In Which Phil Doesn’t Upload a Resume
Okay, Phil. This isn’t hard. Just log in to the job board. Enter the keywords. Pick a job that sounds marginally better than yours. Upload the resume. Write a cover letter.
That’s exhausting.
Yeah…yeah, it is.
I take another sip of my Bollo’s cappuccino. It’s extremely bitter.
You know what sounds like more fun?
What?
And then I start to get an idea.
—–
The unemployment rate in the United States, as of today, is at 5.4 percent, what the Washington Post calls “a seven-year low.” It’s the latest in a series of mostly-positive jobs reports, leading to a lot of my liberal friends smugly quipping on social media.
Or did I imagine that? I dunno, sometimes I think I am.
As Chico Harlan puts it in the Post, “In 13 of the last 14 months, the nation has added at least 200,000 jobs, a period of hiring unmatched in 15 years.” So why do I still feel like my stock hasn’t really gone up in the job market?
My skills aren’t exactly conventional and that may be part of the problem. Over the past two years, I’ve gotten really good at writing in bursts of less than 200 words and staying awake through the night. But it’s the latter which is taking the harshest toll on me.
I don’t feel like a positive news report. Surely there must be a more cynical view on things. I’ll search the news for “job satisfaction.”
—–
The first article I find is “10 Keys to Job Satisfaction, Backed By Research.”
Well. If it’s backed by research, Time Dot Com. As long as it’s not backed by anecdotes, I guess?
The article is written by Eric Barker, who runs a blog called Barking Up the Wrong Tree. It’s full of these sort of technocratic lifehack style posts. Kind of like a how-to manual for turning yourself into a lean, mean, capital-producing machine.
Turning back to the article, I scan through and find a lot of things that reaffirm my own attitude, which is basically – jobs are typically something you have to do, as opposed to something you want to do. The closer you are to a job that you want to do, well…
Barker also writes the line “even prostitutes can be very happy with their work,” which makes me roll my eyes at the shaming.
But there’s one line that jumps out at me.
“Those with no job are happier than those with a lousy one.”
And that keeps rattling around in my brain.
“Those with no job are happier than those with a lousy one.”
And yet….
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