The Hardest Job

I don’t talk much about the ins and outs of my life here on this blog, and that’s a very conscious decision I made many years ago. It’s not that I don’t want my (albeit minuscule) audience of readers to know the particulars of my everyday existence; on the contrary, I frequently use personal history or experiences to bring flavor to my writing. However, I never want my personal blog to become something akin to an online diary. I don’t need a permanent record of every relationship, every triumph or failure, or the inconsequential nonsense that might irk me on a given day. And so I haven’t written about something that has been bothering me for over three years, even though it occupies a constant place of prominence in my mind.

And that something is my current job, which – to put it mildly – I quite simply do not enjoy. I work in insurance, which is hardly what I aspired to do with my life after spending close to five years in college earning an English degree. Obviously, I’m thankful to have a job, especially one with steady hours, decent pay, and that primarily entails sitting at a computer all day; I know there are many who would gladly trade places with me. At the end of the day though, I’m unhappy, and I’ve been living with this unhappiness for over 3 years now.

What makes all of this worse, however, is that I can’t seem to do anything to improve my situation. I haven’t just been sitting around idly waiting for someone to hand me a better job. I’ve done my part: worked connections, submitted countless applications, polished my resume until it gleams. And yet nothing seems to have any effect. In the last 3 years, I’ve been on maybe a dozen interviews, none of which came of anything but a rejection letter (and some couldn’t even be bother to do that).

Perhaps some of you can relate.

At this point, I’m really at a loss about what to do. There’s a quote (often attributed to Albert Einstein) that says the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. So am I insane to keep going about this the same way? This is, after all, how everyone else seems to get their jobs; why shouldn’t I assume that this is how it’ll eventually work out for me?

You know, as hard as it is to get through my 8-5 work day at times, clearly the hardest job of all is finding a new one.