FUNEMPLOYMENT
So I picked this (article here) up off Digg several months ago and wanted to comment on it then, but ironically I’ve been far too busy to touch it till now. It’s an article all about ‘Funemployment’ which defined in the article is “A period of joblessness that you actually enjoy — maybe you get to lay out, sleep in, work out, read up. It helps to have savings, severance, or an unemployment check to help pay the bills. We’re hearing this word used more and more, especially as people realize they may not be able to find a new job right away, so they might as well try to enjoy the time off.”
I think there is some merit to what the article goes after and particularly the phrase ‘funemployment’. There is a crowd of 20-30 somethings that are realizing that life isn’t as cut and dried as they’d planned and find themselves in an interesting place. Imagine the confusion if you’ve been told your entire life to get good grades so you can get into a good university, so you do. Then it’s work hard and take on internships and extracurricular activities so you can impress an employer and get a good job leaving school, so you do. Then after you’ve done all this, you find yourself out of school for a couple of years and back at square one wondering where you went wrong. It’s a common theme amongst many of my peers, as being jobless isn’t something that the ambitious, passionate folk I sometimes associate with have thought about enough to handle.
That being said, once found in a position of being jobless after only a few years on the market, you go through this phase of identity crisis. You weren’t in the job long enough to tag yourself as a ‘finance guy for the restaurant industry’ because honestly, you were only there for a year or two, so do you want to do that again? Or do you find something a bit more fulfilling? If you want to look elsewhere, what do you look for? For that matter, how did you get tied into the restaurant industry in the first place? And on and on the questions go. It’s so easy to get stressed out by the needs of life when a major piece like employment is missing, that this article makes perfect sense to me.
It talks about how people are sometimes reacting with going into a mode of “I’m gonna relax, I worked my tail off all through school, all through college, right into my job, but now, the bills are getting paid, let’s do book clubs and lunch dates and take a break.” Or even better, actually getting out traveling, or volunteering, or doing any of those things you always wished you had time to do, because right now, at the peak of a recession, time just needs to be used up, not slowed down. So they do. I do.
From my personal experience, I haven’t taken to lounging and drinking my juice box as I watch Dora the Explorer in my parent’s basement, but I do more of those things I never could before. I travel more; I work from my laptop on projects I’ve wanted to explore for ages, so I do. I pack everything up and hop in the car for a weekend road trip, then work the next week from a friend’s house in Utah while we mountain bike in the evenings, or head back to DC for the week to visit the girlfriend while I tour the capitol building and the white house. I now take on projects for charity and friends because I finally have time to squeeze other things in. It turns into a very glamorous and fulfilling life style.
The article goes into more detail on some people who have tried to do nothing with their lives (see the dora example earlier), but I haven’t seen this to be the rule. Most of the people I know who have been cut up in this wave of economic drama have responded as I’ve described. Filling their time with meaningful things that they always wanted to accomplish which can be a bit dangerous. I’ve seen more great pictures and stories told from activities enjoyed in this quasi hiatus in the working life than I’ve seen in a while, so the drive to get back into a cubicle somewhere may not be all that enticing. Of course, unemployment checks don’t last forever, nor will magical stimulus money keep making it last longer, so something has to give in the end.
I think this is a good experience to have though. I remember reading a book a few years ago about the rock climbing movement through the 70’s where people would just show up at Yellowstone or other good climbing spots, setup camp, and live there all year, then work 7-11 to make money during the winter to come back and do it again. The book glamorized the lifestyle, but I see it as kind of a waste long term. But the stories and experience from a year or two of that would be great to have, and sometimes if you don’t have the guts to drop everything and go do it, life fixes that for you and pushes you out the door towards some great adventure. Just make sure you come back in the end, cause no one wants to be that hippie uncle.
I only wish I’d taken my full unemployment instead of living off of the savings. Indonesia with Dan could have been a reality…. 
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