There's a very good way of gauging how much of a dystopian shithole our world has become, and that's by simply watching quiz shows on daytime TV.
Compare Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to The Chase. In its original run, WWTBAM had two milestones for answering 5 (£1,000) and 10 (£32,000) questions correct respectively. This meant that failing after one of these checkpoints guaranteed you that prize. The Chase on the other hand is a series of quick-fire pub quiz rounds with some notoriously difficult questions where you're up against a professional quizzer and have to survive multiple rounds, before all the remaining contestants have to beat the 'Chaser' in a two-minute quick-fire round of pub quiz questions. Fail at any point? "You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!"
The Chase is legitimately a much harder show where it is exponentially harder to actually win a cash prize as a contestant and that is one of the main reasons I fucking hate that show.
Where am I going with this? With the way the economy, automation, AI, scarcity, human population growth, etc is going, we are one day going to reach a point where we'll have to compete in game shows just to get a fucking job! If recruiters are making you record 2 to 5 minute video responses on a fucking job application, then we're already part-way there.
I had the same thought when I was watching "Alone". They pay them about 1000 bucks a week to document themselves struggling to live in the woods. Some of them are pulled out for medical reasons, some quit. But for some, this is probably the only way they can afford a vacation.
There was a game show in Russia in 2000s where high schoolers had to answer ridiculously hard questions about Ancient Greece in order to enroll into MGIMO, a prestigious state university of foreign affairs, which was near-impossible to enroll in any other way (e.g. entrance exams) if you weren't a child of a top-level government official.
The contestants had to sit as the audience first and answer some pop-up questions before even having a chance to actually participate in the game show, and then win in a series of games (like quarter-finals, semifinals, finals...)
It really does look like modern job application process where you have to participate in a series of never-ending interviews and test tasks