Robert Allam, 32, ended up in the UK after a childhood spent between Lebanon and Greece. Allam first came to London in 2006 for university, and earned a masters degree in landscape architecture from the University of East London. But although he had come to London specifically for better job prospects, he didn’t find work. Graduating deep in the trenches of global recession meant that jobs were scarce – including within his field.

The global financial crisis of 2008 hit millennials the hardest. Newly minted university graduates entered a workforce in which an additional 30 million workers became unemployed between 2007 and 2010. Forty-three percent of new graduates in the US took jobs that did not require a university degree. Millennials went on to spend the next 10 years trying to make up for lost time against the backdrop of financial austerity and a “jobless recovery”. Of the 43% of underemployed millennials, 29% of them remained underemployed five years on – after a decade, that percentage has only dropped by nine points.

While searching for work after graduation in 2013, Allam began posting to Reddit under the username ‘Gallowboob’. Reddit, which is now the 18th most popular website worldwide, became a hub for disenfranchised and underemployed millennials to voice their frustrations, based partly on the generation’s ability to harness its power of communication.

Gallowboob became – and remains – one of Reddit’s most famous and prolific posters. He created content that went viral almost instantly, having a post on Reddit’s front page on a near-daily basis. Five years later, Allam has built on his Reddit successes and now makes his living as digital company Supload’s chief marketing officer and BoredPanda’s content manager.