I applied for 736 jobs in CA. Is this the future?

By Misty McAfee, especially for CalMatters

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I have applied for 736 jobs in the last seven months. And I don’t know how I’m doing the rent in June.

I am 55; I have been working since I was 14 years old. I raised a son who graduated from UC. I paid taxes for four decades. I have spent over 20 years building a career in marketing, communications, events and brand strategy in California.

I’ve been using AI tools since before most people knew what to call them. I integrated AI into workflows, marketing strategy, research and communications work because I believed that staying ahead was the price of staying employed.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it. I have revised my resume countless times. I optimized LinkedIn. I researched applicant tracking systems. I networked and customized each application.

The advice is endless and always about what I should do differently: Have you updated your LinkedIn? Have you connected to your network? Have you tried applying to smaller companies?

No one stops and says, “Wait, we are fourth largest economy in the world and this is happening to someone who has worked for 40 years, paid taxes and done everything he thought was right. The conversation never gets that far.

The dominant public narrative of unemployment still assumes a personal failure to adapt. If someone can’t get a job, the assumption is that they’ve failed to develop, they’ve failed to learn, they’ve failed to stay relevant. This story is convenient because it locates the problem in the individual and keeps it there.

I’m the worker that history said would be fine. I’m far from well.

I started by applying for six-figure director-level roles. When that didn’t happen, I moved into management positions. Then coordinator positions. Then hospitality. Then work in hotel catering. The result of seven months and 736 applications was one Zoom interview.

Applications disappear into automated systems. Any sign of a human being on the other side was gone. Jobs are reposted after you’ve already applied. After months of application, many publications begin to feel less like opportunities and more like data collection systems.

Meanwhile, California’s economic messages remain relentlessly triumphant. Governor Gavin Newsom boasts that California’s gross domestic product has grown to $4.25 trillion. Nvidia is up the first company to exceed $4 trillion market valuation, generation more than $2 million in profit per employee. And investment in AI has reached over $200 billion in 2025, a sharp increase from the previous year.

At the same time more than 118,000 technical jobs were eliminated nationwide in 2025, California accounts for more than half of those losses. Companies are cutting these positions cites AI as the main reason.

It is less clear what happens to workers who change along the way. I still believe I will work again. I still apply daily.

Before writing publicly about any of this, I emailed Newsom, gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter, Rep. Ted Liu, Rep. Ro Hanna, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. I told them exactly what I am telling you. I asked them one question: What’s the plan?

Only Bass’s team responded. They sent an automated email with a list of job resources. I clicked on the link. The page said “Error, not found.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.