The 5 Stages of Unemployment

Unemployment is understood only by those who have experienced it for prolonged periods of time.

Our schedule is preplanned for us for years thanks to formal education. We know the start time and the end time of each day up until 12th grade. We don’t have to think about how to fill our days during the school months. I realized the luxury of this after graduating from college. Okay, it was all fun and games, but it just got serious after graduation.

Stage One: Realization of Unemployment

You graduated from college and you’re searching for a job. You’re in active applying mode. You’re signing up to online job boards, applying to jobs via LinkedIn, utilizing your university’s resources… You get invites from a couple places to interview but don’t hear back from them, so you continue to apply.

After a couple months pass to no avail, little-by-little, you start to understand what it means when someone says they’re unemployed. You understand the feeling of that condition.

Stage Two: Boredom

We’ve been dreaming of never having to work during our school years. Dreams of becoming rich so our life can be a never-ending summer vacation until the day we die. Unemployment is quick to teach us that this dream, even if it were to become true out of the blue, isn’t good for the well-being of human beings.

However much we might hate our jobs, we need to be busy with work. We need to produce things and create value for this world so we feel a sense of belonging. Unemployment teaches us this the hard way. But, that work doesn’t have to be work as the word is commonly used to refer to employment.

Nevertheless, a period of unemployment culminating with employment gets the engine running so you understand that you need to be busy, but with what, is the question. Since many of us work in jobs we don’t like, trying to get meaning out of paid work puts a big burden and raises our expectations about employment.

Think of a blue collar factory worker working because he has to work and a doctor saving lives. I highly doubt that they value their employment the same way. But that doesn’t mean that the blue collar worker can’t add meaning to the world during his own time.

We diverged from the topic a little so I want to get our attention back to the stages of unemployment. After consuming endless hours of digital content, waking up and going to bed when feel like it, and living the way that we want to live; the unemployed person comes to realize that this isn’t the life he had imagined when he was dreaming of not working. He becomes bored and wants to do something with this life.

He wants to be productive, create, be valued and respected in society. This realization plays a key role in how an unemployed person starts to perceive work. He isn’t the same person anymore who was dreaming of an everlasting summer vacation.

Stage Three: The Dark Period

Although you’re continuing to apply to places, you still haven’t found employment. This takes a toll on your psych. You feel like you’re losing your head. You get depressed because nothing is going your way. You hate the world and the people in it. You hate your loved ones, especially your loved ones. You feel like nobody understands you.

Life starts to become meaningless to you. Your psychology weakens and you easily get upset at minor things. The worst of it all, you think this stage is here to stay and you will never get out of it. You feel trapped in a room that has no door.

Stage Four: Hello Employment

Then everything changes when you find that job. Your psych improves, your outlook on life becomes optimistic, you set goals for yourself, you dream, you enjoy being alive, you feel useful and valued. You obtain a social status within society and attain a feeling of belonging. You become ‘somebody’ from a ‘nobody’.

(I don’t agree with that last thought. I wrote it because that’s how the employed person feels after he finds employment after a long period of unemployment . In my opinion, work doesn’t make the man. I don’t care if you earn six figures. If you’re harming the world and its inhabitants, that doesn’t mean your ‘somebody’ and entitled to respect from society. Your values, virtues, ethics, culture and how you treat the world and its inhabitants make you into a somebody.)

After about a month passes since you started work, you completely forget about the ‘dark period’ and it seems as if you always had this job.

Stage Five: “I Hate My Job.”

“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.” ― J.M. Barrie

After you work for a couple months, you start to perceive the flaws of the employment system. How everything that was said to you in college is a lie. You learn how different and brutal the real world is.

Then you start hating work and everything about it and want to go back to your good old unemployed days. The reminiscing makes you think that you didn’t spend your jobless days wisely. But this, is another topic that needs to be written for another day.

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

If you want to take a look at my other writings on Illumination: