Guest Post: 7 Ways to Enjoy (F)Unemployment

Bahar Zaker has one of those personalities that fills up a room. If she decides you two are going to be friends, you best resign yourself to that fact because resistance is futile. She will pour you a milkshake, diagnose you with sodium deficiency and then demand you spill all of your secrets in 50 words or less.

Given that she was one of the first people to know about Generation Meh and part of the brain trust that helped coax it into being, I’ve been encouraging her to write a guest post for a while now. The results are below.

7 Ways To Enjoy (F)Unemployment, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace The Fail

I’m just another 30 year-old who doesn’t know where she’s going or what she’s doing. Mind you, things weren’t always this way. You see, throughout my life I’ve gone through what I now see as great cycles of over- and underachievement and only now do I feel that I have any semblance of balance. My latest bout with underachievement has come in the last few years. Once a promising young Ph.D. student with fellowships and accolades, I am now clutching my Masters diploma (signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself!) and cursing the fact that “ABD” is neither a degree nor a recognizable accomplishment by 99% of humanity. Only now, underemployed and an academic failure, am I beginning to see the light.  And I can offer you these seven tips to also learn to embrace the liberation of seemingly abject failure.

1. Perspective! Sure, I’m not a fancy-pants academic, my mom’s not proud of her daughter the Dr., and I’m not living in NYC and teaching at NYU like I once assumed I would. But, aside from the big cosmic facts that there are people and animals suffering and dying every day, and that there is a lot of injustice in the world, there are little quality-of-life facts about my life for which I’m grateful. I have a lot of free time, a lot of flexibility, and a lot less wear-and-tear and stress than I had when I was working. I have this time to really take stock and decide what I want to do. I realize that I won’t always be a woman of leisure-ish (I should probably also thank my gainfully-employed partner here and promise that I will return the favor), and so I’m enjoying this weird in-between phase when people look at me funny and secretly wonder if I’m independently wealthy (no) or secretly living out some feminist nightmare of a retro hausfrau (no).

2. Seek out new friends and new experiences. Duh. This has been drilled into your brain innumerable times, right? But there’s nothing like internalizing it once and for all- no one person, group of people, or set of activities will ever be enough. You need to challenge yourself and go out of your comfort zone (I’ll stop the motivational poster talk, I promise)- or you’re not growing. I force myself to go to meet-ups, to volunteer, to do weird jobs (more on that coming up), go to weird places, host strangers at my house or stay at strangers’ houses (couchsurfing is awesome!), and otherwise do things that I never used to do in my overly serious 20s. This sometimes means spending a bit more money than is in my budget. I’ve also learned to embrace the tiniest bit of credit card debt here or there. Because there was a time when I was a young twentysomething living in New York City, and I let a lot of experiences slip through my fingers because I was adhering to a strict budget and a strict vision of myself. Well no more!

3. Meds, dude. Embrace the meds. Yep. A large part of my inability to finish my doctorate has had to do with depression. And I finally went to therapy to realize and deal with that. And a major way of dealing with that has been the use of antidepressants. There was a time when I was a young  anarchist with a subscription to Adbusters magazine and I thought that psychological medications were just another plot by The Man to keep free thought and independence down and medicate a gullible population into conformity and consumerism and blah blah blah. Fuck it. Life is too short to go around feeling bad. Embrace the meds. They will embrace you back.

4. Travel like your life depends on it. It kind of does. Very related to #2. Go places. Just go places. Get a passport. Find people to stay with (relatives close or distant, friends of friends, random internet strangers, couchsurfers, contacts of all kinds).  Find good airfares. And go. Go alone, go with a life partner, go with friends, go with a tour group. Go. GO. It seems obvious and redundant, but after you see a new place and meet new people and get new perspectives, you are a different person. Keep adding to yourself. And take pictures to remember it all by.

5. Try all kinds of crazy-assed jobs. This links back up to #2, and helps fund #4. This has been so great for giving me some much needed perspective and humility. Working in groups of people among whom, for whatever reason (age, socio-economic status, background, interests, etc.), you never thought you’d find yourself has a huge impact. Remember that there are all kinds of people who end up where they are for all kinds of reasons, working for all kinds of different people, good and bad. I write, sell the odd photograph here and there, read AP exams, translate professionally and for friends and acquaintances, go door-to-door working on political campaigns, teach college courses part-time, tutor, do volunteer work, and, I just took a test to see if the U.S. Census Bureau will hire me for some temporary work in the spring. Here’s hoping.

6. But don’t do something just because. This is kind of the point of (f)unemployment. You get to do all kinds of things, because you haven’t let yourself be tied down to a static idea of who you are or what you should be doing. As much as I love my chosen field of study, I did not wish to spend the rest of my life begging ornery undergraduate and continuing education students to love it as much as me. Between my family and my partner’s family, at least 50% are or have been involved in the field of education in one way or another. It would have been so easy for me to keep teaching, and keep being not quite satisfied. But I want to do something that I enjoy and also that I feel contributes to the world in a meaningful way, and so I’m allowing this weird period, one for which life manuals don’t give any instructions, to figure that out.

7. Remember- maybe it’s not failure at all! In the words of a good friend, and also a character in the fabulous 7-Up series of films, just because you haven’t done what you set out to do doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It just means that you’ve changed. There is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, I wish I’d realized all this a little earlier, which would perhaps mean being in a slightly more dignified position right now. But hey, it’s never too late. I don’t know if I’m the tail-end of Generation X or the beginning of Generation Y or a Millennial or whatever, all I know is that I’m probably going to live to be 100 and that means I have many years to decide.

-Bahar Zaker

Interested in writing a guest post for GenMeh? Drop me a line and we’ll see what we can work out.