What the Unemployed Do

It's amazing what the economic recession is creating among the creative classes. While so many people are being driven from jobs and homes with pitchforks and burning torches, there are some who use it as an opportunity to do a complete 180 in their workplace attitudes.

The "How To Keep Your Job" advice columns boldly declare that in order to keep your job, you should work harder and for longer hours and for less pay. And us white collar die-hards do just that, and then lose our jobs anyway. We enter the ranks of America's jobless with the good idea that those advice columnists are lying assholes. And we also enter those ranks with the good idea that maybe it's time to stop working 12-hour days at something we only half care about and to do what we enjoy. Or at least feel proud of.

The creative classes are using lay-offs as an excuse to do something different. Instead of settling for a job at Pizza Hut, we are going back to school, changing career paths, going for something a lot less stressful, a lot lower paying, and way more fun. We are using unemployment as an excuse to do those things our teachers, our parents, our significant others, our bosses used to tell us we couldn't do because we had responsibility and jobs and we had to act like grown-ups now. Things we would never have done had the pink slips passed us over and we, thusly tormented, remained chained to our cubicles. Several of my unemployed and well-educated friends are gong back to school, to get yet another degree in folklore, in metaphysics, in creative writing. One friend started a white-water rafting business in India. My fiance is thinking more and more about starting a bar (in this small town that is severely lacking in bars, as is 100% agreed upon). Another friend got a chauffeur's license, after spending half of his life as a human resources lackey, and is thinking of beginning his world anew as a fitness guru. In my newly discovered spare life, I have decided to finally sit down and write that travel novel (inspired by my new selection of Flamenco music and fine wine) that has been in the works for only about seven years. Some of us are joining the Peace Corps, some of us have taken jobs as travel bloggers for obscure tourism companies in Ecuador, some of us have taken advantage of the new free time to sell everything we own and use the cash to hop a boat to Vietnam to weather out the red tide of financial bust.

We struggle. We count our pennies. We dip into savings. We look into downsizing our extravagant lifestyles. We don't sleep at night. We sometimes take an extra drink in the afternoon and we sometimes snap at loved ones unfairly and we sometimes break down in tears of frustration. We write and rewrite and rearrange resumes to make it look like we have experience in whatever field we choose to look into today. But if not for this, would we ever have gotten that push we needed to do all the bizarre somethings into which we've now found ourselves? Would our passports, our pens, our imaginative business plans, our daydreaming, our awesome-yet-repressed driving skills still be on the selves, abandoned and rusty with neglect?