An A to Z of Unemployment

For 15 months after graduation I was a NEET. A ‘Not in Employment, Education, or Training’. It’s not a time I reminisce about, but as every writer knows, periods of despair are always worth mining for potential literary product.

What follows is an A to Z of different aspects of unemployment. Or, on what it was like to be unemployed in a particular place (northern England) at a particular time (2019 and 2020), the second half of it spent in COVID lockdown.

During, I lived with my parents and they supported me. So mine was a privileged unemployment. Long-term (Google says the definition is 12+ months of) joblessness can for some mean homelessness, debt, illegal activity to get by, suicide. I was lucky to avoid all that. What I’ve written is more scatterbrained than I planned, but hopefully it gives insight to unemployment, both psychological and social.

A is for Application

Even pre-COVID, the modern jobseeker’s life was a motley of screens. Laptops, desktops, phones. It has to be, because the modern jobseeker’s life is a private bureaucracy: it is a career of monotonous questionnaires, reading through the management newspeak of job adverts, a lifetime’s events flattened down into a CV’s Skills and Experience section, the ceaseless updating of jobseeker profiles. Always at the ready to initiate your ‘phone…