Being Young and Jobless in New York
My worst New York moment came at 8:43 the morning of my birthday, Aug. 19. I had been a New Yorker for less than 48 hours. Four M trains had passed, and not a single E. I would arrive late for the interview, sweaty and unhappy. Unhired, I would be a disconsolate date that evening and confirm my ex-girlfriend's impression that I was too serious to be involved with.
On the subway, too hot, waiting too long for a train-a situation that's more Wednesday night than major crisis. But I was unemployed. What is unemployment? It's something bigger than economics. I was unemployed on purpose: I meant to arrive in New York and make a new life. The city would see my merit and reward it.
The prior two days had been uninterrupted confirmation: the friends I was cat sitting for had cooked an elaborate welcome dinner and Greenpoint, with its riverside graffiti and gorgeous women reading Sartre in cafés, was exactly the New York I had imagined.
The story made New York both judge and perfect wage: a Peter and his heaven. But something strange happened. Despite Greenpoint and rhubarb pie, I moved to New York and found no jobs. I sent 20 resumes to publishing companies, 20 to advertising agencies. I wrote to everyone I knew and heard nothing back. What would it mean to fail in New York? What would it mean to be unemployed in heaven?
For me, it was a catalog of errors: how I stayed up too late reading, how I brought the wrong clothes from Louisiana. How distracted I had been the day before by my slam poet roommate, only reading the first few posts on the company founder's blog. All the mistakes that would keep me from that job and all that had kept me from every other.
What is unemployment? Not the same as idleness. By definition, the idle are not unemployed. To be unemployed, one must want a job, must search without finding, must balance excruciatingly between despair on one side and success on the other.
And how to live, how to be the hero of one's life, without a job? Unemployment requires an explanation, another story, one accounting for every job held by someone other than ourselves. Perhaps I was flawed; perhaps I did not deserve a job. But if I believed that, I would not have been unemployed. I would have given up, lived more or less happily with my parents. I would not have been worrying in Long Island City.
In Tucson or in Dover, there might have been another explanation, I might have given up on the city I was in. Nothing there was right for me. I might have left. But I was in New York-where else could I go? What city had more jobs or better ones? I had no answer.
Had I believed those things, I could not have continued. I would have had to leave New York. To remain, I needed to believe that both I and the city were as we ought to be. I good enough, the city a good judge. But how could I not have a job? Only through my own mistakes. Only if I had done inadequate research, been too brusque in emails, got things wrong.
Each day became a question of how many errors would be made before bed time. I was unemployed for all of three weeks before finding work with a neuromarketing firm. I drank too much, lay in bed, spent too much, threw hours into video games.
What had I discovered? That unemployment is a psychological category masquerading as an economic one. An obligation to fetishize one's errors, in which fervent, swallowing self-doubt is a precondition for continued hope. In three weeks, I became the caricature of unemployment. There are 14 million unemployed in America; they have been so for an average of 33 weeks.
Photo: Corley Miller