About Unemployment
It has been ten months and ten days since I was laid off from Eater.
During that time I have applied for more jobs than I can remember; gotten a grand total of two actual interviews and one (unpaid) edit test that took me three days to complete; been ghosted by a prominent editor with whom I'd not only worked but also performed karaoke; completed one novel and neared completion on a second's second draft; studied French; volunteered weekly; written this newsletter; published a few stories; helped start a new food publication; biked many, many miles; mostly stopped eating out; and thought a lot about the nature of professional limbo.
I named this newsletter partially as a nod to my personal purgatory. Because after the shock of unemployment abated, it was replaced by overwhelming ennui. I wasn't bored with life, quite the opposite. But the idea of attempting to re-enter the workforce made me want to lie down and stay there. This had less to do with the fact that I've been working since I was 15 and more to do with the job market, or lack thereof. I'd always been lucky, someone who landed on her feet more often than not, and I was privileged enough to be able to quit bad bosses without worrying too much about what came next. There was always a job or connection or freelance project to carry me through.
But now there is...what? The media's industry's smoldering husk. LinkedIn posts that inform you that over 100 people have already applied to a position posted three hours ago, AI bots that trawl your resume for keywords that may qualify you for an interview (possibly with another AI bot) but will more likely decide you have nothing to offer and spit out, some weeks or months after the fact, a rote rejection letter that you will deem a step up from the usual radio silence that greets your job applications.
And the thing is, as those "100 people have already applied" annotations imply, there is so much company in purgatory. Getting laid off is apparently what hot girls do these days, the trend everyone's trying, so popular it's become decidedly mid, the sriracha of the downwardly mobile. So, as with most trends, I ask myself what it means when everybody's doing it, or expecting to do it before long. It's awful, but also unremarkable, and because it's unremarkable its awfulness becomes less awful and more "that's just how it is," like an open sore whose discharge has ceased to cause much alarm.
When I was growing up, my idea of unemployment was Detroit auto workers on strike or miserable people in a Ken Loach movie. It was Dickens and Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan telling tall tales about so-called welfare queens. Now it just looks like a bunch of people sitting at their laptops, possibly not wearing pants, wondering if now is the time to go back to school or become a life coach.
People like me, which has made me wonder if who I am now is different from who I was when I had a job. I think my ennui comes from the idea of trying to once again derive so much of my identity and worth from gainful employment. I want better than that, for myself and all of us. That's probably too much to ask from capitalism, but since I'm unemployed, I have plenty of time to dream.
What I'm consuming this week:
Reading: Finally starting Douglas Stuart's John of John and cannot wait to dig in.
Watching: Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's 2005 movie that wasn't released until 2011 because of editing conflicts with the studio, and it really is a (very long) masterpiece.
Listening: Fleetwood Mac, "Seven Wonders."
