The Journey Through Hell

In my father's days, finding a job seemed to be the immediate result of just wanting a job. A person would graduate, find a job, stick with it, and make a family. So how come it’s super hard for us right now, no matter how qualified we are, to find a job? In this piece of writing, I’m going to try and take a look at the reasons why the reality of job hunting is the way it is in our time. Why is it so hard? For starters, this is not a research-based article. So I’m not going to talk about obvious circumstances like economic slowdowns, oversaturated markets, higher competition, or even more serious reasons like wars and being a citizen of what the “first world” calls "developing countries”. This is simply a journey in the mind of a job hunter, thinking about why landing a job and keeping it seems to be nearly impossible, wherever you are and whoever you are nowadays. Everyone I know has struggled at some point in their lives to find a job, some for years, some -including myself- still struggling. And those who find one live in the fear of losing it. You sit for hours a day on your laptop, navigating those job boards, applying to everything you see, it doesn’t matter what you really want or are good at, the degrees you hold, those courses you keep doing, or the languages you have learnt; all of it doesn’t qualify you for anything. Not to mention the people who weren't lucky enough to do all this. You find a simple job that requires the minimal amount of skills, it makes you hopeful, but then you get to the qualification section -if you’re not sick of reading it already- and find that you have to know how to fly a commercial jet just to work in some lousy office, writing on the sheets and replying to emails with a boss that doesn’t know where the power button on the computer is (he’s just the CEO’s friend). The hunter’s thoughts: Lying down on your bed, you wonder, Am I doing it wrong? Is something wrong with me? Are there really not enough jobs for all of us? You think of the things you’re good at and try to go easy on yourself, you’re full of energy now, so you go back to that laptop, go on LinkedIn and look at all these people pretending to love what they’re doing -some of them do, to be fair- and wonder again, how did they do it? Of course, you have to “connect” with a lot of them in hopes of getting an answer to that question (or maybe a job). I can’t handle that website anymore, so I have quit it and tried to find other websites or other ways. For me, it represents the worst side of capitalism. All people are measured by their “achievements” or what community they’re part of for so long that they feel they belong. While the fact is, as soon as their boss has a niece that needs a job that person is out of there. Continuing your wonderful journey, you start thinking about your passion, that one thing representing the “DREAM JOB”. Most of us don’t even know what that is, and it used to be not that important, actually. You tell yourself, passion is just another concept the corporate world is selling to take more from you than you would give if it were “just a job”. This for sure applies to privileged people who have the time and money to have a passion; those unprivileged are here to do all the watering and cashiering that, if happened, is just a phase for the elite who are at the beginning of their ladder. Still on your laptop, there’s smoke coming out of your head from all the thinking. By now, you shift to the idea of doing your own thing, starting a small project, or opening a dancing studio (you know nothing about dancing, of course) because the corporate world is not for you. An email telling you that you have moved to the next step in your application gets the studio out of your head, you move with them to the next step, and you never hear from them again. As bad as rejection emails are, they’re always better than leaving you hanging and waiting for nothing (if you still actually wait). Maybe it matters: Going back to the passion idea, while putting our hate towards capitalism aside, even though I would personally do anything as a job as long as it’s decent and well-paying, if the thing I do is writing or music (or maybe eating), I would prefer it without thinking twice. I had this idea for years that making the things I love turn into a job would ruin them for me. Of course, I haven’t started working yet, when that was my idea. Two years into my actual work experience now, I’m starting to get how wrong that idea was. If I’m going to spend most of my day (hence most of my life) doing one thing, I'd better enjoy it. So passion is not a lie after all; people have the right to make it such a big deal. On the other hand, I can see how it’s holding a lot of dreamers back, being obsessed with finding the one thing, they get paralysed waiting for the feeling of “this is it”, jumping from one “it” to the other in hopes of it being the right one. Not to mention the self-hate coming from not having any passion at all. So where can we find the balance? Looking for it between the stress of bills and debts, and responsibilities. You should matter: There’s clearly something wrong with the hiring process; maybe it could be easier if employers started putting reasonable requirements and making sure that favoritism is not the way to go. Or if we start getting better education that helps us with knowing what we like and will add to that field from an early age, and then have that actually matter later when you’re being hired more than superficial and fake personal qualities or knowing how to do fawning and cracking the skills of making the best fake CV and learning to say what your interviewer wants to hear. And dreamily, maybe governments should start to value the human life experience more than revenue.