Are We Becoming Unemployable?

The headlines have been warning us for a while now: AI is coming for the jobs, nobody is safe.

Lately, most of us have actually felt ‘it’s happening’. Meta cut 8,000 employees. Cisco cut another 4,000 the same week. Goldman Sachs has over 16,000 AI-attributed layoffs a month averaged in 2026, and it’s only June. For some time now, Reddit and TikTok have been full of firsthand reports from people who just can’t get hired no matter what. Now it’s highly skilled professionals who spent decades building their careers, getting cut by the thousands.

So, are we becoming unemployable?

That’s one way to read it. Here’s another.

In one single month this year, 540,000 Americans filed to start a business, matching last year’s record while hiring fell to its lowest since 2009. Gen Z out-founded the Boomers for the first time. Post-layoff venture creation, up 67%.

We don’t hear all of that, because the media doesn’t always aim to reflect reality. It actively constructs fear-induced narratives, because that drives clicks and opens more than success stories. You’ve probably opened this email for the exact same reason. But since I have your attention now, I want to focus on the alternative.

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I’ve spent a year inside this AI transformation. On the road. 45 flights in three months at one point. Broke me a little, but I loved it.

Trade shows, accelerators, one-to-ones, consulting calls with companies I never expected to be inside the rooms of. And in every one of those rooms, the same thing.

People who were smart, capable, often brilliant. People with visions worth backing. People who couldn’t tell you what they were selling. Or why anyone should care. Or how to hold the idea long enough for it to pay them.

My brother is the cleanest example. Extremely smart, highly ADHD, lights up the second he catches an idea. He spent two weeks with ChatGPT building investor decks, technical specs, marketing plans, and the full machinery of a company that didn’t exist yet. At the end he asked for a marketing pack he could send to people.

It gave him back a Word document with two sentences in it.

That one hiccup was enough for him to stop building. He felt helpless. A business that could have existed in the world did not, because the AI failed him at a crucial moment and there was nobody around him with the structure, the people, or the accountability to help him keep going.

I understood I’d been writing about sales for a year as part of The Relationship Of Sales and I realised this is the wrong end of the problem. The people I were meeting could sell, or learn to. Sales is what closes the deal. What lets the deal exist in the first place is something further back. It’s the decision to take your own idea seriously. The conviction that you’re allowed to.

So I’m rebranding. Different name. A community instead of a newsletter. Same Pat writing it but Introducing a very special friend as my Co-Founder, Fausta.

Fausta and I sat down in a coffee shop couple of months ago to find the new name. She’s the brand strategist who built Relationship of Sales with me, and the only person I’d trust with this kind of move.

I started by digging into what I actually believed in. What moved me. What I’d choose, if I were choosing and I kept landing on one question: why.

Why work nine to five, five days a week, on a schedule someone invented a hundred years ago. Why start at nine when I’m sharper at eleven. Why ask permission to live the way I want to live.

I wanted to call the company WhyTho. It made perfect sense in my head and zero sense to anyone I tested it on.

Nothing better than testing the name on your closest friends and family and nobody getting it. Maybe a different brand, but I will always wonder ytho?

A few days later we tried again. Different coffee shop, same question. And this time I found myself going further back. Before Relationship of Sales. Before the sales coaching, the consulting. To something that happened to me 16 years ago that I hadn’t thought about properly ever since.

I’d just come out of a professional football career. Fell into it at 16, fell out at 24 (If you want to know why someone would walk away from professional football, this can help), I walked into a job interview not really knowing how to do anything else. The hiring manager looked at me kindly and said:

“Patrick, you’d be great at this. Unfortunately, you’re unemployable. You’d come in here trying to fix things, change the process, tell us how to do our jobs. We don’t need that. We just need someone to take orders.”

I took it as a huge blow. Walked out of there thinking: what’s wrong with me. I was perfect for that job. After, I’ve spent the next two decades proving him right.

It turns out I don’t take orders well. I never have. The ‘flaw’ he named in me was the only thing that ever produced anything I’m proud of. The instinct to question. To fix. To refuse to accept that the way it’s always been done is the way it has to be done now.

And I’d been seeing the same instinct, all year, in the rooms I’d been training in. The founder who’d rather earn nothing than draw a salary from someone else. The graduate locked out as AI closes the entry-level door behind them. The person three years past their use-by date in a role they outgrew. The business owner watching the world shift under them. Different people. Different stages. The same instinct underneath. None of them with a name for it.

So the word from sixteen years ago came back.

Unemployable.

I realised that what had once been a verdict had become the badge I’m proud to wear.

Fausta, who you haven’t met yet, takes it from here. We’ve known each other for ten years; she came to work at my agency a decade ago at just 20 years old, and never quite left my life. We also, somehow, share a birthday on February 4th. She’s the only person I’d be building this with. She’s also about to tell you in upcoming paragraphs that I’m completely wrong about how the name happened.

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He’s wrong about the name. Not about the word. About how it arrived.

On the morning of April 2nd, after Whytho was put gently to death by his family group chat, I sent him a WhatsApp with seventeen names. Good Riot. Human Not Resource. Wrong Turn Right. Free Range. Too Alive. Future Proof. Near the bottom of the list, with a small parenthetical I almost cut: “Unemployable (ironic, employed by yourself).”

His reply came seventeen minutes later: “I really like: Unemployable.”

I tell you this not to claim credit. The small disagreement you have just watched is the whole premise of the company we are building. The word was always his. Making it the name was mine. Both stories are true and both are necessary to see the whole picture.

Pat has given you the kind version of me. The longer one is a disillusioned creative who almost went off-grid to sit the next decade out.

I’d spent ten years doing what I was supposed to. A political science degree with internationally published research. A design career that took me from self-taught to head art director.

Conviction, mostly. None of it had prepared me for what was actually coming. In 2023 I left agency life because I could no longer find a single drop of purpose in pretending to care about brands their own owners didn’t believe in.

Then AI arrived, and the work got faster, hungrier, more synthetic. More output. Less meaning. It felt like sitting in an autonomous car driving full-speed into a brick wall and I was even too tired to flinch.

I wanted out. Not only out of agency life, but the whole business world. No plan, just away from the pointlessness of working with people who, instead of changing the system they were stuck inside, were spending their lives trying to become more like the people who owned it. So I went offline for two years to recover from a classic agency burnout, and was already signing my fairyland-with-no-plan-for-monetisation escape contract, no exit clause.

So when Pat first brought me this, I said no. I said no for months.

What changed my mind was the realisation that I was not the only one. Friends of mine, so talented and often overqualified were watching the door close on them. Degrees and decades of experience no longer enough to buy a job, let alone a life. The exact thing the system had promised in exchange for compliance was the thing it could no longer give.

There has never been more opportunity. There has never been less control, stability, certainty.

Pat and I have decided we are going to be disgustingly delusional about the future. Not optimistic, because that’s only a posture. Delusional. The kind where you build the thing as if it is already working and you let reality catch up. We have come to think this is the only sane response to a timeline like this one.

What we are building is called Unemployable*. Three things in one place. Practical training to take an idea from your head into the world. A network of people doing the same, so you stop trying to do it alone. A culture, ours and yours, that takes your work seriously before anyone else does.

The shorter version of what we are doing, is changing what the word means. “No one will hire me” is what the system says about you. “No one could” is what you say back. We are betting the second one is the future.

The bet is bigger than Pat and I. The bet is a world where building work that’s truly your own stops being the brave exceptional path and becomes the normal one. Where unemployable stops being something done to people and starts being something they choose, en masse.

Individual agency and collective action are not two strategies. They are one, working at different scales. One person refusing to live the way they were handed is a small rebellion. A thousand of us refusing it at once is the system bending.

That is the work – helping people turn ambitions into real opportunities, inside a community of unemployables doing the same. Not alone, not against each other. But together, creating never seen before alternatives and making the competition irrelevant.

If “unemployable” sounded like a threat when this email arrived in your inbox, you are who we are building for. The first 500 people through the door are free for life. Not as marketing. As thanks for showing up before there was proof.

Just hit reply and share your story if you want to be part of the community and we will be live soon 🙌