Check out this frightening chart from an article in today’s “New York Times”.

If that’s you, you’re scared for a good reason – these numbers are real, the pain is real and the fight for your very existence is at Defcon 2.

But that’s this week.

My partner and I are forming a company whose mission will be to make you one of the lucky ones.

Yes, if you are above 40, you are discriminated against in the workplace. We are discriminated in a way that’s so transparent and obvious it would be comical if it wasn’t so terribly real.

They will have you believe no one wants us. They will have us believe we’re destined to watch from the sidelines for the rest of our lives. They will have us believe our only courses of action are to be a greeter at a big box store or bag groceries.

They will have us believe the machines have made us permanently non-essential.

Let’s not forget Millennials, who experience identical discrimination and identical emotional exhaustion when they experience long bouts of joblessness, saddled with college loans and seemingly zero prospects. The young and the old have much in common.

We agree that the outlook is daunting. But too many of us are expending tremendous amounts of emotional currency chasing a goal with all the wrong tools in the toolbox. We’re networking, we’re polishing the resume, we’re applying here and there and we wonder – why isn’t it happening for me?

Our company is going to show you how to find the way back. We will make no universal promises – the cruel hustlers who promise to pave a path to riches at a hotel ballroom seminar are the world’s worst people. The person they are most interested in helping is themselves.

We believe we have found a way to distill relevant, powerful information about careers that will be incredibly useful to a certain type of person: the one who wants it a bit more than the next guy. I can’t and will never describe our service as “self-help”, though its core is obviously that. Telling you how to stroll in the back door of a start-up with your awesome idea is a little different that telling you how to align your auras to sync with a parallel universe. This is about getting a damn job.

Our government, our society and culture will have to evolve to help the ordinary survive as the machines continue to replace us. But we will be able to help some co-exist with them and even thrive in their presence.

We’ll launch an app and a website to start. We will start small and we will grow with you.

But I guarantee this; if you want it a bit more than the next guy, we’ve got your back.

An announcement is coming within a month.

John Scott is the Career Services Manager and an instructor at the School of Multimedia Communications, Academy of Art University, San Francisco. His latest book “You. Employed: why winners get jobs” is in the Amazon book store. 

    @johnscottsf