How to make the most of unemployment

In case you haven’t heard, the job market isn’t great. I have plenty of friends dealing with unemployment and underemployment, especially after graduation. Statistics say that this is not just anecdotal: recent grads are facing their worst non-COVID market since the 2008 financial crisis.

Maybe more frightening is the decline of labor force participation. Though unemployment isn’t breaking historic records (even for recent grads) we’re seeing many people simply dropping out of the workforce altogether. Men especially are leaving at unprecedented rates—for men over 20, participation levels are nearly as low as April 2020.

Plenty of people are slipping into unemployment and never getting out. If you run into a bout of joblessness, how can you avoid this? How can you keep your life moving forward?

I’m going to assume that you don’t have the resources to go on some life-changing journey of self-discovery. Most people out of work probably can’t go hike the Appalachian Trail on the spot. If you can, more power to you. But a majority of unemployed people will need to make the most of it at home.

How can you do this? Well, read more.

I hope that I can offer some better advice—something as practical as possible, though I’m constitutionally impractical.

This is a bit of a joke, of course—you’d never need to worry about optimizing unemployment if you could just get a job.

But there’s a real difference between unemployment looking for work and unemployment resigned to joblessness. You’ll notice an unsurprising correlation between lackadaisical job searches and a lack of effort elsewhere in life. Playing ten hours of Minecraft a day rarely lends itself to a spirited job hunt.

This isn’t the whole story, though. I think there’s some chicken-and-egg confusion here: do people struggle to get jobs because they waste their time, or do they waste their time because they’ve given up on finding a job? I genuinely believe it’s often the latter: when you stop thinking about your future, you become disorganized in the present.

“Thinking about your future” doesn’t (and shouldn’t) just mean figuring out a job. But without that practical sense of direction, routine quickly falls apart. If you’re actively working to find a job, you can apply a coherent narrative to this time of your life: you’re headed in an actual direction, though the destination is unclear.

Alright, my advice isn’t just to read more, but I’d still like to mention it. Almost all wasted time is wasted in front of some screen or another. If you don’t want your time at home to amount to a long series of YouTube binges and Instagram doomscrolling, you need to find a better option.

Reading is one of these, though it’s not the only one. What’s important is finding something to do. You have to go into each day with an option ready at hand.

You probably won’t have things to do at all hours of the day. Maybe you’re the kind of person who can golf, hike, or lift every morning without fail, but you’ll still be stuck with plenty of hours with nothing to do. You need an alternative to your phone. That doesn’t have to be reading: maybe it’s art, music, or a craft. But sheer willpower isn’t enough.

A friend of mine once joked that everyone’s a morning person, though some people haven’t yet realized it. Unemployment might be the best time to figure it out.

Staying up all night is almost always some sort of procrastination. When you start a daily habit of procrastinating—pushing off sleep until you just have no choice—that will trickle down into the rest of life. Unfortunately, it’s easy to put things off indefinitely during unemployment. The only deadlines you have are your own.

Waking up in the morning is the opposite: a simple form of routine that engenders routine throughout life. It forces you to organize your day and to get things done in time.

And, of course, staying in your house all day will nearly guarantee that you lose direction. Go to the library, go to a cafe, meet friends, take a hike—just don’t collapse in on yourself.

I’m hoping that I’m far removed from my next round of unemployment. But at least I have my own flawless advice to follow.

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