As I tell my more consistently employed friends: many of you simply aren’t man enough for a real stint of unemployment. Of course, it looks easy on paper. Drag yourself out of bed at 11, sit in your pajamas until three, vaguely send off a few job applications, and then play Paradox strategy games until the small hours, before doing it all again the next day.

Yet those inexperienced in idleness cannot appreciate the suffocating anomie of such a life. Indeed, it’s a pain that regularly fells the retired before dust has had time to gather on their last employer’s parting gift. Most people simply haven’t built the survival skills necessary to exist without a boss’s nag.

As a man of some independent means and a veteran of sporadic unemployment, I can weather such hardships. It is the amateurs I worry for

It is troubling then that the Office for National Statistics have announced that joblessness climbed to 5.2 per cent in the three months to December. The minimum wage hike, raised National Insurance contributions and a stuttering global economy are all to blame for the increasing necessity of Tebbit’s proverbial bike.

After almost two years, it also means Labour’s signal achievement in office has been to drive up worklessness from a rate of 4.1 per cent in July 2024. Perhaps it’s therefore appropriate that Keir Starmer himself will likely be exploring new opportunities before the year is out – not that barristers are ever short of work.

A few caveats apply. The Newport number crunchers have a habit of making up numbers only to revise them a few months later, the ONS having been reprimanded by an official audit last year for its shoddy counting. The Bank of England is particularly critical of its jobs market data.

Compared to historic unemployment, the 5.2 per cent rate isn’t even that bad, being roughly in line with the New Labour boom years. It is also only a little over the standard definition of full employment, with anything below 5 per cent unemployment conventionally considered good enough to keep inflation down and give people room to switch jobs.

And yet another comparison should worry us more: these figures are the first time that we’ve matched the depths of Covid, where a quarter of the country went on furlough and most employers froze hiring. Speaking from personal experience, the summer of 2020 was the only time I’ve found it harder to get work than in the past year.

Back then the plague at least provided an excuse. And even then, by the end of the year the job offers were rolling back in, including from one old fool who wanted me to come into the office five days a week just as the country was going back into lockdown. When I turned this down, something came up only a month or so later.

Not so now. My personal circumstances have changed, with two nippers in the house and a rather patchy period of freelance work that not all employers find enticing. Finding full-time work has eluded me for the first time in my professional life. And having checked with others in a similar position, it seems like my experience is not unusual.

In journalism and publishing, LinkedIn is wolfing down an increasing share of job listings at the expense of more specialist boards. This perhaps would be no great problem, but the quality of many of the listings is dubious, some being scraped from other sources with little in the way of vetting.

My prospective employers have also lately grown fond of screening calls, something I’ve rarely encountered in previous years. You can understand it from headhunters, who want to justify their invoice and gossip about old employers. But when somebody from internal HR calls to ask you questions you’ve already answered in your CV and cover letter, there’s a distinct impression HR is making work for itself.

If such screening is justified, it can only be because ChatGPT and other large language models have enabled spam on a volume never before seen in the history of Silicon Valley misadventures. While the cover letters such software can produce are never amazing, they are at least plausible enough to send in without completely disgracing yourself, much to the disadvantage of those of us who can actually write, and by extension think.

AI’s other gift to the dole queue has been to provide convenient cover to senior management’s favourite activity of burdening the remaining mules with extra work. With the pressure on to cut staffing overheads, and the tech salesmen gibbering even more feverishly than usual, one can understand the strategy, which will occasionally even work.

As a man of some independent means and a veteran of sporadic unemployment, I can weather such hardships. It is the amateurs I worry for, both those who have never faced redundancy and the graduates looking for their first opportunity to pay back the crushing student debt acquired over three years of hard drinking and shagging. The market for grand strategy simulations has scarcely looked so fertile.