Yes, the recession sucks. For everyone. Not just for the newly graduated who are spending their first few post-college moments wondering why they spent four years and an obscene amount of money earning a degree that won’t, as it turns out, guarantee them a job so they can pay off those student loans. Reality, as I have learned after 35 years on the planet, is rarely subtle. It almost always comes in shockingly large, crotch-kicking doses that we coddled human beings tend not to be prepared for.

Which is to say, suck it up, grab onto those boot straps, keep using your brain, and just find a damn job. The job you find will almost certainly not be the career-launching moment you’d envisioned for yourself four years ago. Too bad. Times are tough. Aim for any job that falls under the general category of your dream career, make some money, accrue some experience. Don’t be sad and whiny and pathetic and sit on your (parent’s) couch and bitch about how effing brilliant you are and how heartbreaking it is that no one will hire you.

No one is hiring anyone, and any companies that are hiring have a whole slew of recently laid-off, older, educated, certainly smart and definitely experienced, people to choose from. And that is not you. You, my adorable little newbie, are still wet behind your brilliant little ears, and even though your brain is packed full of ridiculous volumes of facts and knowledge, and even though you were a technology whisperer when you were still pooping in your pants, you have no experience in the real world. Which is why you’re crying on your parent’s couch and don’t yet understand how to buckle down and get it done (as it were).

Again I say: most humans do not enjoy reality. Animals probably don’t either, but they have always resided in the nasty, brutish and short state of nature and don’t have the questionably useful levels of higher thought that we humans are so fortunate to possess. If animals sat around pondering the suckiness of reality, they’d be off their guard and would get eaten by all the bigger, less-thinking animals.

The moral being: It’s okay for humans to employ higher thought and ponder the crapshoot that is our reality, but while pondering and thinking, keep moving forward and get a job—almost any job will do at this point—so you can survive in a down economy. Worry about sculpting your career to a state of sublime perfection later; at the moment the fittest will be surviving by adding interesting bullet-points to their résumés.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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