From finance to academia, on radio and TV and even in a Kings Cross sex shop, I’ve had a diverse range of jobs, most largely freelance, casual or contract.
I loved doing new things, learning new skills and meeting new people. I was so busy for so long, with so many contracts overlapping each other, that I often didn’t have much time for anything else. By August 2023, I was burnt out.
For the first time in years, I didn’t have any work lined up. I thought I’d take a month to catch up on lots of things I’d put aside amid the demands of deadlines: decluttering, writing, taking some time to reset.
I thought it might be a good time to refresh my job application skills, zhoosh up my resume and see what was out there.
I registered on all the usual jobs sites and upgraded my LinkedIn account, started updating my resume and website and started sending out applications. I was realistic: I didn’t think every application would be considered, and I knew it was a numbers game.
After about six weeks, in which I’d submitted about a couple of applications a week with no response at all, I started to worry. For many, the silly season starts after the Melbourne Cup, when we all rush towards summer, but for freelancers, it feels like a long winter, where commissions and contracts dry up until after Australia Day.
I contacted former managers and colleagues to see if they had any last minute end-of-year work, but many reported that, thanks to interest rate rises, work was drying up for them too, and many were starting to lay staff off. Many government departments weren’t hiring contractors as they were now considered consultants. And with changes to employment laws to make casuals permanent after 12 months, many organisations stopped hiring altogether.
And that’s not including nonexistent “ghost jobs”, or those which I’d discover had already been awarded internally, wasting pointless hours and sometimes days of preparation. I was often working full work days on applications to often short deadlines. The attic remained cluttered, my novel unwritten.
As I headed into freelance winter, I tried not to worry. I was lucky: we had some savings to draw on. My wife was still working and manages our finances brilliantly. And we’d fixed our mortgage just before interest rates went up.
But if there’s one job worse than not having a job, it’s looking for a job: stressful and boring, with neither satisfaction nor renumeration.
While many job ads called for multi-skilled applicants who could perform a number of often discrete roles, I was often told that I was overqualified: something akin to being told you’re too good-looking to be swiped right. It’s nice to hear but no consolation – and something I suspect is code for “too old”.
Despite friends and former colleagues expressing surprise I hadn’t landed anything yet – and hiring managers telling me I was an excellent candidate – after more than 90 applications that yielded only a handful of interviews, I was stricken with terror.
Our savings rapidly dwindling – even as I was finally confident enough about my skills and aptitude – the endless rejection was confidence sapping.
What work, if any, could I get? Would I ever work again? What was wrong with me?
Worst was the stigma around unemployment. It’s wonderful that we’ve moved beyond the silence around mental health and destigmatised it by openly discussing it. But admitting you’re unemployed, as opposed to being “between jobs” or on “a career break”, is still a fraught subject. For most of that year, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to burden them with my troubles. And, to be honest, I felt ashamed.
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While many I finally revealed my joblessness to were sympathetic, some offered platitudes, a few inferred it was my fault, and others changed the subject, as though my misfortune was too frightening to even contemplate.
The first question to start a conversation is often “what do you do?”. We are what we do – I’m a writer, you’re a plumber. Some of us have our job title as a prefix – doctor, professor, captain. And we still think of our jobs as our “living”.
What does that make those of us who can’t find work?
Many positions I applied for had hundreds of applicants. And I know many people my age who’d reached the top of their professions, only to find that they couldn’t find anything for months, even as many Gen Xers like me will probably – thanks to low super balances caused by relentless automation, casualisation and wage stagnation for most of our working lives – never enjoy the retirement our Boomer parents do, and will probably have to keep working until we cannot physically do so.
Although we may measure success in terms of job titles and salary packages, that difficult year I learned a lot about what it really means.
Finding the resilience to keep going – with my family and friends’ support – has made me stronger, a little wiser, and most importantly, more compassionate for those in the same situation.
Still, although I’m lucky that I did end up landing an interesting job, I’m more conscious than ever of the precarity of even so-called “stable” employment. And with the looming spectre of a Trumpcession, there might be many more of us out of work.
Perhaps now is the time to destigmatise being unemployed, and to distinguish who we are from what we do.
