Nine-to-Five

I have become one of those people with a routine. Not because I have somewhere to be every morning, but because the absence of one turns out to be surprisingly difficult to romanticise. Every productivity influencer on the internet will tell you routines are liberating. They reduce decision fatigue. They help you optimise your day. They create discipline. I, on the other hand, have discovered that routines are mostly useful because they stop you from accidentally opening LinkedIn before brushing your teeth.

I wake up around ten these days. Not eleven, because that feels irresponsible. Not eight, because there is genuinely nowhere I need to be. Ten occupies a very convenient moral middle ground. It says, “I am between jobs,” instead of, “I have completely surrendered to circumstance.” I shower, walk my dog, and make an iced latte. The dog, by the way, has adapted remarkably well to my unemployment. If anything, she seems thrilled by the development. Her work-life balance has improved considerably. Then comes what I have started thinking of as my administrative hours. I open LinkedIn. Someone is delighted to announce they have started a new role.  Someone else is humbled to share that after an incredible journey, they are joining an even more incredible team. Then I open my email. “We regret to inform you…” “We appreciate your interest…” “Unfortunately…” There is something almost poetic about receiving a rejection email immediately after reading someone else’s celebration post.

LinkedIn and Outlook have quietly become the angel and devil on my shoulders. One says, “Look what could happen.” The other says, “Not today.”

I spend the next couple of hours sending applications and follow-up emails. I have become strangely good at writing emails to people who may never read them. Law school should probably include a module called Professionally Following Up Without Sounding Desperate. Once all the emails are sent, something odd happens. The work is over. The waiting isn’t. This is, I think, the strangest part about job hunting. Nobody tells you how little of it is actually applying for jobs. Most of it is just existing. Today I existed from a cafe - the scenery changed, the feeling, however, remained the exact same.

So I read. For hours. Partly because I enjoy it, but partly because I have convinced myself that this is the last stretch of my life where reading in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon isn’t a luxury. I say this every afternoon, almost as if the universe is waiting for me to finish one more chapter before emailing me an offer letter. It hasn’t yet. This optimism has, unfortunately, become my book club partner’s problem. We agreed on a reading schedule. I ignored it. Not intentionally. I simply keep finishing the books. Apparently pacing yourself is an important part of a book club. Who knew?

Eventually I drag myself to the gym because I have decided there are certain combinations a person should never allow. Unemployed and unfit feels like one of them. I’ve also started running twice a week. I hate running. Which is precisely why I do it. At the moment, I need at least one thing in my life that rejects me to my face. Running does that consistently.

In the evening, I make another iced latte because apparently unemployment has no department monitoring caffeine consumption. Sometimes I open a dating app. Someone asks, “How was your day?” Or, worse, “What do you do?” This is where things get complicated. Because technically, I apply for jobs. But saying that out loud makes it sound less like an occupation and more like a hobby that keeps hurting my feelings. So I close the app. In a beautiful display of poetic justice, I ghost them exactly the way employers ghost me. It isn’t mature. But it does feel symmetrical.

At night, I watch a show while feeling guilty for watching a show. Which is ridiculous. There is nothing else left to do. Every application has been sent. Every follow-up has been followed up. The guilt survives anyway. Perhaps that’s what unemployment really is. Not the absence of work. The inability to convince yourself you’ve done enough, even after you’ve done everything you can.

Tomorrow I will wake up at ten.

Walk the dog.

Make the latte.

Refresh LinkedIn.

Refresh Outlook.

Refresh my hopes with both.

And repeat the entire process until one of those emails finally starts with something other than “We regret to inform you.” Until then, I suppose my full-time job is waiting.

I’ve been thinking about something I read once about Dua Lipa. Apparently, she reached a point where she became slightly superstitious about writing songs because too many of the things she’d written about seemed to find their way into her life. She started being careful with what she put on paper, just in case. I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s one of those stories the internet collectively decides to believe because it’s nicer that way. But I think about it every time I sit down to write.

If words really do have a habit of catching up with us, I’d quite like this piece to age badly.