Hello Crasstalk viewers! As my inaugural post to this dysfunctional, yet entertaining community, I thought I’d kick off by relating my musings on the intersection of two subjects in which most hardcore bloggers are sadly familiar: social media and unemployment. As I’ve recently taken on a new hobby (drawing circles), I’ll start out with this diagram:
Like many graduate students, I successfully deluded myself into thinking that going to a private school in New York and taking out loans to finance said excursion to deluded-ville would yield all of my heart’s post-graduation professional desires. But as it became apparent that deluded-ville is not a pit stop on the highway to success, I made up a series of excuses as to why I didn’t see the collapse of capitalism coming before I applied. These excuses include living in France the year before going to grad school (the French have a tendency to report more on Sarkozy’s love affairs than on American screw-ups); the sad notion that wanting a career that actually helps people entails job security; and of course, the even sadder notion that knowing how to write coherently actually matters in the job market. This brings me to Tortuous Reason #1.
Tortuous Reason #1: Throughout college, I had the…pleasure…of working in several group projects for my marketing classes. While the blue-eyed Bettys and the green-eyed Dannys enjoyed their frat parties and keg stands, I was often the one left in the computer lab tasked with the responsibility of editing our paper to ensure modifiers weren’t misplaced, there v. their v. they’re were used appropriately, and the dash was used with caution. Those same Bettys and Dannys were cool with their life choice of being an accountant, so they got a job after undergrad, and have been there ever since. As evidenced by their ecstatic use of “!!!!” and “…………” and “LOLOLz” and “WTF r u alrites!?” on Facebook and Twitter, it is clear that their ability to write has taken a further downturn, and all of my effort editing THEIR papers does not matter. So here I sit, writing enabled and all, yet unemployed with all the time in the world to wonder, “WTF. y did thiiis happen?!?!?”
Tolerable Reason #1: To be fair, Facebook and Twitter aren’t all bad. Despite all of the bubbling errors that are creating infinite pools of junk data, I have some absolutely brilliant and hilarious friends who are now dispersed around the world. Even though many of us only enjoy the city in spurts, social media has enabled us to keep current with life in the expensive apple, and much, much more importantly, make snide comments about everything and anything. In fact, this very blog you are reading was borne out of the idea that witty comments deserve to win the internet.
Tortuous Reason #2: LinkedIn. When the hell did LinkedIn become legitimate? Last summer, I got a call from a temp agency that wanted to set me up with an administrative job at the UN. I wasn’t entirely sure whether to take the temp interview seriously, so I compromised by wearing brown loafers and carrying an impressive looking attaché case. Upon entering, the first thing my recruiter told me is that I would not be taken seriously on the job market without increasing my presence on LinkedIn. I subtly reminded the recruiter that she is an infant, but even so, I couldn’t counter the LinkedIn argument, mostly because I had no f*cking clue people took that thing seriously. Never mind the quality or merit of the actual work. What really matters it that you copied and pasted your resume into a few online text boxes, you continually log into the website to beg people you barely know for recommendations, and you demonstrate your intelligence by posting articles you neither wrote nor researched. Yay for professionalism.
Tolerable Reason #2: One of the strange things about this economy is that luck has played a bigger part in our generation’s careers than anything else. As a result, it seems that EVERYONE knows at least one person who is both objectively awesome and un(der)employed. I by no means wish to imply I am that one person you know, but if you draw this conclusion, I suppose I can’t argue. A happy byproduct of this phenomenon is that my 3 a.m. GChat rants, Twitter updates, and Facebook statuses that showcase my unemployment frustrations are met with support. People agree with me! They (at least pretend to) care! And that makes unemployment just a little more bearable. It also makes it less embarrassing that I sometimes confess my life’s problems to a website.
Tortuous Reason #3: I’ll be the first to admit that I neither understand nor care about the organizational hierarchy of corporations. Senior Managing Director versus Associate Coordinator of the blah blah blah project – it’s all the same to me. However, with the advent of hyper-social media use, those titles fade out, and are instead replaced with, “OMG! I just got a HUGE raise and permotion!” Well, great for you. It’s nice to see your career is advancing, while all I managed to do today was charge my iPod. But you still misspelled “promotion.”
Tolerable Reason #3: I do my best to keep my social media antics truthful…and vague. As such, I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t know I no longer live in New York. It certainly helps that I come back often, but I know the real reason people don’t know is because I am selective in what I tell the social media interwebs. Every New York event I get invited to will inevitably get a response like, “I’ll do my best to be there!” or “Hopefully I’m not out of town that weekend!” or “Ugh. It’s in Midtown? I don’t know, I’ll think about it.” I have thus evaded the all out confession that I have not actually lived in New York since September. Thank you, social media, for tricking people into thinking I’m gainfully employed in the City, but too cool to brag about it online.
Anyway, the point of all this is that social media has both sustained, and slowly killed me during this year of unemployment. Do I boost my presence online, or do I withdraw? Is it worth keeping my New York mental state of mind if the cost is seeing the dummies of the world professionally advance before my eyes? Well, I started writing for this blog, so I guess I made my decision. I suppose I’ll add Crasstalk as Tolerable Reason #4.
For less logical musings about my bearable unemployed torture, visit my blog!
