It was the 3rd month of Tanatswa’s unemployment and things weren’t looking up for him. He had surfed the web for companies that would put to use his programming skills, even submitting his CV to businesses that didn’t seem like they would need an IT person, but alas, his efforts were met with no responses and harsh berating from his mother. He had been called lazy even though he dedicated the entire day to emailing more than 300 companies. Things were tough but his parental figure’s scolding didn’t make it easier. Some people got jobs through nepotism, knowing who is who in the market, and the fact that’ that piece of networking advantage was lacking in his arsenal of talents, made him feel seriously fucked.

Even when he did get replies and went for interviews, it almost always seemed as if for some reason, he didn’t meet their requirements. Tanatswa took his time to learn more web development frameworks and useful tools like Angular.js, Bootstrap and even advanced forms of PHP. He believed that he could impress a potential employer if he closed the gap of knowledge he had concerning things he needed to know as a developer. The growth was ever so slightly an improvement that made him more competent and capable of handling much more complex software projects, but alas, even that effort didn’t pay off. This was undoubtedly a dark time for this young man’s life.

During this period of his life, Tanatswa tried to find outlets to make money, even returning to the skill sets he had given up on to pursue his education. Though, if was being completely honest with himself, he had barely made it through university. He graduated with a 3rd class degree and finally cleared his tuition debt. He wasn’t one to keep debts and liked to owe no one anything, but realized that most of the business tycoons he had read about didn’t pay their taxes and owed a lot of money to the government. This made him consider whether or not he felt good about being a debt free person who is also broke and unemployed.

The thought would make him feel like shit and he would avert his mind onto other matters, matters like getting back to drawing his comic and entering it for an online contest or pursuing a youtube channel that never really experienced any growth. Tanatswa had liked art and also partly chose a computer science program because of his interest in game design and the marvelous art that was accompanied with video games. His art skills were rusty but he knew that with a little effort he could get back into it and level up in the skill chain. Apart from farming the coding knowledge on the internet, he would now dedicate his time to improving his gaming skills and killing time with anime youtubers. This was rather a pathetic lifestyle as compared to the expectations that society expected from someone like him.

Tanatswa went through a gradual slump in his life, but was neither an overt trouble maker and got along with most people, exhibiting manners and respect towards people of all walks in life. However, this wasn’t always the case for people who he found annoying or deemed insufferable. The pool of friends that this young man had was small and even he didn’t believe that he had anyone he would classify to be his best friend. Whenever he felt depressed or wanted to have a discussion about a show he liked, he didn’t have anyone to really indulge him in an interesting conversation. Even if he couldn’t do it face to face with someone, the online options weren’t always to his liking. Going on forums or even the discord servers to find someone like minded was as tasking as getting a job.

Sometimes the fun people were there, but their appearance was rare and having to filter through the trolls, memers and the perverts who could not get into intellectual discussions peeved him a lot. He eventually got frustrated and barely used any of those platforms. Facebook, twitter and even Instagram got boring for him. Even youtube slowly began to lose its sparkle. Shows that seemed to have their shine became repetitive and he no longer saw any value in consuming their content. This would propel him to search for other content creators, but when he would find their stuff, after a while he would get bored. The young man felt bewildered by this gradual decline in interest and worried about his mood swings.

After a while, Tanatswa had two websites up, one as a web application and another as just a normal site. He thought that maybe due to a lack of a portfolio that maybe he had been side lined from job opportunities because of that and decided to send a link of his work included to his attached CV. This happened at the same time as he was about to finish drawing his comic which he was going to submit to a contest.

He was thinking that if things were not going to work out on this Japanese site he would take his material to either webtoons or tapastic. He was now in his 5th month of unemployment and he really wanted his efforts to pay off. As he expected, the inclusion of his finished works made a difference and he got called for just 2 interviews. However, this didn’t go as he expected.

At interview number one, the tall 6 feet tall, ebony skinned, skinny Tanatswa, came in to an office that was at the outskirts of town. He was well dressed, and looked super dashing in his light grey suit, beige shirt and black tie, accompanied with crimson shoes. He didn’t have the broad shoulders to finesse his appearance but at least the tailor had made a suit that matched his body type. He walked into the building that looked more like a home that was being repurposed to be a working environment. There the young man went through the process of telling the secretary that he had an appointment with the head of IT there. The woman on the desk who had a nice face but a body that was in desperate need of exercise, made a phone call. Tanatswa waited and darted his eyes everywhere. The place looked kind of interesting and there were a lot of certification frames placed all over the wall and as always, the picture of the president of the country was on the wall.

The place looked homely, but eventually, Tanatswa’s time for his face to face with his potential employer was about to begin. A stocky man who was light skinned, wearing a striped shirt and black trousseaus called for him. Tanatswa followed the man’s lead and meet him in his office. There Tanatswa was grilled about his intentions for working at the company, and the shock of his life came from when he got to see how his 2 websites looked on the man’s device. The employer had a Mac desktop and its screen dimensions were extremely wide and everything he worked looked different on it. Some of the icons were off and looked like shit. Tanatswa opted for the man to check how the website looked on his phone and laptop, lucky for him, the man gave it a shot despite getting an immediate negative impression from the desktop orientation of his websites on his Mac. The websites looked fine on the other devices, but the fact that he had missed one mark had messed his chances. Finally they gave him an aptitude test to see whether or not he could demonstrate real coding capabilities.

Tanatswa was given a website that was done by some company that wanted it revamped, but the source code seemed like an abomination. It was well commented but it was clearly a template that was reworked by some tasteless developer who left a mess. It was chore to go through and even more of a struggle to find all ids and classes used for everything. Going through the mess took a while and soon enough, his time limit was over. The end result was that they would assess his performance and give him a call. A week passed and he never got a call and the other interview he went for turned out to be a disaster. This was only the beginning to a perpetual list of misfortunes.

After Tanatswa had submitted his comic and got his results after 2 months of waiting, he had mixed feelings about the results. The judges essentially stated that he had the best story out of all the contests but his art was in the lower bracket of their score. Due to this uneven scoring, he didn’t place really high in the ranking but he got an honourable mention. This was the first time he was acknowledged for his talents by an organisation and he felt a bit happy, but this wasn’t really the result he desired. If he had won, he would have claimed the prize money and moved out to pursue his comic as a published author serializing in their magazine, but even if that did not happen, at least he got consolation that he had writing talent.

Tanatswa began to dabble into art tutorials online at the same time doing chores for his mom, who seemed to only escalate he indignation towards the unemployed youth. Tanatswa’s goals had shifted and he now wanted to become a comic artist instead of dedicating his time towards finding employment where employers didn’t seem to want him. This change in what he wanted to pursue fuelled him with fire and he practiced stuff like foreshortening, figure drawing and complex angles of dynamic poses. Sometimes the drawings would come out well, but for the most part it was a struggle. Tanatswa began to wonder whether or not he would ever get as good as the artists he idolized and wondered whether or not he should team up with someone really talented to draw in his stead, however, the young man wanted to make this happen through his own merit. He finally entered another contest but this time, he was unlucky.

With the popularity of the prior contest a behemoth of pro artists were attracted to the upcoming one and entered it. His art had improved and his story was plausible but compared to the elite talent that had joined in, his work paled in comparison. Deep down inside he envied them and wished these pro god tier artists would have entered something else so that the rookies could get a chance to shine, but nevertheless, his final chance was taken from him and he was left depressed. Tanatswa thought about the webtoon and tapastic options but the only way to make it on their platforms was to have a consistent release schedule of work and also to become a featured artist on their platform.

Featured artists would get paid plus with the promotion from their site, a creator could leverage the traffic drawn to them by opting for a patreon, but it took him forever to get even one issue out and his mother seemed tired of supporting a bum like him. Thus he would have to be sent to the village and subsist on farm life or live with his poor uncle in the worst possible part of the country. The gamble had not paid off and he was unemployed, a failed comic artist and a failed developer. Eventually, drawing itself became a painful experience. The young man turned to porn, masturbating 3 or even 5 times a day, sometimes he would go on those dating websites which he knew were a waste of time because 95% of the user base were men and the supposed sexy women who wanted to get laid were actually bots posing as actual people. This morbid catharsis made him laugh inside but also made him feel like shit. He was 23 years old and feeling like a loser, but he always made a point of hiding that side of him.

Tanatswa never liked wallowing in misery and showing the world that he is sad. Whenever he had the chance, he would always dress up and get fancy hair cuts that made him look cool and dashing, hiding his broke appearance, but that was it, it was all just an appearance. He pretended to be okay, dressed up nice and faked a smile, but was really dealing with depression. He reflected on his life and even began to associate his lack of success as to why he never really had luck with women. He had never gotten laid and he was already 23 years old. The closest thing to anything sexual he had gotten were lap dances and really arousing grinding from women who probably had to sit on top of at least 40 random crotches of men in a night. This was mainly a means to deal with his sexual frustration, but at those clubs that he did go to, even married men or guys who had girlfriends would get lap dances, grabbing women’s asses and doing unholy things with them that they wouldn’t even consider with their significant other.

Tanatswa believed that he wouldn’t have had to come to such a place if he had a girlfriend and probably wouldn’t even do it for fear of being unfaithful, but seeing all the alpha males getting lap dances, fucking side hoes at the same time having a girlfriend or wife, gave him a slight paradigm shift. Being a decent human being didn’t matter; all he needed was power, fortune and luck! It became clear to him that he was competing in this world at a handicap and needed a boost. However nothing relieved him from his suffering.

A full year had passed and he was now destined to continue his existence at either his uncle’s decrepit living hell hole or at the village to become a farm boy. Tanatswa no longer enjoyed drawing, programming, watching television or even waking up. He got interested for a while in music production, exhausting more than a 100 tutorials and even made a few decent bangers, but then after some research he realized how cut throat it would be for him to even make it in that scene. At that point he was just throwing darts into the air and hoping that something would just stick.

He was wasting time, caught in morbid thoughts and drowning himself in some doom and funeral metal to wallow in his misery. The music gig didn’t work out, even the acting gig he tried bombed badly. Everything seemed hard and all he was good at was failing. Tanatswa sat on his bed and cursed, “Fuck the world, fuck it, fuck it all!” He looked at the ceiling and darted to the left side of his bed which had a pile of tissues that were covered in the semen of his 6 masturbation sessions. It dawned at him that he was nothing but a piece of shit human being and that he wanted to die. After all he had done throughout his life he had decided that there was one thing he had to succeed at doing. Ending his life!