On finding, getting, and living good work: Part 4
So, we started this conversation about work over here. I’ve talked about why the public job market is irrelevant, and why finding work is all about who you know.
This next part of the conversation is far more philosophical, and admittedly more painful. In my initial post I made the following statement:
In the US, people are defined and often valued by the work they do. The first question we tend to ask in social settings is, “What do you do?” So without work, many people feel unconfident, lost, and useless to society. Add to that factors like low living wage and the consistent rejection throughout the job search and we’re well set up to resent the work we have to do to get a job, take longer to mentally and emotionally recover from unemployment, and generally do less.
This statement hits the way we as a society — at least, as Americans — view work, employment, and the unemployed head on. Unfortunately, at the end of 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, I was laid off from my job in the commercial real estate industry. I’ve been here before. And I wrote about it then. I wrote about feeling on the outskirts of life, I wrote about how mad I was at our unemployment system and how if you’re unemployed in America you’re living just above the poverty line.
Interestingly, I’m still allotted the same $11,500 in unemployment insurance as I was in 2009. Six years later. And the poverty line in 2014 for my party-of-one existence was…$11,670. So now I’m officially living BELOW the poverty line. I cannot begin to tell you how lucky I am to have a family that is able to help me right now, and has the desire to do so.
I wanted to get to poverty and unemployment later, but I guess it sits at the crux of all of this. We live to work here in the United States. We define ourselves by our jobs, by our busy schedules and back-to-back meetings, by answering emails at 11:30pm and taking calls at 6:00am. It’s almost a gut instinct to ask people what they do when you first meet them, rather than how they know the person throwing the party or what they enjoy doing when they’re NOT working. When those things that so heavily define us are absent, what are we? Who are we? How do the unemployed relate to others when the most common form of relating — and weighing a person’s worth — is through industry?
So we have these two things, a hefty sense of loss of self and an incredibly low living wage, to grapple with — mentally, emotionally, physically. And then we take on a job search, which is comprised of constantly putting ourselves out there for blatant judgment, whether we’ve got the experience and skills and attitude and “cultural fit.” It’s made of being rolled through an interview today and being rejected next week, only to have to get up and continue to sell our greatness on the days in between. Again and again and again.
There comes a point when we have to admit to ourselves and to the world that this cycle is horrible to live within. It’s hard, folks. In the middle of it, it’s a hard place to be.
Plenty of people bear it with grace, plenty of people don’t. Plenty of people bear it with grace and admit afterward how difficult it was to live through, and plenty of people bear it horribly and say a few years later that it wasn’t so bad.
But the longer we live in this place of undefined value, incredibly low wages, and constant perceived judgment and rejection, the harder it is to recover. It’s hard to flow back into the work world when we are tattered and torn, ripped up a bit from what we’ve just been through and in need of some space to process. But we do it because this is the system we live in.
This is one perspective. It’s not the same for everyone. For more people than I care to think about — but will think about, because it’s important to do so — the road is much, much harder. In a decent number of places outside the U.S., it’s much better. The point I’m trying to get at is that here, in America, we view work and unemployment in unhealthy ways, and that has consequences.
So. For those of you out of work by no choice of your own, push on. Find comfort and support where you can, in the likeliest and unlikeliest places. Look for new ways to talk about and relate to your life and the people around you. Take care of yourself. I mean it. And find something in each day to remind you that you are infinitely more than what this system has led you to believe.
——
Related and worth a watch: Status Anxiety from Alain de Botton’s The School of Life
