Job Hunting

If there’s one thing that frustrates me the most, it’s job hunting. Job hunting is stressful because, more often than not, it involves a lot of people rejecting your earnest applications. Being rejected is never fun, so being rejected for a job when you need it is even harder. The longer one remains unemployed, the more despondent one becomes. And that’s for the people who have spare money to rely on. If you don’t have the money, you will be despondent and hungry.

This is a hardship many people feel right now. The market is just not what it once was, so it’s difficult to find work. Though there are signs that things are starting to return to normal, the damage has already been done. And with that comes a great cost for many of the people who live under this lockdown, mainly the working class and small businesses.

All this is bad enough, but it’s compounded by some of the poor choices I made during my formative years. I regret not working in high school and college. Too often, I focused on getting the grade, so as a result, I have hardly any work experience. This is the reason I talked about the importance of avoiding “credentialism” in a previous post. I spent far too much time doing things that were only of secondary importance to employers. Most employers want recruits who have experience working, and the fact is that I had little to show them on paper besides volunteer work for charities. To say that this backfired is an understatement.

These factors are only compounded by the distractions I am faced with daily. On the job, when I am tasked with a definite goal that I must complete no matter what, I generally will get it done. But this is much, much harder when there is no definitive goal in front of me. The only routine things I can do are help my family (including my grandparents) with various chores and complete this blog every Thursday. This allows me to practice some discipline, but this is nothing compared to a real job.

Working at Marble Slab Creamery two years ago was a great experience for me. I loved interacting with the customers. I learned a lot about the importance of opening and closing a store and the daily rituals associated with it. By the time I left to pursue better job opportunities, I had it down to a science: the customer comes first, followed by making sure tables are clean and ingredients are restocked to the fullest. After that, I negotiated a good contract with another company to research and write up an e-book. In that time, I completed the assigned projects with gusto and learned a great deal in the process. These jobs were fun because they gave me a challenge that I had to overcome. I don’t think I’ve been challenged since.

But I am confident in myself. Very few failures result in permanent harm coming to one’s livelihood. A lot of people my age think that their life is over after a failure or two. But such failures are far from the end of the world. You can work your way out of anything that does not kill or impair you. I remember a story by Walter Bond, how he had flunked out of a prestigious school and had to go to a much scarier one as a result. This incident caused him to rethink his life’s priorities. Perhaps it’s time I rethought mine.