I’ve been reading all week about how my generation – which might well be called the NEET generation if things continue this way – is in trouble and I wanted to let people know what it really feels like to be a young person in this current moment.On graduating with a 2:1 in Business Management from a good university, I felt full of hope. In those what I call salad graduation days, I started to apply to the type of companies I soon learned not to bother with. I looked for jobs at PWC, KPMG, Deloitte, plus a whole raft of smaller business and accounting firms. I got the “application received” message and then, after that, dead silence. Not a rejection or a notification that the application hadn’t been successful, just silence. There was no contact to email or ask, because as I soon learned, job applications have lost any kind of human element. So then I started to apply to smaller and less competitive firms, researching every graduate programme I could: Cadbury’s, Arla, Lidl, Sainsbury’s, B&Q; most had a skills test, which I didn’t mind, as I thought it could help break through the AI filters. I did well, exceptionally so on a couple, but the response, when I got one, was “due to overwhelming demand, you haven’t been successful”.It is so confusing because you have no idea how this works. Is it first come, first served? Are there specific things they want? They all have job and people specs, but in a moment where they might be getting hundreds of thousands of applications, who gets through and who doesn’t? Once, people used “working in McDonald’s” as a coded insult, like you’d failed, but loads of my friends have applied to that graduate programme and most haven’t been successful. So if that was the previous generation's benchmark for failure – which is stupid because apparently, it’s a really solid programme – what does this say about our generation?Every morning is the same. I live with my parents and I wake up later and later because what’s the point in waking up? The anxiety immediately starts to zing and it’s just more frenzied applications. I start LinkedIn searching and feel more demoralised as I see how well other people are doing. I didn’t get a rejection or a notification that the application hadn’t been successful, just silence. There was no contact to email or ask, because as I soon learned, job applications have lost any kind of human elementI did manage to get two interviews, one in the events industry and one in the hotel industry, which I got great feedback on, but there were so many candidates, and I didn’t get the jobs. In a way that was worse, because being so close gives you hope and then you’re crushed again. It’s hard to not get mentally affected by this and I have had huge rows with my parents who give well-meaning but unhelpful advice about it all coming good in the end. I don’t think that’s the truth anymore. With so many people my age all competing and desperate – how is it going to come good? By what economic sorcery or magic?After a row with my dad, I followed his advice and took my CV physically into shops and restaurants, and it felt so humiliating. It felt a bit like begging. Some workers – funnily enough, many other young people – were rude and dismissive; others were lovely and helpful. A common response was to try online, but you never hear back. But there are so few jobs to go around; even those who said they’d call if something came up, I haven’t heard anything back. After a shift at a well-known restaurant chain, for which I wasn’t paid for, I got ghosted and never heard anything again. So they got a night’s free work and I got another dose of humiliation. It felt like rock bottom and I didn’t look again for weeks, because I just felt embarrassed and like, what’s the point? I’m now working off and on in a pub and I’m enjoying it and thinking of training as a nursery practitioner, but it’s more expensive and time-consuming. I’m well aware this is more pressure and expense for me and my parents. I’m one of the lucky ones. My parents can afford to house me without paying rent and they feed me and help me out with some money. I’m earning a bit now, but it’s not remotely enough for a one-room rent in the suburbs, let alone London. I recently watched It’s a Sin, based in the Eighties, and though I know it wasn’t the theme of the programme, I nearly cried watching how people our age could all get a place in London together on starting salaries. To my generation, that’s as much a fantasy now as watching Stranger Things. I believe in government-created upside-down worlds full of monsters more than I do that our generation will ever get the type of experiences to be young adults our parents did in the eighties and nineties. Everyone I know my age is living at home, worried and getting increasingly desperate and depressed. Before more reports are released or older people come on news programmes to tell us everything that is wrong with us, I want them to understand that for us, this is scary and real, and we’re really not sure if there’s a way out of it. As told to Chloe Combi