Job hunting: a whore-able endeavor

I’m staring down the Himalayas, except the boring, unscenic version. Reaching my Everest involves punching down keys on my Gateway laptop for hours on end, hunting down leads for environmental positions that I have yet to find out exist. It’s a crazy thing, feigning to pretend that I have faintest idea of what I want to do in my life, and it’s even loonier trying to convince someone that I’m the perfect candidate for a position they’re offering, especially because I’ll probably know next to nothing about that position. Yet, this seems a very normal thing. Successful people do it all the time. High school…college…interviews…job…marriage…kids…blah

My girlfriend assures me the need to find that perfect something is an American notion. That in other countries life isn’t so career-centric and people focus on other things. Like in Greece life is all about the food. And in Spain it’s all about the nap before nightlife. I think she’s right, and I think that’s why being successful is so confusing.

In America, you can earn your way to fortunes, but to do so, you give up your family and friends. And in America of late, you can earn your way to subsistence living, but you also give up your family and friends. So many people in this country vie for the façade of honorable work and a decent lifestyle, because it’s so much better than feeling meaningless. But often it’s impossible to decipher true meaning in work and to distinguish the difference between what is honorable and what is just a mirage.

When I interviewed to be Editor for the College of DuPage student newspaper, I envisioned limitless possibilities: articles written in prose, headlines littered with alliteration and rhyming, stories about couch surfers, eccentrics, world travelers, arts stories on the front page and feature leads in news stories. But what I got with the position was, “People read the paper for news…these headlines are horrible…our readership is the college faculty…” I became my adviser’s marionette, because I was weak, because I needed her recommendation, and because I needed the tuition stipend and the $3/hour salary to get me out of student loans.

I can’t help but feel that my COD experience is the American job scene in a nutshell. Our financial obligations to either loans, kids, or just even getting by pin us into a position we cannot afford to leave.

Yet, I’m job hunting now, despite all of that. I know that I’d have to be a fucking moron to willfully seek out those conditions, but the truth is I’m a product of a Walt Disney childhood. I, much like the vast majority of Americans, as brilliantly explained in a Freakonomics Podcast about a no-lose lottery, seek that chance to find happily-ever-after. So even if my odds are one-in-a-million of finding a good green job out there that isn’t meaningless, and it pays me enough money to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s worth searching for that shot at happily-ever-after.

So today is for all of us out there who are working toward happily-ever-after. It can be hard as all-getup, but I’d like to mention that I’m proud of the brave souls out there that are inching closer.

Also, if you’re out of debt and thinking about climbing back into it for Grad school…DON’T. Grad school degrees today are a dime a dozen, and unfortunately they cost dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens of dimes to pay back. But if you’re out of debt, holy shit go back to school because you’ve got the one-in-a-million chance, maybe even the one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance, of finding a good job out there.