STILL not drinking
I simply refuse to give up on giving-up drinking
I decided to quit not-working and have begun job-searching the past two months (at the 23-month mark). I’ve been conceptually hearing that it’s a tough market from friends who have found or continue to look for work, but now I get to experience it first hand: a few interviews later and still no dice.
The only job I ever fought for was my first job at Microsoft.
I was rejected for a PM internship two summers in a row, and upon my second rejection (Year Three of university), I went up to the recruiter at a Microsoft event and said I felt they made the wrong decision. He was like “wtf lmao” and said “prove it” and invited me to a Microsoft-sponsored quiz bowl that evening.
I got there and my friend Matt happened to see me and waved me over so we could partner up on the event. That turned out to be good because out of the 20 questions, I am pretty sure I only knew one of the answers convincingly:
“Who created C++?”
“Bjarne Stroustrup, of course”
And I answered another question pretty badly:
“How much profit did Microsoft make last year?”
[with absolute confidence and zero hesitation] “Zero!”
“If Microsoft made zero dollars last year, we wouldn’t be here hosting this event…”
However, my boy Matt knocked quite a few out of the park himself and together we each correctly guessed a couple more apiece, and outscored the field by a wide margin. We went up to collect our prizes, the recruiter told me to come by the career center the next morning, and the rest was history — with plenty of help from others along the way of course.
Crazy enough though, I hadn’t applied to nor interviewed at a single other company that entire year. I told everyone I was going to intern at Microsoft and that’s what happened. The summer before was also a breeze, where I’d gotten a human factors internship at Northrop Grumman on the strength of my research advisor’s word alone and didn’t even have to apply anywhere.
And at Microsoft, I was blessed to intern and then work full-time over six years with a wonderful family of people who took care of me even though I was a clueless shithead.
And even after that team came to an end, on my first reach-out I again found another highly-capable team at Microsoft which while not really being my forte taught me a lot — nobody does enterprise better than Microsoft, but it is exhausting on an individual level being beholden to the customer when your customers are every major financial institution and most governments of the world.
When I needed a change, the process of finding a new job took about 30 days from first recruiter contact to final rounds to hiring panel to leveling to team-matching on my second call with the most unique, best team of contemporaries I could have imagined working with at Google. And Google was the second company I talked to; my first week of searching I did a first round with DoorDash and was rejected and depressed for about a day before I messaged an old recruiter at Google on a chance and she connected me to the PM recruiter. And this whole process is while working at the time seventy-hour weeks (not a flex, the engineers were working eighty).
Other than those companies, I have interviewed at Meta two times and at Zillow once, and that’s about it. Basically, in my whole decade-plus career I’ve applied to a handful of companies and had a roughly even success rate.
This time, I’ve done a full round, several first rounds, and several recruiter screens, and nothing. Granted, I’m not looking very hard yet, as I’ve been slowly ramping up, but this is already harder than I’ve had to ever look.
So, maybe it’s not news to you, but it is news to me… job searching is exhausting.
The main difference between then and now is that before I was drinking, and now I’m not drinking.
As last reported, I haven’t drank since June 22, 2025, and before then I hadn’t drank since March 26, 2024, and before then, since I quit drinking on August 16, 2023 until now, I have had a total of 34.5 standard drinks, which is fewer than what I was averaging per week over half a decade.
So, when I was drinking, everything was easy, and now that I’m not drinking, everything is hard.
The moral of the story is that drinking is awesome and cool, based, epic, and goated and leads to unlimited employment and bountiful paychecks; whereas not drinking like a gay, retarded (we are encouraged to say that now) loser means getting ZERO jobs and ZERO pussy (last part is not true).
Unfortunately, this gay retard (me) is still not drinking, and frankly I’m surprised and happy that this time I haven’t been tempted to drink as a coping mechanism despite deciding to pick up the stress of working again (and now having done both employment and unemployed-job-seeking, I can tell you for a fact that job-seeking is ten times more high-capacity, undirected knowledge-work than any job).
You know what is a tempting coping mechanism though? Nicotine, which I decided to start using again last month to cope with the stress of job searching even though I’d kicked it for a year.
Oh well, you win some you lose some. I will have to quit nicotine again. I’m going to look into replacing it with a caffeine and sweets addiction.
As my dear friend Emran told me two months ago on my first week of job-searching, “Perseverance makes the man.”