I'm sure a lot of this has to do with who you know as well. Someone further down asked if it "feels" like unemployment is really 3.7%, which seems like a silly question in a lot of ways. How something feels to you is not representative of an entire country. Personally, it "feels" like 0% unemployment to me because nobody I keep in regular contact with is unemployed, my family is mostly in skilled trades and business is booming, and my younger nieces/nephews who recently graduated college all found jobs pretty much instantly, higher paying than I'd have expected, with random ass humanities degrees and no special skills. My own company is still growing and hiring, though our parent company had layoffs. I don't know any of those people, though.

But if your entire peer group is senior engineers expecting $500k salaries who worked for web companies that overhired during Covid and live in places where a family-sized house goes for at least $2 million, it probably feels more dire. Probably similar for media companies given the streaming wars are ending and they have to operate like real businesses now and actually make money. All the creatives I know have been struggling their entire lives, though, so that is nothing new.