I feel like I've heard probably you and definitely other people call this the the

YOLO economy. You only live once that life is too short to do jobs that make you miserable

and it's interesting to see that play out now.

Exactly. I've been referring to it as YOLO on steroids. Obviously people knew this basic

mantra before, but the pandemic, the trauma of all of this has just reinforced it for a

lot of people. And that's why not only are we seeing record numbers of job openings, but

this data showing us that nearly a record again in July, it was only topped in April of people quitting

their jobs. So even people who have employment are really rethinking, is this the place I want to be?

From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.

I'm Martin Powers. It's Thursday, September 9th. Today we're talking about how the pandemic has

fundamentally changed so much about work and the economy around the world and here in the US.

One sign of that is this weird paradox that there are so many unemployed Americans right now

and so many job openings. So theoretically, those unemployed people should be filling those jobs,

but they're not. They're basically 80 unemployed people for every 100 jobs or 1.25 job openings

for every unemployed American. That's Heather Long, economics correspondent for the post.

And she says that this mismatch is probably going to continue for a while, even after millions of

people lost unemployment benefits this past weekend. Both workers and workplaces are reassessing

everything right now. We're in this really weird scenario where the Delta variant recently is

causing a lot of havoc for many people. It made a lot of people hesitant to travel, hesitant to

go back to the office. A lot of companies had pushed back the deed, including the Washington Post

when they're mandating that employees return to work. But even beyond those COVID impacts, which we

know still exist, my team and I as we dug into the details, we found a couple of things that I would

...