The Right Bus Comes by, I'm Getting On...

Things that are shocking during week three of unemployment:

1.   The initial profound lack of ennui when contemplating one’s social status relative to the world of the working;

2.   The shocking realization that this status puts one at odds with everyone you know who is working;

3.   The amount of lint that the average adult belly button can accumulate in a day.

I was confronted by the first two items in dramatic contrast to each other just earlier today, even. I had to take my 13 year old son to a doctor’s appointment, and when checking in was providing our new insurance from my wife’s new job. There are standard questions during this transaction, the necessary demographics of every family that are mindlessly recited during visits such as this. I was shocked by my reaction when the front desk person asked for employer information. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have any details to offer! We both laughed when I suggested that I was a secret shopper for the AMA investigating complaints about refrigerated medical instruments, but my visceral reaction…that quickening of breath and a surprised internal inventory of past responses that were no longer viable really set me to thinking about how our work defines us, or we THINK our work defines us, in ways large and small.

I was watching a TED talk this evening that really put everything into a handy little box for me.  

https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

Maybe it is the malleability of the brain unburdened by workaday concerns, or the effect of soaking in the hot tub listening to the Grateful Dead sing about Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never ever land, but this theory of conditional reality really appeals to me today. I’ve got a lot invested in this idea of the thoughtful approach being the right one, of trusting in my instincts to find the right who, what, when and where of my next employer. This time I am afforded to evaluate my current and future state is immeasurably valuable, and I plan to take full advantage of it…to listen closely to the right people, to look at companies that make the annual “Best Places to Work” list without first hustling to the annual comp portion of every job description. 

Rather than scour the job boards to play key word search bingo all day, I find myself warming to this unorthodox approach. What if I alert the people with whom I’d worked, the folks who make work less work? What if they might, through some cosmic coincidence, know of a role for me that will allow me to learn to play the French horn during surface intervals of my new dive photography job? It could happen. After all, we are ultimately responsible for our own reality, right?

Point is, that’s kind of the point. We each are responsible for the way with think about what work means to us, what we mean to that work and the results it produces, and how we feel when the alarm goes off every morning. How we go about translating these thoughts and feelings into action on our own behalf on the hunt for a good job will determine how happy we are when we land. I myself plan to continue to celebrate unorthodoxy, to embrace the joy of the hunt, to take the road that is less traveled.