An A to Z of Unemployment

For 15 months after graduation I was a NEET. A ‘Not in Employment, Education, or Training’. It’s not a time I reminisce about, but as every writer knows, periods of despair are always worth mining for potential literary product.

What follows is an A to Z of different aspects of unemployment. Or, on what it was like to be unemployed in a particular place (northern England) at a particular time (2019 and 2020), the second half of it spent in COVID lockdown.

During, I lived wit h my parents and they supported me. So mine was a privileged unemployment. Long-term (Google says the definition is 12+ months of) joblessness can for some mean homelessness, debt, illegal activity to get by, suicide. I was lucky to avoid all that. What I’ve written is more scatterbrained than I planned, but hopefully it gives insight to unemployment, both psychological and social.

Even pre-COVID, the modern jobseeker’s life was a motley of screens. Laptops, desktops, phones. It has to be, because the modern jobseeker’s life is a private bureaucracy: it is a career of monotonous questionnaires, reading through the management newspeak of job adverts, a lifetime’s events flattened down into a CV’s Skills and Experience section, the ceaseless updating of jobseeker profiles. Always at the ready to initiate your ‘phone voice’ when employers unexpectedly buzz you throughout the day. The fake happy of company websites (‘we’re one big family here at Sainsbury’s’). The Situational Judgement Tests, on which you will eventually learn to answer the questions not as yourself but as the automaton you know the employer wishes you to be. The tyranny of having to be a ‘well-rounded person’. There’s something clinical about it all; a dull pain, like toothache.

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