Diary of an Unemployed Class of '10 Philosophy Major in New York City, Part 1
At what point do I stop checking Craigslist? Why is there an ad for "MYSTERY SHOPPING" in the "writing/editing jobs" category? How much is their purported "nominal compensation"? A ten dollar per diem? A bag of buttons? A punch in the throat? "THIS IS NOT A FREE MEAL!," the ad warns. Well, then. Forget it! Why does this company leave the ‘i' in ‘iNC' uncapitalized? Perhaps this is some sort of test-for a prospective mystery shopper-slash-editor? What other horrors can I spot? I wonder if the person who wrote "boutique mystery shopping company seeks strong writers" felt as sad writing that as I do reading it.
When I think boutique, I think of lots of little hanging crystal beads, baskets with pearls in them, stacks of folded crimson scarves, a dour woman with cropped hair staring into a cold vacuum. I imagine myself saying "No thanks, I'm just browsing," which is my anxiety response at any store, boutique or otherwise. I know it will probably be a long, long while from now, but the first thing I'm going to do when I get a writing job here in New York City is march into the first J. Crew I see and, beaming, reply to the robot working there, "Why yes, I do need help. Bring me some moon-proof socks-I'm covering the Space Election for the Observer!"
But for now I'm just going to stick with looking at my feet and saying "No thanks" before the clerk says "Hey! You! You idiot! You moved to New York to be a writer! Have you even looked at Craigslist?! Ten thousand people just applied to fill out forms at a boutique mystery shopping company!"
I'm pretty sure "boutique" has become a business-world euphemism for "insignificant and unsuccessful"-the quivering in my friends' voices when they describe the boutique hedge fund or boutique consulting firms they work for indicate as much. Would that make me a boutique recent college graduate? I just realized I've been in New York for a full week!
* * *
I'm getting dinner with A____ tonight. I like meeting up with my high school friends because around them I needn't feel so bad about being unemployed. This is probably because they all knew me when I was 14 and had the haircut of a lesbian and the physique of an anorexic straight girl. They've seen me at some rather low points, so what's one more, I suppose. A____ works in some sort of PR consulting thing-nobody is really quite sure. I'm beginning to doubt whether my newly employed peers know what they or anyone else are now doing for a living. Inquiries of this kind are usually met with a "ah well ah some sort of, well it's a media consultancy, ah…" met with an "Ah, okay, oh, cool, oh so that's like-…," at which point both parties trail off and take out their iPhones to compulsively check for app updates.
* * *
I went to the Met yesterday. I'm not sure how I convinced myself that going to a museum at 2 p.m. on a weekday would distract myself from the fact that I'm unemployed, but I usually find Attic vases affirming in some primal way. And besides, reading the "writing/editing" jobs was getting bad to the point of being, frankly, a bit shocking. "$1 LASER TEETH WHITENING – WRITERS ONLY!" What? Come on. WHAT CAN THAT POSSIBLY MEAN?
"Ten dollars is the recommended entrance fee," they said. "Is that okay?"
If this had been phrased in any other manner I would have paid less, but there was really no way for me to look that woman in the eye and tell her that it wasn't okay. It was okay. Only days before I had paid $17 for a sandwich and a lemonade at Bryant Park. The cashier did not ask me if $17 was okay. I just told him, "Okay, here, here is seventeen dollars. Take my money. Take all… of my money," and then blood started pouring out of my eyeballs.
Ten dollars is an okay price to pay. Paying zero would make me a dick, paying one dollar would make me more of a dick, and paying nine dollars would out me as a cheapskate at best, and most likely some sort of a dick. After studying moral philosophy for the past four years, guilt remains the most formidable practical principle of them all. It's okay. Ten dollars is okay. I know you don't like guilting people into paying ten dollars. If I can be candid here, I'm not even a student. I should be paying more than ten. This student ID is expired. I graduated last month. I'm defrauding your employer. Do you need an intern?
The Dead Germans have some things right though, and if life is as horrific as Schopenhauer suggests-and how can Craigslist lead us to any other conclusion?-escaping into art could have saved this afternoon. But the usual red-figure scenes-discuses hurled upward into a clay sky, a young boy being seduced by his gym trainer, Zeus raping a giant fish-didn't rouse me as I had hoped. Here were gathered men and women of virtue, immortalized through their activity. My most laudable activity of the day up to this point was putting on pants before 11 a.m. S____ texted me with good news about his job interview, and wanted to meet me at the museum. We had a drink on the roof of the Met. So far, I resent New York's tendency to stick cash bars where they shouldn't be.
Sam Biddle is a recent college graduate in New York City.
Photo by doobybrain from Flickr.
Zeus had the right idea. Rape a few fish and you'll be feeling good as new.
Be a man and get a business degree.
BA in Philosophy & Business – smartest move I ever made. Get a mind-numbing job and deconstruct your "self" until it doesn't hurt.
Yep. I'm working on the numbing part right now. Wittgenstein helps, so does cheap whiskey.
Just how many philosophy majors are there on this blog?
Someone should post a poll.
philosophy/english double major, which makes me twice as broke
But would the poll really exist?
/philosophy minor
Nay good Sir get the KING of all Business Degrees, You know which one I mean. Checkout my twitters to see how to get rich, there'll be unemployment and met afternoons no more!
And how is the physique of an anorexic straight girl different from that of an anorexic gay girl?
*waits for the joke responses*
Anorexic gay girls still have biceps. From all the WNBA.
nice
Thanks, deepomega.
Anorexic gay girls do not exist, because we are all obese. Don't you listen to jokes?
The Strand is always hiring.
they pay crap wages and the work can be incredibly dull. I knew an English major who worked in the basement there for a few weeks before giving up and joining some kind of ad agency.
I worked there, too. For longer than I cared to admit. But I'm not being entirely disingenuous.
Ah, but if you can work on the second floor with the art books, you can just flip through monographs when you're bored, and your coworkers are also all disaffected liberal arts majors holding out for better jobs. $9/hour is better than no dollars/hr.
i was there yesterday and based on thirty seconds of observing my cashier i can surmise that he slit his wrists later that night
Sounds about right. My friend got to be in charge of stocking and restocking "review copies", ie glossy hardcovers of awful self help books and trashy novels. It's depressing just walking through there.
Some of the damp, isolated stacks of the Strand basement are creepy. The sense unspeakable things happened there long ago, a subterranean torture chamber decades ago perhaps.
I worked at the Strand right out of college. Any adult working there is a monster, and/or borderline pederast/racist/homophobe.
I read the title and got depressed for a few hours.
Turns out the rest of the article hilariously made up for the klonopin-dive of a title.
I'm an employed class of '94 philosophy major! So there is hope!
But I'm a legal secretary, so that hope is fairly tenuous.
As an employed class of '07 philosophy major in New York City, I can only say: THANK GOD I ALSO MAJORED IN ECON
Computer science is also a good co-major for humanities types.
No, thank you.
Hmmm, this is troubling. I must have missed you at the Bawl last night because I told everyone else the answer to your dilemma: marry rich.
Since you're young it's okay to enter a live-in rich relationship first. That way you'll become accustomed to rich things and rich people.
But you'll need to keep one eye searching for the rich person who will support your dream of taking your laptop to the park and working on the great American novel guilt free and in expensive clothes.
If I retain one thing from last night, I hope it's, 'Strike while the iron's hot!'
Welcome to the city. I advise you to never pay more than $1 to go to the Met ever again. That is for tourists. Being able to spend your day in the finest museum on the continent for the price of whatever spare change you have lying around whenever you're broke/bored is one of the things that makes New York the place where everyone wants to move after college. The air you breathe there doesn't cost them anything–save it for another drink on the roof bar.
Yeah, I would probably tell the donations person to put it on my bar tab upstairs.
and, when you get a job, I highly advise getting the individual memberships to the Met (for guilt-free browsing) and to MoMA (which isn't pay-what-you-wish). Totally worth the $135 or so it'll cost.
I am a non New Yorker who goes to New York a lot (though not often enough to get a membership) and I have a serious love affair with the Met. So, really, what happens when they tell you what the suggested donation is and you say "Yeah, I'm not paying that" and just walk right in? Anything beyond guilty stares?
I'm totally fascinated by how they set it up so that it SEEMS like $20 or whatever is the actual price, even though it isn't. What is the logic behind this bizarre system? Did someone endow the place in the 1880s on the stipulation that no admission ever be charged?
@jfruh: "The suggested-donation policy is a requirement of being part of what is called the Cultural Institutions Group, a group of 34 New York City-owned institutions that also includes the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bronx Zoo. As part of the same deal, the city provides 11% of the Met's total budget, according the Department of Cultural Affairs. In the last fiscal year, this came to about $24,598,000, an amount that contributed to general operating costs, as well as paying for heat, light, and power."
I've paid little or nothing probably hundreds of times and never been given the side eye. Someone else keeps the lights on; why should the ticket taker care what you pay?
The Met is a part of a consortium that receives subsidized funding from the city, and I believe the suggested donation policy is tied to this. If you elect to pay less (or nothing), you still need an admissions ticket to enter the museum. (This really annoyed me once, when I lost my ticket and couldn't re-enter between wings). You may get a minor guilt trip from the ticketing agents, but that is the extent of it!
You just say "here's $5" or whatever. They honestly never give the hairy eyeball or anything. I think they just ask how many adults? It made me super uncomfortable for a long time, but I'm full over it now. It's in their charter that they be a free museum.
In art school quite a while ago, the teachers would say, "Pay a nickel, or a buck tops- but go every week.". They were right.
You are right. Am I the oldest one here or does anyone else remember when the Met was free and empty? I spent my teenage years– well, some afternoons– wandering the deserted halls, lost in my thoughts, and not dodging tourist families. Priceless!
Such an education, Trilby. The Met is a treasure. I do think tourists should pay $20 for a one time visit. But for students and New Yorkers , less is definitely okay. Going to the Met weekly or so was like going to church, only far less boring. I generally drop a tenner now, but then "pay what you wish" was a godsend. Always kind of resented MOMA for being so pricey, post-grad. I have a reall affection for the Met I just don't have for MOMA, in part because of that.
My girlfriend worked there at the ticket booth a bunch of years back and most of the regular visitors paid around a $1. A lot of the UES elderly retirees would come every day and usually just throw a penny (serious) toward her general direction.
I see you and I raise you: I majored in SEMIOTICS, back when they had that sort of thing. And I am gainfully employed. Do not lose hope, young Sam!
What, do you like the tend the grave of Roland Barthes?
BA, Philosophy & Literature. Presently freelancing, but presently open to something more substantial. But hey, my thesis was on Kierkegaard, so *sigh* I'm covered
Well you're a regular Knight of Faith aren't ya?
*leaps* Clearly you are familiar with the concept of irony
The only thing I got out of reading "Fear and Trembling" was that Kierkegaard would be a terrible long jumper.
I think Soren would appreciate that
i have a newly-minted philosophy BA, and i landed a reporting job at a major daily paper: of course the two are in no way correlated. and, as you'd suspect, the gig comes with important caveats, so don't drop your jaw yet.
but interviewers always scratched their heads over my degree. "explain?" i'd ramble on about interrogating presuppositions (ok, i'd probably say 'assumptions') and distilling complex things into simple things, etc.
you can sell your degree as a valuable skill set if ya talk more about the "real world" tools (having muscular analytical abilities!)and less about phenomenology and ontology and nerdspeak.
look how these stellar grads did: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/05/16/the_semio_grads?pg=full
Yeah but… half the fun of having a degree in the arts is the amount of self-deprecation you get to employ in everyday conversations!
I minored in English in order to have something "sensible" written on my diploma, which was for a BFA in Printmaking. Have ya'll heard the news about print being dead? But hey: it was a fun, if not utterly unpragmatic, four or, um, five years.
In numerous job interviews, I have tripped over the description of my college. For some reason it always comes out "a small libral-arts…libuhralarts school." I just can't say those words.
GRAD SCHOOL
Just wait. The only thing cooler than complaining about lack of a decent-paying and enjoyable job post-college is complaining about studying for the GRE.
When I was unemployed I registered with about 10 temp agencies. I would call all of them every morning and wait around until about 11 am or so then either go to the beach or hiking. I would then get back before 5 and call them all again. When I lived in NYC and was unemployed I would go to museums or walk around the city and go shopping. My favorite thing to do was go into stores and try on evening clothes. None of the sales people ever bothered me or even talked to me. When I moved to LA if I tried to do that the clerks would be all over me. A sales clerk at Channel even kicked someone out of a dressing room so I could try on stuff. So I stopped doing that here.
Don't worry! You'll do great, ENJOY That Afternoon at the Met. I made the mistake of spending That Afternoon (the one where you are no longer in school but have no direction or job or money or anything) at the natural history museum, and to this day I still think I wish I could be like those plankton. Those plankton don't need jobs or money or anything they just let the tide take them where it does and maybe they get eaten by a whale and I STILL WISH I WERE THOSE PLANKTON
I really miss not working and aimless wandering. The no money part is the only part of it that sucks.
I'm going to hide out here while today's apparent hacker war is going on if that's ok.
No one had attacked my stuff since the Sci War so I'm not sure what's going down.
Has it calmed down yet? *peeks out of covers*
Did someone take out fosterkamer.com or am I going crazy?
If you had gotten your MBA from a universitttttty then life would have been a whole lot different, seriously dude, check out mah twitters 2 c why!
I paid one dollar for admission for three weeks in a row. I felt no compunction for it at all because the rest were taking pictures of everything, whereas I was merely looking at it.
Seriously, though: As someone possessing an undergraduate degree in Philosophy who has been out in the "real world" for a bit, don't lose hope. A bachelor's from a solid liberal arts college can gain you entry in a lot of fields. You would be surprised. The opportunity, however, really depends upon the economy. I wouldn't judge the difficulty you are presently experiencing upon the Philosophy major. The shitty economy has everything to do with the lack of jobs right now. When or if the economy picks up plenty of companies will be willing to take a chance on a bright young possessor of a BA in Philosophy, provided you can show them your critical reasoning skills in the interview. Keep your head up.
– "Letter to a Young Philosophy Graduate"
That's right, just Constantin Constantiusing.
Damn it's hard being a college educated middle class white person in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
I know maybe this piece isn't asking for advice? But Craigslist is pretty hopeless. I got a much larger ratio of applications-to-interviews applying through HR websites of universities and businesses in the city that don't post openings elsewhere. Still, there will be 100 other applicants, but that's better than the thousands on Craigslist.
"Transferable skills," etc. Just wait for the interviewer with the secret hatred of business majors we all share.
Please tell me how this works out, the moving to New York to be a writer part. Cause my friends keep telling me its the only way, and I keep trying to argue with them that in fact the internet makes it possible otherwise, and not every writer lives in New York, and being able to afford food is fairly integral to my creative process. I would like to know if I am wrong though.
I showed this one guy how to build from the bottom up his own publishing company. Also had some fun pissing off Chris Matthews while doing it, so that was fun too.
It's the trade-off that is important. Back in the day they romanticized living in a cabin until the work was completed.
Basically having a Sugar Mommy/Daddy. I don't think that actually contributes to the creative process so much as being a fun way to go through life.
Bridget, it depends on what kind of writer you want to be and/or if you want to get published in your lifetime or posthumously.
Nothing to do with it kitten.
Depends on how much you want it. How hard you will work for it. And what your end goal is. Money, recognition, or adding to the sum total of societal understanding/global wisdom.
Anyone can save up $25/week and then publish their own book, market it like a pro can and help it make its way.
The 1880's are over.
I think you lack street cred as a writer when you live in bumfuck, egypt and try to interest NY organizations in publishing your work via email. But what do I know!
Trilby, I am thinking more of screen writing than novels. But I imagine that one needs to network just as much in NY as you do in LA. In LA, in addition to the politics, you also need to get a feel for what is selling. You know, like, vampires is hot right now but those werewolves are nipping at their heels.
Mostly how to mix metaphors :o)p
If you have street cred, you don't need a large corporation from NY behind you. Their job is to manufacture street cred.
What you mean is kissing the ass of peons in the publishing world until they pass along your stuff.
I'm saying change the dynamic. Be your own publicist. This can happen by email. Be your marketing liaison. This can happen by email. When was the last time you had face time even with people in the same company/building?
Humh…no post in a while. Just wanted to see if anyone is here. Looks pretty deserted.
Have you considered making things and selling them on Etsy?
I was a philosophy major. Once in college I had dinner with a friend and her father (a banker) and one of his father's idiot banker friends. The idiot asked me what I was majoring in and I said Philosophy and he made one of the obvious what'll you do with that jokes followed by why did you do that. So I said it was sort of a family thing, my grandfather did it and it worked out for him. What'd he do, idiot asked, scoff at the ready. He was chairman of the SEC I said and immediately changed the subject to Bosnia.
I've changed some details to mask my identity but the essence of the story is true: You can do anything with a philosophy degree (you will probably do something you don't even know exists yet, like me and half my office) and idiots are easy to bait into traps.
Within approximately one job of graduation it doesn't matter a damn what you majored in.
It's apparent our institutions of higher learning are doing a very poor job teaching nihilism.