Why people are dropping out of the workforce and not looking for new jobs: 'The market wore me down' — SkimNews
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- Dan Coda, a 40-year-old from Durham, North Carolina, logged more than 300 hours and applied to dozens of jobs over six months before stopping his search in June, telling CNBC Make It: 'The market wore me down.'
- January layoffs hit their highest level since 2009 during the Great Recession, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, flooding the candidate pool with displaced workers, per Coda.
- June 2025 recorded the largest one-month drop in prime-age labor force participation (ages 25-54) since June 1976, excluding the pandemic, with roughly 720,000 people stopping work or looking for work between May and June, per the St. Louis Fed.
- Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said the majority of those leaving are ages 25-34, and more than 1.9 million Americans — about 1 in 4 unemployed — were jobless for longer than six months in June.
- Haina, a 33-year-old marketing analyst from Inner Mongolia on an H-1B visa, abandoned her U.S. job hunt in May and returned home after visa-transfer complications strained her mental health.
- Celine Wang, 26, enrolled in a New York City dental hygiene program in May after eight rounds of interviews failed to land her a design job, betting healthcare's relative stability will pay off.
- About half of active U.S. job seekers say the search negatively impacts their mental health, according to an April Resume Genius survey of 1,000 respondents.
Why it matters: The 720,000-person drop in prime-age participation between May and June is the largest single-month decline outside of COVID since the 1970s, and economists warn a low-hire, low-fire labor market could push even more workers out permanently — undermining their long-term career earnings and retirement savings at a moment when rising costs make extended breaks untenable for most families.
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