As someone who just graduated college, I have spent the last year learning what lots of people on here probably already know: if you can't get a job/education lined up, society (especially in the US) will do everything it can to make you feel like a pathetic failure. I applied for PhD positions and got in nowhere because academia in the US is unbelievably cooked (a whole other rant). Anecdotal evidence says that schools were accepting literally ~5 people out of an applicant pool of ~300 because of funding cuts, and the situation before funding cuts wasn't much better. But anyways, not getting into a PhD position is very far from the end of the world; I can just take a gap year and reapply.
However, I feel like my experience and the experiences of those around me (both of rejection and success) have really reinforced just how "connections" seem to be damn near the only thing that can get you a position at this point. I already knew how important connections were in the job search; I've heard all the sayings like "your network is your net worth" and "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know." That shit sucks. But I naïvely thought that somehow academics would be more insulated from this type of stuff. I knew that PhD applications were personal affairs on some level; you're applying to work with someone more than you're applying to a school as a whole. But people around me would talk about how they would talk to potential advisors at conferences and get lunch with their current research advisors. It felt like there was a social aspect to being in academia that I didn't know you had to participate in and that I just kinda didn't grasp. I like my advisors, but I usually kept my relationship with them to research and I have no idea how I'm supposed to get to know them better so they can write better rec letters for me and blah blah blah. I don't know if I'm over-analyzing my rejections (given that acceptance rates are literally 2%) but it feels like the fact that I didn't go out of my way to "network" hurt my chances. Anyways I now get another chance to apply to either an absolutely cooked higher education system or an absolutely cooked job market 
tl;dr: complaining about how I graduated college and didn't get into any PhD programs and do not have a job rn and I think the fact that I have a hard time "making connections" and "networking" probably hurt my chances
By no means am I enjoying the process of trying to uproot everything to go anywhere with anybody to pursue this passion I have for a career. But networking is my favorite part of the process. I say it as someone who drags their feet and pleads to God for a sore throat so I don't have to drive an hour each way to grip and grin.
But holy shit my family and friends are anti-intellectual and couldn't give two shits. I'll never meet PhD candidates unless it's at a networking event. But once I'm there I get catered food, people are dressed nicely, they're open to connecting, they want to share cool things they're doing, and they want to be helpful to others generally & professionally.
Yeah, I have to talk about what I do and what my focus is >100 times, ask for their L*nkedIn 100+ times, and sometimes their ideas are shallow, but that's showbiz, baby.
When someone IRL wants to talk about this thing that I identify with in a way that could make money+serve a niche+not drown oneself in work it's an exciting prospect. If I have a problem (finding it hard to get accepted into a PhD program?) I have a group of people with their "this is how I solved that"s and "this is what I would have done"s and "I had a similar problem"s.
When I went to a government hiring event and I sat around waiting for batches of people to go through into a classroom to listen to a regional manager give the same speech over and over regarding information you could generally summarize in a pamphlet it was so miserable in comparison. Maybe Marx is disappointed in me but I'd much rather network into something than be algorithmically assigned into a cubicle. Their optimism is infectious to me.