I caught myself waxing and whining philosophic as the shorter days come to a beginning, and the fiscal year crawls to a close. I’m at a loss for gainful employment, and the prospects of finding any before the New Year seem more and more unlikely. I’ve got the end-of-November blues.
Today marks my 140th consecutive date of unemployment since getting laid off, or, approaching 5 months. It’s my first time getting the proverbial pink slip, and it’s a strange new reality. I suppose I’m overdue for this kind of reality check. I’ve never been laid off before, but I was raised on Mike Judge’s ‘Office Space’ and the culturally fruitless cynicism of Gen X, so it was something I had been expecting ever since I entered the job market. Not that my nurtured nihilism wasn’t without reason to back it up. The last few years of working have been haunted by hints and whispers of the dread nocturne of unemployment, ghosts of colleagues disappearing into the e-Ther, and insulated by fear and poisoned gratitude for still clinging to a job. Unemployment has, up until now, only been a vague and indirect reality of the larger macroeconomic system I haplessly find myself in.
Now that the prophesied layoff has finally arrived, 140 days ago, there was undeniable panic as I scrambled to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinthine hemorrhoid of the ACA healthcare system. I’d always relied on my employment to paternalistically handle my healthcare needs and this was a rude awakening to one of the more bizarre and cruel parts of the modern for-profit insurance bureaucracy.
When my overpriced insurance premium was picked and paid for, and the panicked reaction to worklessness wore off, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been watching colleagues at my job get laid off slowly and then less slowly over the course of 2 years. I knew what was coming, but the waiting was the worst part. In retrospect, I wish I saved more money during this period, instead of anxiously spending it in short-term bids for distraction and novelty. When it comes to money especially, getting laid off taught me how naïve I was with my income, truly squandering money when I was working, simply because I took it all for granted and couldn’t conceive of a time when I wouldn’t. There’s some gratitude in unemployment, and a feeling of taking things somewhat less for granted. But even in my shiftless state, I know that there isn’t much satisfaction either way. The system is set up so that the customer is always right, but the employee is always responsible. By which I mean the tired and obvious observation that healthcare being tied to employment is a form of indentured servitude.
The feudalism of modern healthcare. The arrangement amounts to the enforcement of strict and unspoken class boundaries. The subtext says something like: ‘If you want healthcare then you need to be granted access to it through your employment. Whether your employment chooses to give you access, however, is based on the socioeconomic class inherent in the line-of-work or industry you inhabit.’ So in a way, healthcare is the real determinate of social class. If you’re working class, you get no health insurance. If you’re middle class, you have good health insurance but it is fully dependent on continually and indefinite employment. And if you’re rich, then it doesn’t matter who’s sponsoring your healthcare because you’re rich. It’s all one big ugly flaw of capitalism.
I guess I’m just screaming into the void or feeling for cracks in the foundation for light to peek through. There are endless things in my life I am grateful for, and many more I’m sure I take for granted. For now, I am stuck in the doldrums, windless and metaphorical. Maybe some day I’ll yearn for these moments of uncertainty and forced stillness. After all, the place of no wind is Nirvana. The place of no work is unemployment. I feel wicked and wistful breezes blowing from both directions.