All work, no play

On my way to work I saw this advert for one of those pre-teen magazines. Oh, how innocent and different that world seems. "Who's your celebrity crush?" "Test if you're a secret stylist!" As I'm trying to schlep through the swamp that is the terrible thirties I can't help but envy that age. How much easier everything would be! No unemployment-related-frustration, no devastating break-ups, no debilitating Visa-bills, no mortgage-negotiations... 

My view isn't correct, of course, as anyone who's ever been 13 knows. Life at that point feels everything but easy. There's so much to worry about, so much angst and insecurity and even the break-ups feel every bit as devastating. And you need to get through them without Chardonnay and cigarettes!

But so much has changed in the world. Remember when people actually had proper professions? There were bakers, locksmiths, butchers, doctors, undertakers, barbers- and people actually had jobs! These days we have massive unemployment and scores of "management consultancy trainees", "visual brand developing executives", "program analyst supervisors" and "project coordinating junior partners". 

I'm getting so tired of everything being such a tough competition. You can never properly just stop to breath; you've never achieved any long-term security, but your place is only secure for a limited period of time after which the whole rat race starts again. How do you then plan ahead? When do you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour? When does it all end?!

Remember that notoriously elusive training I'm trying to get into? I just had another exam (Crikey! I had completely forgotten how nerve-wracking those buggers are!) to determine how many of the candidates reach the next round . One of the applicants was a man in his eighties. Apparently the answer is never. It never ends.

I'm not sure if I'm cut out for this arms race. Racking up unpaid internships in order to gain experience, working abroad to display capacity for multicultural interaction, learning new languages, volunteering in different organizations to gain knowledge and connections in the NGO- field, producing articles to show your social awareness and understanding of what's going on in the world, pursuing courses in humanitarian and international law to prove your pro-activeness... all this just so that one day someone might hire you? I'm ready for a truce.

I still haven't had a single call-back. Not a single job interview. And reading about a guy in who'd sent out 15 000 job applications and was still out of work doesn't really do much to lift my spirits... (in all honesty though- I wouldn't hire him either. He looks like the silent, retiring guy who nobody even knows works in your company until he kills his colleagues by stapling their eyeballs to the desk and sets the office on fire).