My partner also has good qualifications and skills has been out of full time work for bordering on 2 years now. Similarly she has become depressed / nihilistic about the job market after hundreds and hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews (and this was after a job she had to resign from after only a couple of months due to the company being incredibly incompetent). She has multiple part time gigs now to stem the bleeding, but it's wild and crazy how bad the job market is in places, and how much the older generations seem to generally just not care.