nowhere. Garman says every rejection wore down something she once believed about herself: her sense of worth. She went looking for explanations. Maybe she had undiagnosed ADHD, she wondered. Maybe social anxiety. Then she landed on a possibility she calls her greatest fear of all.
Garman Says She Has Never Earned Over $20,000 in a Year, and Help Still Skips Her
Her deepest fear, she writes, is bigger than failure, poverty, or loneliness. She fears being fundamentally out of sync with the world and not realizing it. Maybe she has been clueless for years, she says, and everyone else noticed except her. The thought returns again and again, a quiet suspicion that other people know something about her that she cannot see.
Garman lays out her situation plainly. She is not homeless, addicted, or mentally ill. She says she has never made more than $20,000 in a single year. That places her in a gray area: struggling, but not visibly enough to qualify for help. She calls herself the kind of person nobody builds policy for, someone who falls through the cracks without anyone noticing. She says the damage goes beyond the paycheck.
Work, Garman writes, supplies rhythm, purpose, and dignity. It gives days a structure and gives the brain something to do besides spiral into self-questioning. Locked out of even the most basic jobs, she says, the harm reaches past the bank account and into something she calls existential. She also insists she is far from a lone case. She points to a statistic about college graduates.
Underemployment Hits 41.5% of Recent Grads While 67% of Job Seekers Spot Fake Listings
Federal data supports her sense of scale. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that about 41.5% of recent college graduates, ages 22 to 27, held jobs that typically do not require a degree in early 2026. Unemployment for that group stayed above 5%. Earlier New York Fed figures put underemployment among all graduates at roughly 34%. Garman blames the hiring process itself.
She describes a system that has become automated, impersonal, and biased in countless tiny, invisible ways. Overqualified applicants are treated as a liability, she writes, and older applicants, especially women, are routinely overlooked. In her view, the technology meant to streamline applications ends up shutting out the people who need jobs most. Other job seekers say the same thing about the listings themselves.
A 2026 Resume Genius survey of 1,000 active U.S. job seekers found that 67% had come across postings they believed were fake, misleading, or never meant to be filled. Garman describes the same maze: portals, QR codes, and ghost listings that lead nowhere. She knows some readers will not accept her account at all.
Garman Warns Employers and AI Are Rejecting the Very People Trained to Handle Future Crises
Many people believe success follows effort and that failure exposes a flaw in character, a lack of discipline, or too little drive. Garman asks them to consider another possibility: outcomes may come from circumstances, and circumstances are rarely within a person’s control. Then she raises a second, harder idea about the world she trained for.
The second idea is that the world has entered the digital age, and people working in history, philosophy, the humanities, and faith may have become obsolete. Garman once believed people like her would shape the future. Now she says she is trying to survive in it. She was trained to think critically, lead, and imagine better systems. In her view, the people and AI overlooking her cannot do what she does, and they are turning away the very resources that could help guide society through the crises ahead.
Garman ends with a modest request: a chance to be useful somehow. She says she has so much to give and would make the best sandwiches anyone has ever tasted. The sign in the window said Now Hiring. The application she handed over, filled out by hand and offered with a smile, earned no answer.