My 10 Year Job Hunt
I’m just a young adult woman trying to figure out exactly what I was destined to do in this lifetime.
Dear City Girl,
Now that the winter weather is behind us, the season of weak men are upon us. To the New York city girls, look your meanest, be undistracted and walk that tough girl walk. Scream loudly, be rude, stay safe. Start carrying a baseball bat. Or put that 40oz Stanley Cup to good use. (Seriously)
Looking for a job when you’re a multipotentialite? Are you also in the deep pits of self-doubt and existential questioning in your attempt to pick apart the difference between a career choice and a hobby?
Multipotentialite is a term coined by Emilie Wapnick to describe individuals with many interests and creative pursuits. I have personally only ever seen it as a pro to being someone with many passions. It enriches your life and injects it with dynamism. Does it not? What I failed to consider until I “became an adult” and had to take my place in society is that our linear world expects the same predictability from us. If being human is to think and feel and create and experience, then what society wants is for all that being to perform tasks and be reliable and produce results. Our transition into industrialisation created The Machine Era and the Hybrid Sapien who welded his tools to produce at astonishing rates and qualities. The digital revolution propelled humanity into another realm of production where we began to all become producers, curators and vendors of a virtual life, seemingly just as real as any physical existence.
The movement from industrialization to digitalization in this sense allowed us to produce more of everything with greater efficiency and efficacy than ever before. Yet why do so many of us still feel as if all we do is work? These tools we’ve invented, such demonstrations of our intellectual prowess, do they work for us or us for them? Who are we working for, ultimately?
Belgium-American psychotherapist Esther Perel has a description that I have heard her circulate in many interviews and talks. She says that before, when most of the world subscribed to a religion that emphasized an afterlife, we understood that here, on Earth, is where we suffered in order to reach paradise afterwards. In the modern age, where secularism has gone rampant, we now demand that the present, our conscious life, gives us the attainment we were previously seeking in religion and the life after. I have significantly simplified her argument but this is one key takeaway I keep pondering over. It seems to suggest a sort of inevitability of mundanity.
I have been on a job search for the last 10 years. In this time, I’ve studied photography, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and French. I have worked in education, media, consulting, and hospitality in various roles involving to a greater and lesser extent the use of technologies and machines. I have never held the same job for longer than 1.5 years and I have never worked an office job for longer than 4 months. I have, however, lived in 5 metropolitan cities spanning 3 continents and speak 3 languages. Who am I in this society? I don’t represent the norm but I also am just a person. Do I count as a Hybrid Sapien who works with video editing programs and takes analog images and writes with online documents? I feel like I’ve been at a buffet of work experiences and I’m having my fill but it’s time now to “grow up” and “get serious” and just do one thing. This world, diverse, kaleidoscopic and ever changing, holds a myriad of human cities, borders around tall artifacts, that demand singularity. Esther Perel didn’t say anything about life having to be a certain way even if she did allude to the improbability of work being transcendent. I have often wondered if I should just give it all up and live in a caravan out in the countryside where I can evade this manmade matrix we keep working for. If we have such intellect, why are we not using the tools we’ve created, systems we designed, to work for us?
My current solution, a hodgepodge of ideas that sometimes work out and sometimes don’t, is to keep doing what makes sense in terms of honoring the humanity within us. I know I’m not by any means a typical case but I’ve had to let go of so many ideas surrounding normalcy that I realized that they were paradigms largely built around work. We go to school to find work afterwards. I went to school thinking the point was to learn about something that interested me. Everyone keeps asking me “What I do in life” “What do I do for a living” and “What do I want to do here”. I still don’t know. I thought that if I found work that was meaningful to me that it would make the half of my waking life I’m supposed to dedicate to it worth it. In reality, I am still seeking. I am seeking that piece of transcendence in my work. This process feels like anything but mundane.
It’s the striving that counts, the reaching for fulfillment, mundane or otherwise, and resting assured despite uncertainty.
I think we just try things and see where they go. I don’t know that anybody really knows what work is supposed to mean to them. We are all supposed to spend 8 hours a day doing something in contribution to something else. At least at a restaurant, the goal was always clear. We provide a culinary experience that we hope warrants a monetary reward. When you’re a teacher, you shape the minds of the future. In this type of work, even when you’re working for someone else (the students, the parents, the school, the society, humanity), don’t you also work for yourself? How meaningful, to disperse knowledge. And how do you know, if you thought you wanted to be a teacher, or a doctor, or a shop owner, that you’re meant to do this as a job?
You dip your toes into it. You start by volunteering or finding someone you can help or assist and just seeing how you feel about the work and the field and if it’s worth continuing for you. There likely isn’t one sole answer, especially if you have many interests. Even if we don’t do something for work, we can still find meaning in doing that thing. We might not be able to bring down the matrix but we can shift paradigms. If we do what brings us meaning, we reclaim the power of our tools. They work for us to create meaning. When we take the untraditional path, we are in our own way saying that our potential, that which has yet to manifest, is worth taking the risk.
Even as our work doesn’t speak to our values, we can still be in touch with the things that matter most to us as we strive for work better suited to us. Here are some things I would love to have become my new ideas of normalcy:
Taking time to figure it out should be measured in years or even decades
Sometimes we feel lost on a search because we are still trying
Tiny trickles in one direction come together to form a river - not everything I do has to be great, I can do many small, almost imperceptible things that culminate into something meaningful
Just because someone has had a “stable” job for a while does not mean they’re happy
In order fo me to want to work I have to make it work for me
Earning potential is only one measurement of competence
Perceptions of allure rarely indicate a glamorous experience - in work and other aspects of life
It’s the striving that counts, the reaching for fulfillment, mundane or otherwise, and resting assured despite uncertainty. It takes time, mental fortitude and an ability to not give two f*cks about what everyone else has to say about it. In the end we’re just trying to reconcile the complex and often contradictory nature of the human experience by taking steps towards meaning.
Written by Elena Chen
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Recent reads that might be of interest:
What Americans can learn from Denmark via Changing the Channel by
: We Don't Need 'Self-Help,' We Need SupportThe more truer story on the House and Murder of Gucci: I didn’t really care for the Ridley Scott/Lady Gaga film version, especially since I watched the documentary on the Gucci empire and tragedy that was once upon a time on Prime. The overacting of the accent was too much for me, didn’t even finish it.
The rare Phoebe Philo - New York Times interview.
SUPERFAN is an art exhibition in Amsterdam where artists are invited to pay homage to their idols. Artists such as John Yuyi (she was our very 1st artist interview btw) and Sarah De Vos to name a few.
Drawing For Nothing: This e-zine is for artists by artists who have created amazing works for films that were never used.
NOW HIRING
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5 GOOD BOOKS I WANT TO READ THIS SPRING
Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn based on this description; “Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money,” - this feels like a fun read.
No Judgement by Lauren Oyler - critical essays, so this book will make me think about things.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill - the title, the cover, the font all foreshadows this to be a future Netflix limited series: “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.”
Room For Rent by Noelle West Ilhi - a thriller, fast-read novel with the majority of reviews advising to read this with the lights on. Noted.
Maame by Jessica George - Only heard wonderful reviews of this book, “funny, heartbreaking and unforgettable.”
To the good men in New York City (you know who you are), the good brother, guy friend, boyfriend, neighborhood bartender - offer to walk with your women friends and colleagues. Look out for them and protect them as best you can. Ladies, don’t be afraid or shy to ask for their help right now.
Stay safe and help others,
DNAMAG