The Job Hunt
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in 1942, was convinced that entitled intellectuals who couldn’t get the kinds of jobs they thought they deserved would be the downfall of capitalism.
The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work.
All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment…. and righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism.
Notably, Schumpeter himself was not particularly employable. Despite having a superhuman memory and a breadth of knowledge that would have won him some serious cash on Jeopardy, he struggled to keep a job. Before he published any of his books, he was a failed political staff person and a failed policy writer.
So, legendary influence on economic theory aside, Schumpeter and I have some things in common. I am also a member of the educated class who has undergone a period of unemployment while looking for work that my friends and peers would deem worthy of my academic standing. So I can relate to the “discontented” and “resentful” desire to burn the Career Industrial Complex down to its beams.
It’s hard to believe that my summer can be summarised simply as a post-grad school job hunt. In other words: one of the most mundane events to happen in the western world in This Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand And Nineteen.
But of course to me, it was 2,160 hours of free fall — free fall whilst sprinting, in place, in the air, with gravity rushing by all the while, mocking my flailing attempts at progress and my distress that pointed in all the wrong, unjustifiable, nonsensical directions (sometimes literally). And now that it’s over, I’m overcome with a compulsion to write about it in excruciating detail, to label each facet as Psychological State A or Structural Injustice X or Lesson Learned Z.
But, then again, I am so tired of talking about myself — working and reworking the narrative arch of my own story. It feels like I’ve done nothing but explain myself for the past three months : What I am “looking for” and where I “see myself” and what my background is and why am I passionate about X or Y. It’s the kind of tedium that inspires in a person the urge to take a puff and ask: “Why do jobs even matter dude?”
Neither do I think I am quite ready to extrapolate from my personal experience a 400 page treatise on the relationship between wealth distribution and political stability. My pal Joseph was 59 when he wrote his, so I still have time.
However, there are three themes from my job hunt that I am keen to unpack, just a little:
