Welcome to the ‘Youth Hunger Games’: the brutal NEET race for shrinking pickings

Young people are being exhorted to keep chasing the elusive prize of employment, even as our work-centred world is diminishing

Photo by Hennie Stander on Unsplash

NEETs, the million plus young Brits not in education, employment or training, are scrabbling to find work in a Hunger Games style rat-race, seemingly designed to punish. Reliance on benefits is increasing, and many find themselves unemployed for years on end.

A NEET-eye view:

“To say that my adult life didn’t shape up how I thought it would is an understatement. I have been out of work for just over a year and it’s tough. It has been the single most soul crushing experience of my life so far.

Sites that I was told are good and reliable places to look, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, are now riddled with scam postings. [There’s] listing after listing where you spend hours perfecting the cover letter, rewriting the CV, giving them a picture off you, the blood of your first-born child and a lock of your hair, and they never get back to you.

It no longer feels like getting a job is possible, even one that’s not perfect or just something to pay the bills. It’s like being employed is something that happens to other people. Meanwhile, one has to go onto benefits just to survive while you send application after application after application.

It feels like there’s no longer anything I can do to fix the situation I’m in.”

The toll on young people’s lives from these struggles, and from our aggravating culture of mindless carping, is enormous.

The game terrain

UK unemployment is at a 5-year high of 5.2%. Job applications are heavily oversubscribed, with 2.4 jobseekers for every vacancy and graduate jobs typically receiving up to 140 responses per advert.

Young job seekers are caught in a catch 22. Employers now seek an average of 2.5 years’ experience for many entry level jobs. As a result, 33% of applicants are rejected because they lack sufficient experience.

Graduates hit the job market also saddled with £50,000+ of debt. Being a UK graduate NEET:

“Exposes a common lie about our education system which we … hear from parents and teachers - that a degree in the right subject, or from the right institution, or with the right grade is a recipe for success.”

The employment Hunger Games have also shifted fully online. As our first NEET above observes, days are filled with endless applications in an anonymous screen-world, devoid of face-to-face human interaction. The interminable rejections are conveyed through silence.

Businesses won’t touch real paper CVs now and buildings that say ‘Job Centre’ are not actually job-finding centres.

Additionally, large language AI has triggered a fall in demand for human input, with the UK service sector concentration leaving us particularly exposed to large-scale job displacement.

AI constitutes a double insult to NEETs. It not only ruthlessly adjudicates their online applications but is also soaking up swathes of NEET employment opportunities.

Limbo

The challenge of finding employment currently looks overwhelming. Instead of reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood, NEETs find themselves in an unstable limbo, endlessly repeating the “humiliation ritual” of chasing work that has the seeming rareness of hens’ teeth.

Aspiration is deeply strained - only 48% of young people believe anyone can succeed in Britain if they work hard enough.

Alan Milburn’s recent NEETs report distinguishes between NEETs actively looking for work, (39%) and inactive NEETs (61%). A proportion of ‘inactives’ have never worked, but it’s worth noting that others in this cohort may have been active but eventually gave up precisely because there’s a limit to human endurance.

Try harder

As NEETs wake to face another round of application checking, the continuing online silence is broken only by the steady thrum of government and society urging them to try harder - ‘You just need to get more savvy at working the system’; ‘your problem was that you didn’t put enough freelance projects and student society leadership positions on your CV’; ‘try doing (yet) more volunteer work to stand out’ (assuming you can find it). ‘Tell AI what’s special about you’ (even if you don’t feel special after months of relentless failure).

This thoroughly undermining ‘advice’ tells NEETs they aren’t doing quite the right thing, as if the right thing can somehow even be done - anymore. It’s a grotesque pantomime testing the endurance of even the wiliest.

Getting work, rewarding or otherwise, is now random, rare, and has very little to do with how hard you try.

Stop slacking

When society isn’t delivering ‘advice’, it’s busy caricaturing these Hunger Gamers as snowflake scroungers. Since their brains, it’s presumed, have been melted by social media and ‘me’ culture, they lack the ‘gumption and fortitude of their forefathers and allow themselves to fall lazily into the pernicious habit of exploiting our hard-pressed benefits system’.

Here, NEETS, again fall under society’s mindless sledgehammer: ‘If that kid is fiddling the system, you must all be’. But it’s the critic’s reasoning here, not ‘youth’, which is lazy where it slithers, as it’s so often inclined to do, from ‘one / a few’ to ‘most / all’ without reflection or hesitation.

Waking up on day x of your dogged ‘job seeker’ marathon to hear that you’re a ‘feckless loafer robbing the state’ is just the ticket for compounding pre-existing mental health issues, or, frankly, even creating them.

PIP

The growing number of youngsters claiming PIP (Personal Independence Payments) for neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders has only amplified society’s grievances. But is their use of PIP surprising? After failing repeatedly to find employment, plenty begin to feel they don’t fit into society, that there might be something wrong with them. ‘Neurodivergence’, if nothing else, floats an explanation to NEETs themselves and their judges for ‘feeling dysfunctional’ and for a predicament they feel helpless to change.

Of course, PIP is exploited by the work-shy. But, again, we should pause before making assumptions since reasons for PIP applications are nuanced.

Some NEETs use PIP to protect themselves from the despotism they often experience in the world of Universal Credit (UC). In the easily abused power relationship with their ‘work coach’, receivers can get sanctioned with little provocation. Perhaps they missed a UC meeting as their bus was cancelled; perhaps they couldn’t face attending a job interview for nightshift work cleaning toilets a 1.5 hr train-ride away. Sometimes reasons for sanctions are too buried in red tape to discern.

Harried by the government’s shrill promise to ‘make life (even) harder for UC receivers’, young people live under the constant threat of waking up skint. And, in our atomised society, they don’t invariably have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ as last resort. So, who can blame them for using a PIP safety net that protects them from capricious UC decisions, and provides certainty about their next meal in a world where ‘if you work your socks off, you’ll gain security’ is a promise that simply never materialised?

The future

Andy Burnham plans to reduce NEETs by revolutionising education in ways that help engage young people with work. But this is only a solution if there’s work to be had.

There is a fundamental contradiction in our NEETs narratives – we firmly believe people’s lives should be orientated around work and that young people should be encouraged with carrots and sticks to find it. But we are simultaneously moving towards a world when employment opportunities are disappearing.

There’s a school of thought according to which, as per past tech revolutions, the AI revolution will ultimately give rise to sufficient alternative forms of human employment. But this optimism is hotly contested. The National Foundation for Educational Research, together with Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist) and prominent economist, Daniel Susskind, all argue that we’re moving, at the very least, towards a world of dramatically reduced human labour, with AI “creating massive unemployment”.

Plumbers and electricians look safe. But Susskind predicts that “task encroachment will displace workers” from a wide range of jobs across most blue- and white-collar sectors. Economics and employment are de-coupling, creating the novel spectre of “jobless growth”.

Beyond the work gospel

We aren’t preparing young people for this fast-approaching new world of significantly reduced work. Instead, we’re foisting on them an old model that they can see withering before their own eyes.

There’s a parallel here between NEETS and Thatcherite deindustrialisation. In neither case was the promise of life-long, regular work and security honoured, or preparation made for the consequences of trashing those promises. Then and now, the neo-liberal assumption was that market forces will kick in, driving people to find other work, by relocating, if necessary. This ‘try harder’ diktat no more fitted reality then than it does now. Are Thatcher’s lost northern towns, still stuck in poverty and disillusionment, a metaphor for our future youth?

So much is premised on the value of work as life’s provider of structure, meaning and security. Yet young people are facing a future where this prop is shrinking. Faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and the prospect of their Hunger Games only getting harder, NEETs are losing faith in the “gospel of work”, disengaging wholesale from the point of it. Depression, suicide, crime and drug use will all increase unless we give young people aspirations for worthwhile lives that are no longer noosed to employment.

To this end, education will need to build the kind of value, purpose and meaning into young people’s lives that enables them to cope in a ‘work-lite’ world. We may need universal basic income; but education must also cultivate stronger moral and societal responsibility, together with other specifically human endeavours such as creativity, physical life, and the rewards of human interaction.

Instead of looking backwards to an obsolescent model of work, making empty promises to young people, and feeding the NEET mental health epidemic, we must equip them with the skills, confidence and imagination to flesh out this potentially exciting and culturally advanced new world for themselves as adults.