“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” – Lloyd Dobler, Say Anything
“Nothing. I would relax. I’d sit on my ass all day. I would do nothing.” – Peter Gibbons, Office Space
I’ve heard it said be careful how you talk to your kids because it will be the voice in their heads in adulthood. I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with my father during college that still rings in my ears close to seventeen years after his death.
I was talking to him about how little I liked the internship I had in Rochester at a company that made mixers. If you think there’s more to the product than that, you would be incorrect. The purpose of this company was to make tools that literally mixed things. With a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, you’re lining yourself up for a career like this or for jobs in petroleum, food processing, or pharmaceuticals. None of it sounded remotely appealing to me – if I’m being dramatic, they all sounded like prison sentences – but I was already too deep into the degree to turn back.
And my father said, “where we went wrong was letting you study engineering instead of English or something in liberal arts.”
“Where we went wrong”?!
Bear in mind, I wasn’t calling him in hand cuffs wearing an orange jumpsuit or from a rehab facility wearing gripper socks while being handed a dixie cup of Librium. I was calling him from Cornell, the Ivy League university that I was attending after four years of high school where I did everything right just to please my parents and be a good kid with a bright future.
Finally, frustrated, he told me, “you don’t seem to want to do anything.”
It’s not exactly the cliched scene of a son saying to his father, “I’m not gonna work in the mines, pop, I’m gonna get out of this town!” It would have been odd to scream at my father, “there’s more to life than a white-collar job in a perfectly nice upper middle-class neighborhood in upstate New York, Dad!” But it stung because I was imploring my father for answers about what to do with my life. I needed guidance and I needed to be heard but I didn’t feel like I was.
Looking back now, I realize that he had made it a point of pride to see his son through college, making many sacrifices to do so, including taking on loans and putting a second mortgage on our home. In addition to devaluing the monumental gift of this education that my father had given me; I also happened to be complaining about his dream career. Working in an industrial plant that processed chemical solvents, treated wastewater, or refined petroleum was the peak of my father’s interest and talent. It would have been like a conversation with my own theoretical son complaining to me about the tedium of being on Saturday Night Live when he wanted so desperately to be a dentist.
That conversation has never left me, and the wild thing is that I think it’s because he was right. I don’t seem to want to do anything.
I haven’t had a job since December 31st, 2024.
I’m not proud of that but, frankly, I’m not particularly ashamed of it, either.
I still dread the perfectly natural and reasonable question, “How’s the job search going?” I dread it because the answer is, “it’s not.” I feel paralyzed with the current state of the job search.
I thought about being a teacher, a caterer, a plumber, an electrician. I thought about trying to audition again or go back to school, neither of which are exactly cash cows. I could write my novel, which, even if it were halfway decent, would most likely go unpublished but make some good friends think I could do better with the next one.
Nothing jumps out at me in a meaningful enough way that I will jump through all the hoops in order to do it.
I could go back to web development. I even considered trying a bootcamp to get all my skills in order. It turns out that bootcamps are pretty much dead and they weren’t necessarily all that effective in the first place. I spoke with one friend who had to declare bankruptcy after his bootcamp experience. I spoke to another friend who went through a bootcamp but said these days you should just go back and get a bachelor’s degree. I told him I already have a bachelor’s in chemical engineering and over twenty-five years of experience in web development.
“Oh, really? Why can’t you get a job?”
Good motherfucking question.
You go on LinkedIn, you see a posting, you upload your resume and you click submit. And then nothing happens. There’s no human with whom you can follow up. If you’re lucky, you get an email two weeks later saying, “we aren’t moving forward with your application, best of luck in your search.”
I was recently talking about this with a friend and I told him, “I send out a hundred resumes, and nothing happens.” He replied, “that’s because you need to send out a thousand.”
Do I, though?
I swear that I’d send those thousand resumes if I thought that that action would lead to anything at all, but I truly have no faith that it would. In the age of AI, you send digital files out into the void only to be rejected by a computer. The truly infuriating thing is that I can’t even use results to adjust my search. I don’t know if my resume is written correctly or incorrectly. I don’t know if I am right for these roles but other people got there first. Should I keep going in the same direction and it’s only a matter of time or should I course correct? It feels like playing a video game on mute with no controller while wearing a blindfold. I can handle the fact that I’m not winning but I can’t even figure out how I’m losing in order to change my approach.
I don’t expect any sympathy from the gainfully employed. I’m sure that I’ll only receive a shrug of the shoulders that suggests, “what do you expect? This is your fault.” I’ve read management books. I’ve read Who Moved my Cheese? (how dated is that reference?) I know that you’re supposed to adapt or die. I know that “no one ever got truck driver’s block.” But it feels increasingly like employers want you to fail and they relish the ability to say, “Sorry, you’re not qualified in the very specific way that we want you to be.”
This isn’t to say that I won’t work. I will. I find work satisfying. For all of my whining, I promise you that that’s true. But I’m not going to organize my life around it. I won’t put work at the center. I get that I need to do it but I’m not going to love my job.
Like I said, I had a twenty-five-year career. I’ve seen CEOs squander venture capital and lose gigantic accounts that got me laid off and those same CEOs don’t remember my name. Fine. But that works both ways. I’m not going to talk about passion or excitement when it comes to a job, I’ve seen too much shit.
It’s kind of like talking a three-time divorcee into another marriage.
“Look, if you want to, okay, but let’s get the prenup sorted out and we’ll head to the courthouse.”
“Aww but that’s so unromantic!”
“Oh, grow the fuck up.”
So, what am I doing? I’m piecing together whatever it is that I can. I put out the trash for my coop (see? I told you I’ll work), I walk dogs when I can, I freelance copy edit, I coach improv, I even code the occasional website when called upon. And just in case you’re wondering, yes, I do use AI for that. However, I assure you that AI ain’t magic and there’s a reckoning coming when we discover the limits of what AI can actually effectively replace.
In a supreme twist of ironic fate, I am also supplementing my meager income with money that my parents left me. Sorry I didn’t end up working in a wastewater treatment plant, Bob, but if you wanted that you should have left all of your money to charity instead of me. It’s another situation of I’m not proud of it but I’m not exactly ashamed of it, either. I didn’t touch it for about sixteen years and I’m using it for rent, not a jet ski, hair replacement surgery, and scratch-offs.
Life isn’t bad, honestly. Being single and child-free is pretty economical. These days, I walk my dog, I do whatever work is required of me, I go to the gym (sometimes), I watch soccer, I play soccer, I do improv, I hit open mics. This phase won’t last forever. I’m at a crossroads and frankly, for once, I don’t want to go crawling back to the familiar for a steady paycheck.
I might not want to do anything, but I want to do something. I’ll let you know when I figure out what that is.
