From Saving the World to Saving for Ramen: JadedAid DOGE Edition

Bring hilarious laughter to your next happy hour with new JadedAid Cards: DOGE Edition

Welcome to 2025, where DOGE spent the weekend feeding your graduate degree in international development to the wood chipper!

If you're reading this while updating your LinkedIn profile for the fourth time this month, you're not alone. We're all here together, watching DOGE eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse by ending pretty much every program that ever made a difference.

The New Humanitarian Hell

Foreign assistance was started to feed white people's unquenchable thirst for feeling good about themselves, and now that the political winds have shifted, we're all discovering the poor life choices that got us here.

The job market is our own special kind of hell.

The application process has become performance art. You spend hours crafting cover letters explaining how your two years coordinating refugee camp logistics qualifies you to... manage social media for a wellness startup in Brooklyn.

How do you explain to HR departments that USAID is not a dating app?

Our biggest accomplishment this week was mastering the mute button during another Zoom interview that went nowhere. Yet, we're competing against 1,000 other job seekers, while organizations hold motivational meetings about mass layoffs.

Networking events are their own special torture.

Picture this: high net-worth individuals talking about food secuity over caviar and fine wine. Or telling you about a private sector approach with a bar tab that is bigger than your last project's budget - and your actual grocery budget this month.

Survival Mode Economics

Let's talk money. You're now in that sweet spot where you're too qualified for most jobs but too broke to be picky. Making minimum wage as a consultant after you take out taxes and basic medical care starts looking appealing when the alternative is living on take out and broken dreams.

The gig economy beckons with all the enthusiasm of a sinking boat full of brown people – technically an option, but not exactly inspiring.

You find yourself considering opportunities you would have laughed at six months ago, like volunteering for a research project to find evidence that evidence-based research for policy makers is used by policy makers to make evidence-based policy.

The Solidarity Solution

Here's what we're not going to do: pretend this is temporary or that "everything happens for a reason." The humanitarian sector is experiencing its own climate change, and we're the penguins.

What we are going to do is find each other. Connect with fellow displaced do-gooders who understand that actually giving a [bleep!] about the world's problems shouldn't be a luxury reserved for trust fund kids.

Some of us will pivot to private sector jobs where we can afford rent. Others will ride this out until the political pendulum swings back. Many of us will discover that the demise of foreign assistance can only be prevented by getting creative about what "humanitarian work" looks like in 2025.

Your Survival Kit

The reality is that laughing about our collective predicament might be the most radical thing we can do right now. Sometimes the best coping mechanism is finding humor in the difference between your dreams and cold, hard reality.

Gather your fellow jaded humanitarians for a game night group therapy. Because if we're going to process the absurdity of our current situation, we might as well do it with friends who survived Ebola juices only to have their job cut by DOGE.

Submit your new card ideas too! We’ll publish an update soon. We're (re)building our community spirit one dark joke at a time.