Learning to Enjoy the View ☀️
My unemployment, toxic productivity, and meaning-making in late-stage capitalism
For the first time in two and a half years, I had nothing to do. If you know me, you know I’ll twist myself into a pretzel and do a double backflip before I decide to ‘relax,’ a word that I’ve deemed as foreign to me as it is negligible in the face of my Google Calendar, scheduled to the hour.
I was laid off from my job in January but hold the apologies please, I was more than ready to go. I’ve always had a hard time knowing when to say goodbye, so much so that the end of a 6-week pottery class makes me teary eyed and a 7-month relationship will leave me heartbroken. In both professional and personal, I won’t walk away unless I know I absolutely have to leave.
At first, much like with my breakup, I felt liberated. Untethered. Manically joyful to the point I was worried about it… Why does this feel so good? So it was no surprise, then, that when the fateful email came, the Zoom call made, and the viral TikTok posted, that the feeling I primarily experienced upon being laid off was not fear, but relief.
January, winter’s bitterest and darkest hour, felt for perhaps the first time not daunting but incredibly hopeful (an insane statement coming from me, given I have long suffered from seasonal depression and see spring and summer as my lifeline). I remember skipping home from the L train on a Sunday night at 11 PM, a smile plastered across my cheeks as the wind whipped at my face.
I was 24 with no job to report to the next morning, no boyfriend to FaceTime when I got home. I was lucky enough to have the financial security of a generous severance, and it was early enough in my unemployment that in lieu of fear, there was hope. I count myself very grateful for that. It was one of those moments where I was acutely aware of how little responsibility I had and how short-lived that reality would be. I collapsed onto my couch, cheeks flushed with the evening’s chill and my wired headphones tangled into a knot so erratic my friend asked me if it was ‘a new statement necklace.’ I was giddy with the idea that this would be a time I looked back on a year, 5 years, 10 years from now and think she had no idea how good she had it.
That lasted all of 10 days. Or more accurately, 10 hours. Suddenly unclasped from the stable outline of a 9-to-5, the Big Brother of my K-12 and college existence of methodic schedule and order, I felt deeply overwhelmed by the amount of time available to me. I soon became fixated on how to maximize and optimize this ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity.
I wasn’t alone in my ‘layoff era.’ My company let go a third of its employees and layoffs across the industry were, and continue to be, abundant. Some friends were booking trips half-way across the world, launching creative endeavors in full-force, or deciding to put the whole ‘corporate America thing’ on hold for a while and try their hand at working in a patisserie. It all sounded so romantic, so fascinating. But in reality, I felt anxious spending money on my daily necessities (even with my severance!), let alone vacations or passion projects, knowing that the security of a semi-monthly paycheck wouldn’t come for who knows how long.
As someone whose anxiety festers in the absence of action, I quickly got to work. Suddenly, my completely open calendar filled with networking calls and interviews and scrolling-- endless scrolling. I swapped out TikTok and Hinge for LinkedIn and lay awake at 2 AM screen-shotting job descriptions and refreshing my email inbox for an update on my applications.
I count myself lucky that in this case, the anxiety and quest for control led me to two amazing job opportunities. On the outside, it looked like I had ‘crushed’ my layoff, if there was such a thing as that. And on paper, I did. But it would be remiss for me to say that the way I went about it wasn’t fueled by negative self talk, insecurity, doubt, and fear.
I took job interviews at the airport (and not in the lounge, at the gate). I sent feverish LinkedIn messages while only half paying attention to The Bachelor with my friends (sorry, Julia… I know I was the one who said I wanted to watch together). When my mom spent several weeks in town, visiting friends and family, she told me I feel like we haven’t really gotten to connect, despite the fact that we shared my studio apartment for a third of her trip. It was in that moment that I realized I haven’t really gotten to connect with me, either.
When it became clear that no, I wasn’t going to be unemployed forever (duh, but negative self talk is a bitch, let me tell you) and that actually, I was going to have a job offer within weeks of being laid off, my all-out fixation dwindled on operation ‘Somewhere New by Q2.’ (Yes, I really did brand my unemployment with a slogan… I do work in marketing after all).
The meetings on my calendar dwindled, and I replaced the holds for ‘Mentorship Check-In with Ashley’ or ‘Third Round Interview’ to a long laundry list of imaginary ‘to-do’s.’ When I would sleep in until 11:30 AM and wake-up with an overwhelming sense of guilt, my friend Katie would remind me ‘You did it Joe… there’s nothing else for you to do but rest.’ Somehow, accomplishing the one ‘task’ of unemployment, i.e., securing a new role, wasn’t enough to warrant rest in my book. My journal and iPhone notes filled up with long lists of things I felt I ‘had to do,’ and I spent every day trying to piece together meaning when I had internalized the idea that a day without productivity of some kind was a day, an hour, a minute, wasted.
I wanted to do everything. I wanted to do nothing. And every day, when I crawled into bed for several hours of mandatory scrolling, I felt that I had done it all wrong.
Last night, I met up with a friend of mine I only see ‘quarterly’ (can you tell that corporate speak has me in a chokehold?) Naturally, we had a lot to catch up on and I felt myself, as I had done in my head countless times since I was laid off, deliver a resume of my unemployment period. What I had done, what I hadn’t.
It’s now 2 weeks before I start a job I’m so damn proud of getting, that every time I think of it, I feel giddy with excitement. I’m working at a company I had counted myself out of, a place I thought ‘No of course that’s cool, but that’s not a job for someone like me.’ But it was. It is.
But as soon as I signed my contract for my April start date, a new, soul-crushing anxiety enveloped me and nearly robbed me of my excitement. What should I do with these next 2 weeks? My mind flipped into overdrive, a code my body and brain could run automatically, no directions needed, and I scanned the buckets of my life for where to next turn my attention. Should I be writing more? Should I be going to the gym more? Should I try to ‘get a boyfriend’ (as if they’re something you can order on Amazon; trust me I’ve done that before and it does not work). With one ‘project’ completed, I found myself asking what I needed to accomplish next. Nicole reminded me that I have built a beautiful life for myself, one worth celebrating.
I told her I guess it’s time I learn to enjoy the view.