This was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed."
It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've lost about 30% of our employees in the last few years). She was pressured to resign after returning from her maternity leave because, as far as I can tell, they figured out they could cut her position and offload the work onto others while she was gone. So she's stayed home to raise our child. I haven't lost my position, but every week brings a new clusterfuck of horrors that I'm running out of ways of coping with.
The problem is, now she's wanting to return to work, and has a job offer, but it's in another state, and it's created a situation where basically I have to give up a job and probably career, or she has to run the risk of her career dying off because of lack of opportunities in the area.
So if I take time off to watch our child while my wife rebuilds her career, and maybe move to a different career myself, somehow I'm penalized? Pardon my language, but fuck that.
I'm also in my early 40s, so there's that.
I'm starting to feel like my life is ending, really, like opportunities are just vanishing left and right. It's odd because up until this point I always felt optimistic, like there was always something out there for us. My wife comes from an elite school, we both graduated with Ph.D.s from a program in the top 5 in our field (according to dubious rankings), if you're into that. I don't mean this narcissistically, but I just feel like there's this huge discrepancy between what I know my wife and I are, in terms of work ethic and competency, and what our opportunities are.