A line between jobfulness and joblessness
Whenever I talk to the so-called Gen Z, I understand how fast the world changed around us. These folks are not at all in awe of the system in place. They don’t perceive their employment status as a do-or-die situation. If anything, a job is something that is supposed to enrich them, not suck their existence out of them. There is a bohemian-cum-hedonistic spirit in there. Quite a drastic shift from my generation of hardworking, backbreaking people who were hardly holding onto their last threads of individuality in a workspace. We knew our place in the system. And we learned this from the generation that preceded us. Our parents told us that job security is everything. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have a purpose in life. The key operative word here was security, not purpose though. But nobody had the gumption to get into nuances back then.
Things are damn different now.
I turned 37 last month and I’ve been working non-stop since September of 2007. Barely a month after I quit engineering college for good, without a degree in hand (I had a diploma, for what it was worth), I entered the reckless transcription industry, before earning my BA (Literature) and MA (Journalism), and plunging into entertainment journalism, and then shifting gear towards corporate communication in the startup world.
All things said and undone, I’d been at it for approximately 16 years now. I was so attached to the idea of employment that punctuality was synonymous with me and I completed my tasks with unmatched zeal. My first ever manager called me ‘super-dedicated’ and later, the editor at Sunday Midday labeled me ‘enthu cutlet’ for delivering on Tuesdays what was expected on Thursdays. That’s just the way I operated. A weird restlessness to get things done.
During my 6 summers with Zomato, I was always the first person to enter our office building. I reached before time and left before 7 PM. Nobody questioned me because they knew I was solid with my commitments. My longest-serving manager there once remarked “he is always there” about me. That’s just how I was: available both offline as well as online. I got married one Monday and resumed work the following Monday.
This is not to be proud of by any measure, but never once did I ever take all the allotted leave in a calendar year. When I eventually quit Z and moved to Mangalore, I joined the Bangalore-based edtech Kyt and worked with them for 5 months. As had been my track record, I took zero leave and was always active. That’s just how I was and it was a nice place with a tiny team. Anyhow, in April of 2021, I joined Grofers (which later became Blinkit) and stayed with them for a little over two years, until last month.
As of now, I am not employed by any one particular brand. I talk to different entities—both at individual as well as organizational level—about how I can help them in content/copy/ideation/etc. As much as I appreciate monogamous professionalism, this is an interesting phase. It almost feels like joblessness because so much time goes into discussing out details. Too many handshakes, if you may.
When you work for one org, you are singularly directed and goals are accomplished at a much faster rate. Oh, not to mention, the painful bit called money negotiation(s). When you aim for full-time employment, that conversation happens only once: at the very beginning. And then you set your sail on a given route. Here, you are constantly marketing yourself, your potential to make a difference and how much you weigh it in rupees. Pretty tiresome exercise, to be honest.
I recently posted on LinkedIn about my desire to move towards the mentoring space. This led to leads and calls from different quarters; turns out it’s not just startups and agencies that are keen. Too much talking going on presently, something I am not really a big fan of. I am more interested in doing.
Speaking of LinkedIn, I suggested there that ‘unemployed’ sounds more professional than ‘jobless’. Which, in essence, is correct, right? In our quest to inflate our worth in the marketplace, we drop empty words, fancy jargons, that are emptier than a lost submersible. What really matters is what we, as individuals, bring to the table. That’s all. Everything else is 100% hokum.
In the end, whether you are employed or unemployed or self-employed or half-employed, what you genuinely end up with are stories. If you have great stories to share, you are already winning in your (professional) life at least.