That's silly. Facts are real regardless of whether the person speaking them has experienced them firsthand or merely learned them. And anecdotes should not be taken wholesale as shining examples of how things really are for the general population or sub-population being discussed.

If you heard that certain job fields were not hiring would you refuse to believe it until you heard it from someone who applied for those sorts of jobs? Would you take the time to peruse his/her resume or hear his job history to try and determine if he/she was actually qualified for the positions they applied for after listening to their despair narrative or would you simply trust them, because they had experienced it firsthand? Would articles about how those fields are not hiring be dismissed as "not coming from sufferers"?

Sure, first-hand experience can provide a perspective, and even a valuable one in the right circumstances. But it's not the only way to acquire information and facts, or to justify them. Sometimes anecdotes are completely off-base. I got hired two months after stopping college, with no degree, making over 30k a year, in a field in which I had no experience and which was not related to my degree, at the age of 20, in the freaking summer of 2010, in the United States. For reference, the unemployment rate across the nation was 9.5% that summer. Does my experience (while certainly not a 'despair narrative') corroborate with any facts of the job market at the time for the standard American? No, not at all. Likewise, one person's "despair narrative" may be completely skewed from the norm, or skewed by their perspective.

Moreover, I don't feel the need to shore up my belief that some things are awful/worthy of despair by waving around my personal experience of them, nor should I.