Unemployed

I am thinking about the condition of being unemployed.

It is not the same as not working. That I think of as a more voluntary condition. My situation has been an involuntary one and, as such, not without its moments of tension, fear, anxiety, and emptiness.

Aside from the extreme emotions, being without a job at a time in your life when you expected to have one and may, in fact, need one can feel just plain strange. For one thing, it alters the landscape of your daily life in ways you could not have imagined. Once my day was structured with people to see, places to go, and projects to do. I was happy about some of it, but was at least accustomed to all of it. I really just took it all for granted. Now, I have to create any structure I want or need in my day, and sometimes there are people to see, but sometimes not.

It seems funny to think about this now, but when I was working, I used to sometimes think about people who were not working as being "on the outside" as if work were a kind of incarceration. Not that I did not often enjoy my work, but I guess the requirement of being there day in and day out for specified hours could feel like confinement at times, especially when the day would drag.

That feeling lingered when I was "let out" for doctor’s appointments and such, so that I would look around me in wonder. Who are all these "free" people? Why don’t they have to work? What are they doing? How do they make a living?

Those questions went unanswered, of course. And now that I have been one of them for a year, I still wonder. I am on the outside now, but because so much of my energy goes toward trying to get back on the inside, I am not really and truly on the outside. Maybe that is, in fact, the most difficult thing—existentially speaking—about being unemployed. If the secret to happiness, as the experts tell us, is living in the present moment then we who are out of work must be in a kind of Purgatory. We do not accept where we are, so we are in a constant state of trying to get somewhere else. Add to that misery the fact that we may not have any idea of where exactly we want to be. We just know that it is not where we presently are!

Maybe that state is metaphorical for the human condition. After all, we humans live in a constant state of fleeting present moments speeding by into the past with future moments, that we cannot yet know, hanging out there . . . somewhere. It is a precarious position at best, but one that we learn to live with and are, thankfully, usually not fully aware of or else we might go mad. Or, maybe, we might learn to live in the moment along with the rest of the natural world, like Thoreau did. He understood that the furnishings of modern civilization were mostly façade. He wanted what was real. Reality, after all, claims us in the end and sometimes in the middle, too.