The Smartest People I Know Are Unemployed

I had the occasion to go to my former graduate program to receive an award for my dissertation. I had the normal amount of nervousness one has when going to a place you first started going to at age 22, and last frequented age 26-ish. There was also the worry that I would be asked if I was still doing my communications job and if I didn't miss academic life. As the award ceremony turned into a party, I saw people I met eight years ago including my supervisors and some old friends. I really enjoyed seeing them, although part way through I was filled with powerful nostalgia; I felt old and sad. But on this occasion, another ugly feeling transfixed me, unavoidable.

In, definitionally, a room full of PhDs, literally the doctoral student lounge, the overarching conversation seemed to be that no one had a job.

This is up for some debate. Of course, the professors in my program have jobs; one of my professors was discussing the segment of her job that's reviewing the job prospects of students (summary: grim). And most of the students currently in the program, which requires students to work as they study, had jobs. And even many of my fellow graduates had jobs, whether part time, within the department itself, or (a few) actual tenure-track jobs. But most conversations with them went something like this:

Are you going on the market? Y/N

> Regardless of answer: Well, there's no jobs.

> Anecdote from one person to the other about 1) one of the three people we know who got a tenure track job, or 2) a search that had a thousand applicants, ended in days, or was cancelled entirely.

I expected to feel strange for winning an award for a dissertation that hasn't propelled me on the traditional job path and metamorphosed into a monograph on the way. But what I felt stranger about was how even in this celebratory atmosphere, the jobs situation hung thick, so much so that one faculty member mentioned it in a speech. How incredible, that students we are training for jobs that don't exist persevere and thrive anyway, he said. While I admire his outlook, I don't share the positivity: it feels like a grinding, jagged hole in my heart.

When I was in grad school, unemployment was like going down a roller coaster that was going to slam into the ground. Starting slower, then faster and faster. Every year fewer jobs in my field, fewer people I knew getting jobs, and graduation getting closer and closer, until I pulled the rip cord (uh, got a job). I remember the feeling of awful inertia, and that feeling going away is one of the best things my job has afforded me. Even in that job, I sometimes feel like I'm walking on a thin line in a dark forest, whose branches could catch me the wrong way at any moment. (I hope these images aren't hurtful to any currently unemployed readers, by the way. They're just the results of my brain thinking about what snatches up a new person I know every week.)

It's not just PhDs. That's how I lured you in; isn't it disgusting that PhDs can't get employment? But everyone I know around my age has had periods of a few months or more without employment, when they were desperately looking for it. And I'm older than the segment of Gen Z that's really having this problem. Despite my time on the grad school treadmill, I'm the outlier. And if that experience caused me so much pain that I can notice when it's gone, then what must everyone else be feeling?

I got home and immediately saw a Gothamist article about how the median NYC rent is almost twice what my household (of two currently employed people) pays, an amount higher than apartments we'd never qualify for even together. How are people doing this? I want to throw a fit. I only have time after work to write or draw; if I sometimes feel like my talent is draining away from me, how must everyone else feel? How much art and inspiration are we losing? Maybe it's bougie that that's what I'm sad about, and I'm also sad about my friends losing their health insurance. But I spent seven years getting an advanced degree; I'm looking out after it's done to a field (my field, medieval studies) ever more destroyed in terms of jobs and positions even as I felt it becoming more expansive, interdisciplinary, and interesting during the time I spent within it.

I worry that academic writing is going to become what it's become for me: something you do in whatever free time you have, between other tasks, as a hobby, which I'm aware graduate studies already are if you're rich, but for everyone else too. This is ok for me; I have other hobbies and time to do them. But it's disastrous for the field as a whole. And lest we not forget, the same thing is true for journalism, criticism and reviews, and every creative field, gone from being sources of income that also let you spend time being inspired to being things you do for meaning on your break from your job-- if you have one.

If I can really butcher the work of Sianne Ngai, whose book Ugly Feelings was one of the first things I read in my graduate program, what negative and oppressive things are we feeling all around us, all the time, and what are they doing to us? What is it doing to us to either be unemployed or watch everyone around us experiencing some degree of unemployment, and furthermore, as I think it is in academia and journalism, having it be the presumed basis from which conversations about doing the thing begin, the air which we must inhale to begin speaking on the topic? And-- of course it is! Everyone's unemployed!

If you read this far, and if you're dealing with unemployment right now, I'm really sorry.