> competition for employment has gotten so cut-throat that when you spend time not being productive, not learning, not building your network, not adding to your resume, you can be assured that your competition (people wanting your job or the job you also want) ARE doing these things
That is not a life I want to live in the slightest. I mean it: I'd rather kill myself than live that kind of life. I only work so I can fund my personal life. No personal life, no reason to work.
I'm just an inherently noncompetitive person, and I'm not career-minded in the least.
I've been like that my whole life. When I was in high school, people told me I had to take a ton of AP classes and do a ton of extracurriculars if I wanted to get into a good college. I refused. I took a tiny handful of honors classes -- just the ones that interested me, I coasted through all my regular classes and made more As than not with minimal effort, and I was involved in exactly one club which had very little time commitment. In the yearbook, all the other seniors had this long list of clubs below their pictures, my entry looked almost empty because I had exactly one. After high school, I went to a state university, got my CS degree, and got a job out of college at a fairly conservative B2B company.
TBH, even though I'm lesbian, solidly aromantic, and an extreme introvert, I wish I was straight and able to tolerate living with other people so I could eventually marry a man and spend the rest of my life as a housewife. I'm like the total opposite of career-minded.
But, really, I think you're overstating it. There's a certain segment of the industry that's really competitive, and the rest of the industry isn't like that. Yeah, sure, you need an impressive resume to get into the Big Four or to join some Silicon Valley startup that's pioneering emerging technologies and has dreams of changing the world. But for every company in that mold, there are dozen conservative, enterprisey corporations with headquarters in "flyover country" (I hate that term) that just want interchangeable fleshy cogs to maintain 20-year-old legacy software or a colossal J2EE stack filled with FactoryFactories and the most enterprisey enterprise piles of code you can imagine (or both, with a legacy backend and a J2EE portal). And a decent chunk of them aren't tech companies but are banks, healthcare companies, local governments, etc. You're not going to find them automating software engineering with AI; the managers probably think AI doesn't exist outside of Terminator.