How To Not Sink Into Despair

I totally just got a gig writing a guest blog for this website igrad.com that serves as a resource for recent graduates who aren't really sure what to do next.  They asked me to write about how I cope with being unable to find a job or a strong sense of direction after college.  This is what I sent them...

On Post-College Despair

Since graduating from college into unemployment two months ago, I've been slowly uncovering this weird, new law of physics: the emptier time is, the harder it is to fill.  Somehow having nothing to do makes it harder to do anything at all.  I've also learned how to cook on a budget (beans beans beans!), and a whole hell of a lot about the show Lost (post-college tip number one: don’t start fucking watching Lost). 

There are a lot of people graduating from college with liberal-arts degrees right now into a world that feels inhospitable and a job market that definitely belongs to the buyer.  Morale is a huge problem for a lot of us, and I'd like to share some of the discoveries I've made about how to keep one's chin up in the face of joblessness.

It's common to harp on the importance of imposing your own structure onto your time, so that you don’t become that TV-and-beer caricature of the unemployed.  What's seldom mentioned is that it's almost impossible to stick to a schedule that you know you just pulled out of your ass and that has pretty much nothing hinging upon it. 

Equally as important as self-discipline, then, is the ability to forgive yourself and just get back onto the discipline-horse when you do inevitably fall off.  Because making no effort is even more painful than making a futile one, and even if your goals do turn out to be unobtainable and your efforts really are worthless, at least you're not just kind of hanging around.  I know that this is a very cynical line of reasoning, but I've found it helpful to remember that even if my efforts are for naught, I'm still making myself happier by trying.

I've also found it necessary to learn how to convince myself of things that may or may not be actually true, in order to avoid sadness.  Things I have decided to believe include:

-If you try hard enough, something good will come of it eventually.

-The situation is temporary.

-The knowledge that I gained in college is valuable and I'm better for having gained it.

Using this mantra, I've managed to lurch back into productivity many times.

I've also put together some dos and don'ts that I've found helpful…

DO:

-Vary your routine.  Take your laptop to a coffee shop and write cover letters there.  Go to a friend's house for a movie.  Generally just get out of the house.

-Exercise.  It will burn off some of your existential doubt.

-Keep in touch with people who support you.  Seek out positive, productive people and have coffee with them.

-Find stupid little ways to cheer yourself up.  Sometimes I buy myself flowers from the supermarket and put them in my room for no reason.  This is a very, very lame thing to do.  Do these things anyway and laugh at yourself.

-Get up in the morning.  Take a shower.  Put on real clothes.

-Every time you spend money, write it down in a table.  This will give you a realistic picture of where you need to cut costs, and it will also encourage you to spend less.

-Find something to take care of.  I recommend plants over dysfunctional romantic partners, but that's a judgment call.

-Drink tea.  Yerba mate and green tea are particularly good because they provide caffeine without being hard on your stomach or making you feel tweeky. 

-Keep on keepin' on.

DON'T:

-Sink into a pit of despair.

-Allow yourself to remain in a pit of despair if you do find yourself inside of one.

-Start fucking watching Lost.

-Get angry with yourself when you don't reach your own goals or follow your personal rules.  You will fail sometimes and you have to just kind of keep going anyway.

-Drink too much.  It's easy since you never really have to get up the next day, but it will hurt both your soul and your wallet in the long run.

-Spend more than you can really afford to.  You should treat yourself every once in a  while to maintain morale, but it should be like a pint of ice cream every week, not a martini every hour and a half.

Of course, I really have no more authority on these matters than any other out-of-work college graduate, and I would love to hear any thoughts from my peers about how best to move forward.  We gotta figure this thing out together.

SHMEAT

If they can make sheets of lab-grown sheep meat, couldn't they also culture human muscle tissue and theoretically sell human meat as food?  I mean, if they wanted to?  Is it fucked up that that's one of the first things I thought of when I heard about Shmeat?

These are the facts I know about Shmeat:

-The technology is the same as that used to produce human skin for grafts.

-Because the process replicates muscle cells but doesn’t tell them where to go or what to do when they get there, they naturally grow into a kind of structureless, wiggly flesh-blob instead of the sinewy, textured, succulent turn-on that we usually think of as "meat."

-Scientists are working to overcome this obstacle by growing muscle tissue on an edible polymer scaffold that will lend a more familiar texture to the food.

-This still doesn't take into consideration the fact that the meat we eat is actually a conglomeration of many different kinds of cells, including fat and blood.

-Apparently Shmeat tastes like ass for that reason.

-I'd thought that Shmeat was created from stem cells, but apparently it isn't.  It's simply made by encouraging muscle cells to replicate by placing them in a nutrient-rich solution similar to blood. 

-In theory, there's no limit to the amount of shmeat that can be grown from a single sample. 

-If they made too much, though, and it somehow developed consciousness, and took revenge on humanity, it could be a pretty cool B horror movie and I would watch it.

-PETA loves Shmeat and has offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who can devise a commercially-viable (i.e. tasty and cheap) chicken-based version.


Now for the speculative parts…

-There's some debate on whether the mass acceptance of Shmeat would be good or bad for the environment.  The industrial farming of livestock takes huge amounts of land, energy, and food.  Over 40% of the grain grown worldwide is fed to livestock, so if we could get rid of livestock, we would have that much more grain to feed hungry humans.  On the other hand, the kind of mass-scale laboratory operation that would be needed to produce mass volumes of Shmeat would take a lot of energy to maintain.

-Again: couldn't they make Human Shmeat?  Do I finally get to know what people taste like?  Is some religious group going to get all pissy about this?

-Is there some spiritual aspect of consuming the flesh of another beast that would be missing if our meat was never alive?

-For that matter, is Shmeat alive?  It's self-replicating.  It doesn’t feel pain since it has no nerves, but it is self-replicating and I'm pretty sure, if I remember 8th grade science correctly, that that's the definition of life.  So eating Shmeat might still be killing, even if it's painless killing.


Would you eat Shmeat?
I would eat Shmeat.