By Matthew Jeans, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
I’ve started noticing cars at the far edges of large parking lots.
Not the cars near the entrance, where people are loading groceries or returning carts. The ones farther back. The ones sitting alone.
I wonder whether someone is sleeping in them.
Then I wonder whether, in a few months, I might be sleeping in mine there, too.
I’m not homeless. I live in an apartment in Fredericksburg with my miniature schnauzer, Mia. My lease ends right before Thanksgiving and I already know I can’t renew it. I moved here from the Washington, D.C. area after I lost my last job because Fredericksburg was cheaper than D.C. or Alexandria. Now comparable floor plans in my complex are being advertised for roughly $800 more per month than I pay, and I expect to reach the limit of the credit I’ve been using to stay afloat at almost exactly the same time my lease expires.
I’ve been thinking through the logistics.
I have a gym membership, so I could shower there. I could put most of my belongings in a storage unit. I’ve slept in my car before during long moves and trips when I couldn’t justify the cost of a hotel.
The part I haven’t figured out is how to make that life work for Mia.
She spends most days lying on the floor beside my desk while I search for work. Her bed is in the same room, but she usually chooses the floor next to my chair. I take her out a few times a day, but lately I know she’s not getting the attention she used to.
The job search has become its own full-time job.
***
I’m 32, almost 33, and for most of my life I’ve considered independence one of my defining qualities.
I grew up in and around Fayetteville, Tennessee, after spending my earliest years in Kelso, a community of only a few hundred people. I started school early, and was still a young teenager when I left for the University of Alabama. My family was low-income. I was a first-generation college student. A scholarship paid $1,750 a semester, but the rest of college was financed largely through federal student and Parent PLUS loans.
At 17, I was signing loan documents involving amounts of money I could barely conceptualize, but I had absorbed the same message many young people do: Go to college, work hard, get the degree, and you will make enough afterward to justify the cost.
What I understood much sooner than most, though, was how expensive it could be simply to stay enrolled. I routinely carried more than 20 credit hours a semester while studying clarinet performance. Summers that might have been time to earn more money were often filled with classes. One included music lessons alongside Organic Chemistry I and II because I was still planning on medical school.
I spent four years in the Million Dollar Band at Alabama, and had even been clarinet section leader. Because my last semester fell in the autumn, I could have returned for a fifth season, but I didn’t. I needed more hours for my retail job.
Leaving hurt because marching band was not something I had failed at or stopped loving. I had done it well. I had been trusted to lead. But survival needed those hours more than marching band did.
I came out as gay around that time, which didn’t go over well with my parents. “We were afraid that was it,” they said, and not long after that took possession of the car I’d managed to buy. They said it was because they didn’t want me to have transportation to attend LGBTQ+ social events.
Grocery shopping back at school often meant walking several miles to the Walmart on McFarland Boulevard, buying whatever I could carry, and walking back. A half-hour errand could consume four hours.
I was 21.
That period left me with a rule I’ve carried ever since: If I wanted my life to belong to me, I had to be able to support it myself.
Over the next several years, I kept proving to myself that I could.
I moved to Albuquerque months before graduate school began and worked as a medical scribe, a manny, and a clothing-store employee while taking community-college prerequisites in nutrition. Once the University of New Mexico program started, I kept a retail job while earning a master’s degree in clarinet performance. The best music fellowship available to me paid roughly $600 a month. I also found my way into a nutrition research lab, where an interest in preventing disease through nutrition and other modifiable behaviors started to look like a career.
From Albuquerque I moved to Austin where I earned a master’s degree and then a PhD in nutritional sciences at the University of Texas, supporting myself through assistantships, loans, and music teaching on the side. A policy fellowship eventually brought me to Washington, D.C., where I began working while finishing my dissertation.
Written that way, the progression sounds almost tidy.
It wasn’t.
***
Over the next several years, I held various research jobs in the health sector, and then in the research and program-evaluation side of education technology, where I worked with large datasets, designed studies, and translated complicated findings into information people could use to make decisions.
When the last company I worked for was bought out by a larger corporation, the culture changed. Late nights and weekends became increasingly normal, bureaucracy made it harder to get actual work done, and research integrity was becoming a concern. I was sometimes asked to go back after the fact and find support for claims senior executives had already made. Once, on Christmas Day, I received an email from the CEO telling me to meet him at 8 the next morning.
I eventually left full-time employment but continued with the company as an independent contractor, and freelanced with a few others, after being told the arrangement would be different. I would have control over my own research and could do the work in a way I could stand behind professionally.
For a while, that worked. But later I was told to perform an analysis in a way I believed was methodologically inappropriate, and to describe the work in a way that didn’t accurately reflect how it had been done. I refused. When I pushed back, the company terminated my contract.
I don’t know how to calculate the financial value of your principles when rent is due, but I know what it would have cost me to abandon them.
By then, I had moved from D.C. and Alexandria to Fredericksburg because part-time employment had made remaining close to Washington too expensive, and the math worked better.
The irony is that the cheaper place to live also put me farther from many of the professional opportunities I could pursue in person.
For roughly a year and a half, I’ve been trying to regain stable full-time employment. I’ve applied to more than 800 jobs.
Most days I sit at the desk with Mia beside me and search job boards, tailor applications, write cover letters, message recruiters, cold-email strangers, prepare for interviews and look for consulting projects.
Then I do it again the next day.
I tried Instacart for awhile, but an entire day delivering food orders produced barely $100 before gas and taxes. Eventually I stopped, not because I thought the work was beneath me, but because every day spent driving was a day I wasn’t spending on the search for full-time work and a stable income.
Survival work can consume the time you need to escape survival work.
***
The hiring process itself has become increasingly strange. Four or five interview rounds are no longer unusual to me. Take-home assignments appear even for entry- and mid-level positions. Interviews sometimes feel less like mutual due diligence than performance art, where the candidate who most convincingly claims that each company has always been a personal calling has an advantage over the person who simply says I need to work, I can do this job well, and I will take it seriously.
One “opportunity” kept me in interviews for two and a half months. I made it to the final stage, and for a while, that job became the light at the end of the tunnel.
Then I waited. Weeks passed. I didn’t hear anything until, eventually, a standard rejection email arrived. As I understand it, the organization ultimately decided not to hire anyone.
That was when panic set in.
I opened my banking app.
Then I closed it.
I have always used credit cards, but I paid them off every month. Carrying a balance for the first time felt less like a financial transaction than crossing an invisible line.
On paper, someone like me is not supposed to be having this much trouble finding full-time work. In June 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an unemployment rate of just 2.7 percent among Americans 25 and older with bachelor’s degrees or higher. Among recent college graduates, though, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put unemployment at about 5.6 percent in the second quarter of 2026.
Underemployment for recent college graduates was even more striking, at 42 percent.
I’m clearly not alone in my struggle to find a job, even with my advanced degree, training, and experience. Former friends and coworkers affected by the wave of government and corporate restructuring in 2024 and 2025 have messaged me to say they are still looking. I regularly encounter people with master’s degrees, PhDs, and years of experience who have all the things we were told would protect us.
They are still applying, too.
As I continued my own job search, and as my savings disappeared and my debt mounted, I didn’t think things could get much worse.
Then Mia developed bladder stones again.
She had undergone surgery for stones two years earlier, when I still had stable employment. Even then, paying for it was difficult. This time she formed a different kind, and someone loaned me $1,000 toward her care.
I hate owing people money, but I hate asking for help even more.
The first time Mia had stones, an emergency veterinarian discussed putting her down after I said I couldn’t afford the price they quoted for surgery. I found another veterinarian who could perform it for substantially less.
That’s what I do. I figure things out. I thought that was what we were all taught to do.
If there’s an emergency, I handle it. If I need to cross the country for work, I pack and move. If I encounter something I don’t know how to do, I learn how to do it.
What frightens me now is that I am doing all the right things, but I’m no longer confident they‘ll be enough.
My lease ends November 21. The cars at the edges of parking lots look different. I wonder where I would park, what I would put in storage, and where Mia would sleep.
Most afternoons, after I’ve spent hours at the computer, Mia gets up and looks at me in the particular way dogs do when they decide you’ve been sitting still for long enough.
I reach for her leash.
She’s not interested in my applications, the balance on my credit card, or what happens in November. She wants to inspect the same patch of grass she inspected that morning. She wants to choose the direction we walk, and for the next few minutes, I let her.
Then we go back inside.
***
Matthew Jeans lives in Fredericksburg with his miniature schnauzer, Mia. He grew up in Tennessee, and has spent most of his adult life bouncing around the country and between music, health, research, and education. He is usually overthinking something, drinking coffee, or being reminded by Mia that she needs attention You can contact him at Matthewjeans@aol.com. Or through his Linkedin account.
