22 Things Everyone Does When They’re Unemployed

1. Sleep until noon.

2. Turn off Facebook chat so you can pretend that you’re “busy doing things”, but leave the tab open so you can still check every single post out of sheer boredom/productive job search procrastination.

3. You somehow become lazier. You have all this free time to clean, but you just can’t seem to find any reason to it, and your dishes continue to pile up in the sink.

4. Finish whole seasons of TV shows at an expedited rate. You wait a few weeks to talk about the show with your friends though, so they won’t know you finished Scandal in a day.

5. Lose all regular eating patterns. You eat sporadically, and indulge in snack foods often.

6. Make light of the situation by calling it “funemployment” while you are secretly dying a little more inside every day.

7. Consider teaching English abroad. Or au pairing. Or WOOFing. You spend days looking into all the different programs, finally coming to terms with the fact that you wouldn’t survive even a week in a deserted Estonian village.

8. Bring your laptop to a café, hoping that the change of atmosphere will help you be more productive. It doesn’t help.

9. Practice your answers to questions about your job search until you have them on lock. No, not the interview questions. The ones about how your search is going. “It’s going really well, yeah, I’ve sent out my resume to a bunch of places and I’m pretty confident one in particular will offer me an interview.” Only you know, of course, that none of that is true.

10. Go through all your LinkedIn contacts and other social media friends searching for any possible connections. You ask friends useless questions, like, “Hey, doesn’t your cousin’s boyfriend work for so-and-so? Because that’s like, right up my alley…”

11. Change your resume format a hundred times. Play around with fonts, spacing, and margins. You save five different versions and stare at them for hours.

12. Think about how you’ll need to start writing cover letters again, and you consider just giving it all up and moving back in with your parents.

13. Go shopping for “interview attire,” and instead buy a new coffeemaker.

14. Drink heavily and stay drunk for days.

15. Feel extreme, conflicting emotions. On one hand, you feel optimistic and you believe this is a golden opportunity to reevaluate your goals, or to travel, or to volunteer, and on the other hand, you feel sick with financial worry.

16. Visit your friends on their lunch breaks. It’s not like you have anything better to do.

17. Share articles about how important it is to enjoy youth, and to have fun, and to not stress.

18. Google “how to be an extra in a movie.”

19. Start a blog. You make big plans for it, but then forget about it in a week.

20. Visit your parents. You don’t want to hear the job lectures, but you really need that delicious home-cooked meal.

21. Tell people that you started to learn a new language, even though you just downloaded Duolingo.

22. Gather a select group of friends and convince them to get in on your innovative food truck art gallery fusion business dream. Of course, you abandon the idea once you finally land a boring new job.