The jobs are there, they just aren't nice jobs.

I entered the workforce shortly after losing a healthcare provision a handful of years ago, and one thing I had to come to terms with was that I no longer had a shiny career escalator to step onto, no fast track to affluence.

This was actually liberating, though, because I was able to say that I was fully self-driven, building myself from the bottom up, and I got to deconstruct the "you have a special and privileged seat in society" mentality that my liberal upbringing gave me. Mao was right that manual labor is a source of realism and class consciousness.

Later on, I was able to connect the dots in retrospect, and realize that I ended up understanding the economy way more accurately than the PMC types who were my peers growing up. And beyond that, through mixing together a solid high school math foundation, a couple business classes from junior college, and some socialist theory, I ended up with an ability to analyze businesses through labor and material inputs/outputs, to identify how inefficient they were. Not that I think anyone would hire me as a consultant, but being able to see the weak points of a capitalist apparatus is exhilarating.

There is definitely a future in economic subversion, where the lazy despondent capitalists leave enough slack for their workers to find out what's going on under the hood, and then duplicate the business model to ruthlessly undercut their former masters.