The main problem with "funemployment" is staring into the existential void every day, that bottomless abyss where my job used to be. I’ve mostly bought into our cultural programming that says one’s job is the primary source of one’s self-worth. Therefore, each jobless day becomes a quest to justify my existence for another 24 hours.
The first time I tried to escape CorpWorld, in 2008, I thought I could write my way out, so I worked (hard) on my writing almost every day. But I failed in that endeavor. Of course, I wrote a sketch comedy revue for the Fringe Festival, so the odds of hitting the big time were minuscule to begin with.
I’m still writing, but I’ve been starting my daily session a few hours later in the afternoon this time around, and it’s a much harder slog than it used to be. Although I’m trying to write essays now, which are a lot harder for me than sketches. So maybe I should cut myself some slack.
At some point between then and now, I lost faith that my artistic genius would save me from the fate that befalls most people, namely, having to work boring, everyday, run-of-the-mill jobs. That precipitated a crisis, because I could no longer discount the present.
I could no longer convince myself that the shittiness of today would be redeemed by a glorious tomorrow in which I had my dream job, acting as a vessel of the Universal Soul, delivering The Eternal Truth to the world by way of comedy sketches, sitcoms and/or films. I had to find work in the meantime that actually provided meaning (and money).
This revelation was facilitated by the tightening job market, which refused to provide me with the kind of easy data-entry gigs I found in the 2000’s. The new meaningless corporate jobs were taking up more and more of my brain and, more important, my emotional bandwidth. I couldn’t just plug into music or podcasts and space out all day. I actually had to give kind of a fuck, and that wasn’t what I was looking for in a 9-to-5.
At the same time, I had moved in with my parents, which, ironically, gave me less license to be immature. Somehow, lazing around all day watching TV seemed even more wasteful, lazy and juvenile with my parents around.
It became more difficult to justify these “quirks” as the typical growing pains of an artist when my artistic career was virtually nonexistent. My immaturity was also losing a lot of its sheen. Artists have to remain childlike in order to be creative, staying open to the wonder and absurdities of life. But, by this point, I had become more childish than childlike.
I doubt my immaturity was the reason my friends drifted away. (I tended to be my least immature around them.) But I had to accept that, if I wanted things to improve, I would have to grow up. I couldn’t just hide behind my artistic-ness or the tragedy of my friends’ abandonment anymore.
I’d always thought of myself as a Good Person, but I began to realize that I hadn’t done much lately to justify that belief. So I started behaving better and stopped calculating actions just to benefit me. I realized a Good Person wouldn’t only be friendly with people he thought could provide something for him. A Good Person would be friendly with everyone. I didn’t realize how much of my old Good Person had been lost in adolescence. (I also may be idealizing my boyhood self just a bit.)
Instead of blaming my parents for my adolescence and my current predicament (which seem inextricably linked), I became grateful for their support. Instead of harping on the shittiness of my various jobs, I appreciated the benefits, such as exercise, human contact, sense of purpose or cool co-workers, depending on what each job offered.
Because of that gratitude, I can feel a really amazing joy now in being an uncle and sharing that experience with my family, the people who continue to stand by me even though I’ve often been a pretty big asshole to them. And that’s something no amount of money or professional success can provide.
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