Blogs and Stories
Looking Busy for a Living
With jobs disappearing faster than the polar ice cap, those who find themselves out of work must pit their wits against those who still cling to their paychecks.
What was the easily recognizable and newly unemployed magazine writer going to do? Like so many others in the media industry, he had recently been laid off from his high profile job, and was now collecting unemployment. While that marked a humiliating first, at least no one caught him cashing his $405 weekly checks.
But now he was being summoned by the unemployment folks for a mandatory appearance at their offices—and when he looked at the address he saw, with horror, that it was in the same Varick Street office building as New York Magazine!
Suddenly, we've gone from being affluent baby boomers to cash-strapped baby boomerangers—returning to our humble beginnings.
The journalist was terrified. He knew loads of writers and editors at the glossy weekly; only a few days earlier he'd lunched with a top New York editor and discussed with him the possibility of an assignment. He'd acted confident and busy at that lunch, hoping to convey that a piece for New York might mean a burden on his extremely busy schedule. "I've already lined up some magazine assignments," he'd told the editor, "plus I'm planning a documentary, and writing a TV pilot." Now he worried: what if the they ran into each other in the lobby on his way upstairs to the unemployment bureau? The two offices even shared an elevator bank!
So the writer did what any self-respecting, out-of-work journalist should: he wore a black ski cap and dark sunglasses as he entered and exited, and looked downward when Adam Moss got on the elevator and looked his way, suspiciously.
We're becoming a city in which the number of unemployed professionals may one day exceed the ranks of those with a job. And that shift has changed the way those two groups behave and interact with each other.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon among the dozens of professionals I know who've been laid off, downsized or fired in recent months: their new job is to look busy, for the sake of their employed friends and prospective employers. They're always running to meetings, constantly working on proposals, and forever developing new projects.
They're online 24 hours a day, updating their Facebook profiles and IM-ing each other and Twittering away about their plans. They're devoting every ounce of energy to figuring out what's next as they race around the city having lunch, darting into Apple stores or standing on street corners with their iPhones, checking their dwindling supply of emails.
I call it Social Notworking. It's a trend that pits the unemployed—the outofworkaholics who won't stop until they get back in the game—against their former colleagues, often younger, who still have their jobs. It's Generation Y versus the "Why Me?" Generation, and it's going to get worse as New York's once-vibrant, once-fully employed professional world keeps shrinking.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
Geithner's Stock Plummeting
Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
Last Chance to Make History
David Blum, former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice and The New York Press, teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of Flash in the Pan: The Life and Death of an American Restaurant and Tick...Tick...Tick...: The Long Life & Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes.
Gee. At first I thought the story was about the actively employed without enough work to do. I really feel for friends who "keep busy" on dead jobs all day especially when they sit right outside the boss's office. That's looking busy for a living. Pure hell, but a paycheck.
Working as a Network Administrator, social networking has always been meaningless, my servers don't care who I'm having lunch with. Well, maybe they do, but anyway I have found that the easiest way to look busy is to glare angrily at your monitor/cell-phone/USB refrigerator........whatever it is you're working on.
I can see where appearing to busy may or may not be bonus when searching for a job or trying not lose one.
"We're Social Notworkers because we need to maintain the self-respect that comes from keeping busy and from maintaining the appearance of success and happiness-to those who actually are successful and happy".
Theres your first problem. Anyone who get success and happyness out of their job needs a huge reality check. Jobs come and go all the time. Instead of all this social networking b.s. how about actually talking to people. Friends and family are the real keys to happyness and often lead to success when you least expect it.
This is the first networked recession and it's going to be different. Those made unemployed aren't cast out into darkness but can stay on the scene, in touch with peers, up to date with their field and blogging their opinions whether in work or not; that's a good thing I hope, and there's still an abundance of information and imagination available free for the broke but still online. 'Pretending' to work online is more like the real thing than taking the train to the office and sitting in a park all day, which was what redundant execs did in the 80s.
"Breadwinners vs. sore losers"? How is someone who has lost a job a "sore loser"? Excuse me, my dog is barking. Maybe he's being a sore loser because I've had to downgrade his rations from a premium to a generic brand.
We went from a tangible "Proudly Made In The USA" manufacturing economy to an outsource loving culture of paper pushers and "task forces", moving information from email to email, in between all that "Networking" (code for meeting for lunch or playing grab ass during a round of golf), otherwise known as a bullshit economy.
How sad and peculiar that the pretense has to continue once the job has gone. Why the need to sham? Isn't life about the dark AND the light, not just the light? Why not poke around in the dark a bit, while being honest, and see what happens? The US work ethic seems to have disappeared into a "yes, I work, I'm indispensible, see how important I am and how much power I have or think I have." Does this, in the long run, accomplish anything for the human race?
The unemployed must stay busy, to keep their mind alert they should write blogs, keep in touch, and continue to network.
The employed should do the same they need to keep in touch with their unemployed brothers and sisters because you never know the roles might be reversed some day.
Sure unemployed need to spend time adjusting their standard of living, skimp on expenditures, "go Dutch".
The employed should invite them to lunch show them some friendship, sympathy and respect.They should pull all their contacts, write references to help the unemployed get back to work.
I have been on both sides of the coin and have found this behavior works and is gratifying and rewarding on both sides of the devide.
The American unemployed is exposed to greater hazards than their European counterpart, their unemployment checks run out, in Europe they do not. Thank god I am a European.
The unemployed should adjust their lifestyle and keep their minds busy with developing what I call an "Armageddon" budget and stick with that even when they get their employed status back.
Here are some ideas for both the unemployed and the soon to be unemployed to busy their time and save tons of money.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUYjhZ-pldk
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.