Mad Max Fury Road: Unemployment Edition

I just graduated with a Masters’ degree a month ago, and the road from being a student to straight-up unemployed is a nightmare. Being a student means that you don’t have to worry about planning the layout of your day or knowing what you are supposed to do. There is an army of people working to make sure you are fully occupied and more, every single day. But with graduation, comes an unwanted aspect of freedom (at least for me), the freedom of being able to do, whatever you want with your time.

And like any well-meaning young adult, I decided to devote my time trying to find a meaningful way to spend the rest of my days, doing a well-paying job. Let’s forget the well-paying part for a minute. The journey of trying to find a job opening, to begin with, that in itself is probably the most complicated thing I have ever done in my life. Add to that the pressure of not knowing what you are actually good at, the employable skills as some would call it.

I always thought of myself as a good student, but not knowing if you can be a good employee, an asset to the company, the way most job descriptions read…that’s petrifying. And I know, I am not on this boat alone. I am just another fish in the ocean of fresh graduates that are trying to find the right answer to the same set of questions in every job interview they go to – ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’, ‘Describe a major challenge you faced recently and how you overcame it.’, the same tune played out, over and over again, in the hopes of finding one person/company that believes in your potential.

The number of unpaid internships that I have done over the past five years makes me wonder if I should have spent my time trying to find companies that weren’t trying to trade manpower for the pretense of experience and learning. And then there are people on social media, with their illustrious careers and larger-than-life success stories that make us wonder where our turning point is.

Someone suggested that we should spend more time on LinkedIn compared to other social media platforms. Well, I did, and boy do I regret it. If you think Instagram’s picture-perfect profiles are depressing, try ten minutes of reading ‘I am happy to share that…’ posts on LinkedIn where every person you know and don’t know is doing something or the other with their lives.

This was not supposed to be a rant. But I think now it has become one. I am just two years shy of a quarter-life crisis and while I am so happy and inspired by my contemporaries doing so well with their lives, I do start to wonder – what am I doing with mine? The sense of not knowing is my biggest fear and anyone who can resonate with this knows how scary it can be.

I know getting a job is not gonna solve all my problems. I have learnt enough lessons from all the people my age who have already levelled up in life to know that life is only gonna get trickier.

But if you are someone like me, clueless about what plans life has for you, my heart goes out to you and this is all I wanna say – Enjoy the oblivion, till life comes and hits us like a road truck. Because like it or not, in the game of life, I like to believe that ignorance is always bliss.

So, keep doing whatever it is that you are doing to stay sane and find meaning in your life’s uncertainty. because eventually, everything will make sense.

Sincerely yours,

Ms. Freshly Unemployed – Starry-eyed to work!