A couple of months out of work, during a time I like to call my “wilderness months” (in homage to Anthony Bourdain or whoever coined the term I’m paraphrasing; I’ll assume it was him), I had something of an epiphany. Or maybe it was more like a moment of madness.
I was walking around up the street from my barely-affordable apartment on a trek to a grocery store to determine the week’s rations. As I passed by the other shops on the street, a strange realization crept in. Everyone in every one of those places had a job!
There was a hair salon where they employed hair stylists. There was a restaurant with cooks and servers. There was a drug store with cashiers and pharmacists. EVERYONE EVERYWHERE had a job.
Except for me.
Making it into the grocery store, I noticed the employees at the registers, behind the deli and bakery counters, stocking the shelves, cleaning the floors, making announcements over the PA system, arranging the fruit…my lord, the fruit! There were growers, pickers, shippers, marketers, sellers and buyers, all of whose jobs led to that one banana lying in front of me among a mountain of other bananas. The people involved in making a TV dinner or a carton of orange juice boggled my mind.
For the first time in my life, I walked out of a grocery store, knowing I desperately needed groceries, empty-handed.
I was shocked. Here I was, pouring over every job site I could think of, floundering desperately for work, when there were thousands of opportunities I hadn’t considered! How many minutes, hours and days had I wasted looking for a job, passing hundreds of thousands of other opportunities by? I trudged back to the apartment, laid down, and had a small nervous breakdown.
Within a week, I had a new job.
I had reached the point where the job search had become too daunting and life-consuming. After I reached that point, I took a step back to relax and realized that it would be humanly impossible to apply to all of those jobs. Instead, I focused on what work I knew I could do, and went after the type of career I wanted with more determination and focus.
So if you feel that the job search is becoming unbearable and that you don’t know what to do, take a few minutes, hours or days to stop and calm down. And try to avoid the grocery store.
