When self-made fashion insider Stacey Duguid broke from behind her glossy Instagram persona a few weeks ago, revealing that she’d been out of work for 16 months and was struggling emotionally and financially, she was met with an outpouring from people in the same boat.
While Duguid has since focused her campaign on the way midlife women in particular are hobbled by the current job market, the truth she tapped into is increasingly a universal one. In 2026, success simply doesn’t equal financial security, whether you’re talking about high wages or even just the expectation of grasping the next rung on the ladder.
For millennials in particular, that pill has been a bitter one to swallow. Sold a dual-pronged dream as kids – hard work pays off; do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – we entered the workforce bright eyed and bushy tailed only to collide with the financial crash, Brexit and Covid. Now, AI threatens to demolish the world of work all over again, with job hunters and recruiters locked in a robo-arms race that rejects genuine applicants in favour of CVs wrought from its own homogenised LinkedIn drivel.
Clinging to survival by the skin of our teeth, very little seems clear to my generation, but one thing’s for sure: the steady careers we were raised for are gone, if they ever existed in the first place. Call it the gig economy, or side hustles – truth is, nowadays many of us need more than one job to survive, let alone thrive.
