Is There Life After Unemployment?

There was a small headline on the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine that read, “Don’t Worry, There Is Life After High School.”  That got me to wondering: is there life after unemployment?

When you’ve been unemployed for a long time, unemployment becomes your life.  You make the initial lifestyle and psychological adjustments to your new state and transition to the unemployed life.  Gradually you develop an everyday routine that revolves around the search for work.  Eventually, at least for me, it becomes hard to remember life being any other way.

It’s strange.  I try to imagine what it would be like to have a job again, but it’s difficult to conjure up an image.  Maybe it’s because I don’t know where it would be or what I’d be doing or for whom I’d be working, so there’s nothing concrete to daydream about.

And unemployment isn’t all bad.  I like not having to get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning during the week.  I like being able to schedule appointments during the day.  I like not having to run errands on Saturdays, when the working people are crowding the roads and stores, running theirs.  I do like some things about being at home.

Mostly, though, I worry.  I worry about my brain losing its workplace edge (if you don’t use it, you lose it).  I worry that I won’t have enough money saved for my later years because I’m tapping into it now.  I worry that I’m becoming so set in my ways that it’ll be a tough adjustment if and when I do start a new job.

And then sometimes I think, maybe the way I’m living now is the way my life is going to be.  At some point, maybe I’ll stop considering myself unemployed and think of myself as what – giving up?  Accepting my situation?  An early retiree?

I don’t like the idea of giving up at all.  I’m not a quitter, so I’m not about to just stop trying to find a job.  To me that would feel like accepting defeat, like acknowledging that I can’t succeed at finding work.  I honestly don’t believe this.  I won’t allow myself to, at least not yet.

Accepting my situation, on the other hand, does have a certain appeal on those days when I feel like I’m beating my head against a wall with nothing to show for it.  Instead of the endless exhausting cycle of hope and disappointment, I can “accept the things I cannot change” and move on.

But that only brings me back to: move on to what?  Is there life after unemployment?  I feel like I’m going around in circles here. 

Maybe I’ll never be able to picture life after unemployment until I stop looking for a job.  Only then will I be able to focus on creating my post-employment life.  Right now I won’t consider that I won’t find a job and I refuse to stop looking.  But because I feel this way, I can’t focus on what life without a job would look like.

It’s weird.  I can’t picture working, and I can’t picture not working.  Maybe I’ll just wake up one day and picture retirement instead.  Or am I retired already?

Is any of this making any sense?  Personally, I’m feeling a little confused now.  This not having a job can really mess with your thinking.  Or maybe I'm just tired.