The Life and Times of the (F)unemployed

I’ve been in D.C. for 2 ½ months and I’m still unemployed.

“You’re so qualified!” Everyone says.

“Have you thought about looking for a job on idealist?!”

That’s like saying, “Have you thought about sleeping if you’re tired?” It’s so obvious. I feel like I spend more time on idealist than I spend time doing anything else.

But being unemployed is sometimes really fun, hence the (f) before unemployed. I’m funemployed!

There is an art to keeping busy and entertained while you have no job, and therefore, no income. This involves sleeping in, going on many informational (and sometimes when I’m lucky, real) interviews, walking around the city, free museums and other discounted DC activities that your tax dollars so generously pay for, and reading at cafes and foregoing my favorite drinks to order $1 iced coffees.

I’ve read some good books, most recently Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s an incredibly moving novel about a boy searching for clues to his father’s life after he is killed in the World Trade Center.

“Don’t you get bored?” people always ask.

I don’t get bored, I have plenty of job alerts I have to track, plenty of blogs and books to read, plenty of interviews to have, and plenty of motivation to go to the gym. But it’s nice to have a real summer vacation and the chance to take my time to feel at home somewhere.

I don’t get bored, but sometimes, I get frustrated. Our generation grew up with such a sense of entitlement. In the boom of the 1990s we had everything we wanted and more, and were told we would be whatever it was that we dreamed. But when my class accepted our diplomas this year, we were essentially told the opposite. “You won’t get what you want, but something is better than nothing, and eventually, things will get better.”

Eventually?!

I think to myself, this life is too short for eventually. But I know, whether I like it, I will take the first something that comes along because something will lead to something which will lead me to another something that hopefully will be an opportunity that I can’t even imagine.

Sometimes I think to myself, my peers and I worked hard and we shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of the consequences of older generations’ mistakes. But that’s how the world works, I guess, and maybe it’s a good experience to have to learn to compromise some goals and to be rejected and to struggle a bit.

So for now, I wait and apply and interview. I play and read and am grateful for this opportunity to relax. I am grateful that the inner-calm from India has not been totally corrupted by DC mayhem, and am especially grateful for those who have helped me through this process. While interviewing, I have met some exceptional individuals who have done some extraordinary things in their lives. It’s motivating and inspiring, and I’ve learned about opportunities I didn’t even know existed.

Some people might take their unemployment personally. But when I’m told that over 400 people applied to the same administrative job at a tiny non profit that I did, or when the temp agency I applied to doesn’t even have work to give me, I know it’s not my fault. So I look at it as funemployed, because it’s better to be positive, and if I have to be 22 with only a measly bachelors degree during one of the worst economic times in history, I’m going to make the best out of it.

To quote Jonathan Safran Foer, “I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

So, for all of you who have a job and a paycheck, enjoy it. But for the millions of people in my situation, let’s make a toast to funemployemt. (At happy hour, where it’s cheaper.)