LOG 004 // MILLENNIAL MANAGERS WITH CHAT GPT KILLED THE HIRING PROCESS

As a new member of the “your unemployed friend at 11am on a Tuesday” club, I’ve been spiraling about WHY everybody on both sides of the hiring process is saying the same shit, but nobody has any real insight.

Before quitting, I’d been in the job hunt for A YEAR AND EIGHT MONTHS. This whole mess is a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell of the critical thinking crisis + incompetent millennial managers. Yeah, I said it.

The kind that excelled through their early career, got promoted, and are now hiring their very own direct report. But managing is not the same as doing. And without the ability to apply their experience in a new context, these managers have no idea what the hell they’re doing.

I figured this out while meditating on my experience. I quit my fuckass job two weeks ago. I used to love it, but it really hoed me at the end. I traced the bullshit back to my manager’s promotion. Once she moved from leading execution to leading strategy, I fear she folded.

Tragic, because she was SO good when I started and her job was teaching me to replicate what she’d perfected over the prior four years. But the second she needed to apply all that great work to a slightly different situation, she couldn’t walk the walk.

The elevated role came with two more marketing channels AND two more direct reports. What we could accomplish in 40 hours working in sync didn’t survive the transition. We had fewer alignment points and I was getting further from the flow of information. Turns out I was doing a lot of the strategy-to-execution work on my own. I didn’t realize that until I wasn’t close enough to the strategy to inform execution.

Add the complexity of three channels each with different timelines, partners, and standard operating procedures. The team couldn’t catch the process fast enough to execute her strategic vision. Even when her ideas were sound, she couldn’t architect the system to bring them to life.

Eventually, I shuffled back to owning one channel. It was less chaotic but still undermanaged.

Now, we’re both no longer with the business.

The Western education system has always rewarded Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V over synthesis. And while I DO have a calculator in my pocket, the kid whose book reports were summaries has ChatGPT. Yike.

Inside the hellscape of the 2026-27 job market, I genuinely feel like I’m doing ALL THE THINGS. I update my keywords and make sure the bullets match the job description. I keep my LinkedIn up to date so it plausibly matches whatever resume I’m submitting. I write the cover letter and answer the bullshit screening questions with intention. I reach out to the hiring manager and follow up. PER. JOB. Net two screenings and one interview later…I’m over it.

The first recruiter call was kinda shaky but I felt like it went well. And even though I wasn’t asked to interview, I did get valuable-ish feedback: it was a channel-specific mismatch, not necessarily experience, knowledge, or strategic thinking. Though my fiance challenged me to really sallow the feedback, I still felt like it was kinda dumb. Marketing strategy is channel agnostic if you know what you’re doing. And I have a Master’s in marketing??

Second prospect, at this point for a super entry-level role with a steep pay cut. GREAT recruiter call. I prepared a short slide deck explicitly connecting the dots for the hiring manager. Super disengaged call…decided to move in a different direction?

At this point, it’s not about the skills. Or it’s racism, who’s to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Inside the chaos of “how to beat ATS” and “keyword optimization hacks,” did we pause to ask who programmed the damn robot? Somebody, somewhere set the filters, defined parameters, decided what success looks like. These hoes don’t know what they’re doing. And they set the software to the same dumbass frequency.

Cool.

So what do we do? Artists have always known how to draw inspiration from different places, experiences, and information to create new realities. Imagination is innovation. Translation: the Humanities will save us.

Log 003 // Humanities Marketing

Waking up and the TV’s still on. Some late-night commercial for a CD box set — just four easy payments of $19.99! I knew every word to all my favorite commercials as a kid with no money and no need for anything they were advertising. You probably didn’t have a structured settlement, nor did you need cash now…but you knew exactly who to call.

As an undergrad, I took a class called Roman Spectacle with the head of the Classics Department, Dr. Tuck. We covered the games, triumphs, theaters, and of course gladiators. Yes, it was fun watching Russell Crowe clips in a 300-level course. But we were actually watching the full apparatus of public entertainment as a political and social instrument.

Our final papers analyzed a modern American spectacle through a classical lens, exploring cultural parallels and connecting to larger belief systems beneath them. Only rule? Couldn’t write about the Super Bowl. Too obvious.

So I chose the next best thing: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A triumphal procession through a major city, sponsored by powerful patrons, igniting collective pride. Nothing in the parade is accidental. It constructs a narrative reflecting what America wants to believe about itself. It’s one of few nationally unifying moments.

A primary source. Uniquely American, that balances gratitude with an impending season of holiday spending.

Now with added marketing experience, it’s like I’ve zoomed out. Taking in ads and commercials in aggregate - not the individual buys. What saturated categories say about our anxieties. What desires are manufactured by different elements of culture.

Look at this year’s Super Bowl and Halftime Show. Remember how many conversations exploded just around the language Bad Bunny performed in? And the commercial right after? Both deliberate choices against our political backdrop.

And yet most of the ads were about AI. To me, that means it’s here to stay.

I can barely watch Hulu without Serena Williams trying to sell me Ro every ad break (literally need to invest in premium for my mental health).

One of our generation’s greatest athletes selling weight loss medication you can buy from your couch. We want to blame the marketing — the messenger — but we’re the ones creating the demand. We’re in the 2000s skinny swing of the pendulum, except the 2026 version comes in a bottle.

That level of saturation is a cultural stance. Something “we’ve” decided is socially acceptable to want. By the time something has marketing, the desire (or fear) already existed in the zeitgeist.

Sorry for saying zeitgeist … sometimes it’s just accurate.

The marketing-ism says you aren’t your customer. To some extent that’s true. But marketing requires the capacity to understand the underlying human emotion that precedes action. To see new signs of old desires, find new technologies serving ancient problems, hear what someone is reaching for before they’ve found the words for it.

Classics taught me that, not a dashboard.

Marketing isn’t exempt from the list of fields begging for a return to a humanities foundation. AI tools can replicate the science of language. I don’t think they can reproduce the art. How to choose words that connect, not just communicate. Rhetorical devices that earn trust on an emotional level. And human instincts to combine it all.

The tools make it easy to build something that looks like a brand. But without the art, the idea gets lost: wrong symbols, wrong connotations, wrong customer at the door.

At its best, marketing is translation.

How a brand shows people it understands what they care about.