25 Signs You’re Underemployed

1. You’ve started to realize that using the very skills you were hired for will probably just end up disrupting the status quo. Best to put your head down and get the work done without the extraneous hassle.

2. Your parents or loved ones brush off your current situation as if it’s a leak in the ceiling that will be fixed in a matter of days. Phrases like “you’re so talented, they have to see that” permeate conversations with an incessantness worthy of a college sophomore who can’t stop talking about the sweet townhouse they just locked down for junior year.

3. You’ve descended into depths that in the not so distant past you swore you’d never go to. I am of course talking about endorsing people on LinkedIn.

4.  Superiors assign you tasks that they think will take you at least a day to complete. It’ll probably take you about a half an hour.

5. You’ve ceased making smart-person analogies accrued during your overexpensive education, because nobody in the office will have the slightest clue what you’re talking about.

6. You’ve debated buying glasses with very thick rims for the sole purpose of reminding yourself that you are in fact, learned.

7. You pronounce the learned with a hard “ed” at the end. But you can’t afford to buy more than one book per month.

8. You used to look down upon people with jobs in food service or retail, but you’re slowly beginning to realize that the joke’s on you.

9. You’re well past resenting your parents for urging you to turn your passion into a career. You now simply wished they channeled your interests towards something more practical. Like mobile advertising.

10. When trying to make a budget for yourself, you’re never able to finish because coming to terms with what you can afford is infinitely more depressing than simply hoping there will be enough money.

11. After looking at the prices of things like toilet paper and laundry detergent, you spend hours trying to figure out how 70% of the world can afford to live.

12.  Upon looking at the carefree statuses of your younger friends still in college, you’re not sure whether to laugh hysterically or punch your computer monitor into smithereens.

13. With increasing frequency, you’ve begun to skip lunch out of pragmatism. But you attend alumni dinners where people expect you could totally throw down $120 for the open bar fundraiser this weekend.

14. When espousing advice onto younger folks, you talk in alarmingly tired cliches like “I get paid to wake up early”, or “All you have to do is know how to a tie a tie.”

15. You have a series of built-in excuses as to why you can’t make the work happy hour, because two $7 beers is just crazy.

16. You’ve perfected the “when an elder person asks you about your job” face. A curt smile. A subtle indication that this is all a lie.

17. You scored at least 500 points higher than your direct superior on your SATS.

18. You realize that he/she probably took the older version out of 1600, so you proceed to spend a good 30 minutes figuring out how much better you did percentage-wise. The result isn’t any less depressing.

19. When people your age ask you what you do, you stutter nervously for about five minutes, then vomit out an indecipherable string of words that are not very helpful in determining what it is you actually do.

20. You follow the previous scenario up with a trusty “it’s not what I want to be doing in the long-term, but it’s a job for now.”

21. You spend a good deal of time planning out highly implausible scenarios in which you’d triumphantly exit your cubicle dungeon, and bring down all the shitheads with you. Then you realize you kind of need this job because that flight you can’t afford to Atlanta isn’t gonna pay for itself.

22. You start to hate and resent your best friend for moving to Atlanta, primarily because you can’t afford the flight to Atlanta.

23. Upon reading this article’s headline, you immediately felt an extraordinarily intense self-righteous pang.

24. You’ve begun to hate yourself for thinking you’re constantly better than the rest of society– because you’re realizing more and more that you actually might not be.

25. You’re right around the age of this list, and you’re not sitting pretty; where you thought you’d be at this age is now the goal for when you hit the big 3-0. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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image – Underemployed

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