The day the room went quiet. January 2025. Twenty years in product and AI behind me. A Teams call ended a chapter, and I closed my laptop thinking the next one would open easy. It did not. Five hundred applications. One discovery. I treated the job hunt like a job. Coffee at sunrise. Ambient music in the basement. A window full of trees and a list of openings that never seemed to end. By application five hundred, I had learned something nobody warns you about. Rejection is no