The hell of frustrated optimism

Good lord, it's scammy out there. Have you noticed this?

I've been desperately seeking literally any form of income for a few months now, and every day it becomes clearer that this is an activity that involves exhaustively filtering for scams.

I have, several times now, spent fully two hours putting my details into job sites only to discover that I have to pay a subscription fee in order to bid for jobs, or that the reason the listed jobs don't include any kind of wage information is because the company is based somewhere that allows them to pay three dollars an hour.

I've had to sign up for so many different sites – job sites, company sites that don't let you apply without creating an account with them, recruitment companies. Some if not all of these are clearly selling user data to scammers, so I've had a sharp increase in spam emails and phone calls.