I have the good fortune to have a job right now, but many of my friends are out of work. Most have been searching for a while. Some are encountering a problem that has my full sympathy, something I’ve experienced myself at various times. I’m not sure I can solve it, but maybe I can help put words to what some are going through.
The problem unfolds in three distinct phases as the job search drags on.
Phase I: The Obvious but Impossible Search
You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at. Usually you get no response. Occasionally you get a polite “position filled.” That’s it.
You’re knocking on all the obvious doors—all the jobs closest to what you’ve been doing—and nothing is opening up. It’s exhausting and frustrating. The very act of telling your friends you’re “discouraged” feels like swallowing a horse pill; “discouraged” does not reach the depths of your fear and despair.
The obvious path forward—finding a job in line with your resume—no longer looks like a path. It looks like The Cliffs of Insanity. What used to feel like the Obvious Way Forward now feels like the Impossible Way Forward. Somewhere in your brain there is a tank of gasoline that gets burned each time you force yourself to do something irksome. That tank has burned down to vapors.
You are burned out. You are burned out on search. You are burned out on an impossible search.
But you can’t stay still. So your mind looks for new paths.
Phase II: The Adjacent-to-Impossible Search
You consider job openings that aren’t quite aligned with what you were doing but might offer better chances. Maybe it’s in an adjacent industry, a slightly different role, or somewhere you never really wanted to live. Maybe you could take a small pay cut. Maybe an hour’s commute wouldn’t be so bad. You expand your search away from the impossible to a broader horizon, to things that are adjacent to impossible.
This often works! The compromises can turn out better than expected. A pay cut can lead to a quick raise that puts you ahead of your prior pay. Sometimes they turn out worse than expected, but the next job search goes better—new connections, new head space, more time for the market to improve.
Sometimes it doesn’t work. The employers don’t bite. The required compromises are just too dire. The adjacent-to-impossible jobs turn out to be impossible too.
You are burned out. You are very burned out. The creativity and spunk it took to expand your horizons has gone nowhere. That extra spark has died. The brain’s reserve gas tank is now showing “E.” You are suffering from a disease we call Adjacent-to-Impossible Search Burnout (AISB, for the medical professionals in the room).
But you can’t stay still. So your mind looks for new paths.
Phase III: Weird Search
Well, if none of the obvious or even next-to-obvious stuff is working, why hang around? Throw the gates wide open, go ronin, walk the whole horizon, drag the whole ocean. You could learn to make jewelry and open an Etsy shop. You could band together with friends and make that little app you’ve always talked about. You could open up that little coffee shop, that bakery, that catering business. You could go back to college and learn a new career.
It feels like giving up, though, doesn’t it? Wait, no! It feels like taking charge of your own destiny, plotting your own course, becoming master of your fate, all that sort of thing! Except, geez, at maybe one-half, one-fourth the pay, if you’re lucky? Maybe less, if you’re paying for college before you even start this new career.
And yet… what’s the alternative? Getting paid zero for the foreseeable future? Continuing to churn out groveling resumes and “I can’t wait to work at your wonderful company that doesn’t have the internal culture of decency or self-discipline to bother responding to this application that you invited, from someone you know really needs answers right now” cover letters?
So yes, you go weird, at least mentally, and you entertain ideas about what else in tarnation might possibly pay you a living wage while using your talents and filling up your joy-meter.
And sometimes this goes great. Almost every company or product we love started more or less like this. The next one might be yours. I like the weird path, and if you take it and it blossoms, I salute you and I bless you.
But we’re here for the ones that are still stuck in this place, this third phase.
You have been thwarted by the Cliffs of Insanity. You have become nauseated by the Wide World of Compromise. But nowhere else on your broad horizon has yet called you forward.
And here’s the deal: here’s how you know you are really at the end of the rope: you are sick of freaking thinking about it.
You are sicking of trying to find jobs you should have. You are sick of trying to find jobs you could have. You are sick of trying to find jobs you shouldn’t have—jobs that could be fun but would make your grandmother shake her head a little. You are burned out on search. All possible gas tanks are empty. All the creative-hopeful-bright-idea-one-more-try sauce is gone, dried up, kaput.
You are Burned Out On Search (BOOS for the professionals). That’s the problem. That’s the disease. You’re welcome.
Solutions
I don’t know. I can’t solve your problem. If your problem wasn’t genuinely hard you would have solved it already. Some stranger who doesn’t know your situation ain’t gonna solve it. But here are some notes I’ve picked up along similar roads.
You’re not alone. A lot, a lot of people are in this boat right now, and frankly, in any given year somebody, probably somebody you know, is in this boat. As I write, 40% of unemployed people have been out of work for at least 15 weeks. That’s almost four months. Fully a fourth have been unemployed at least 27 weeks: over six months. Unemployment is not strange or rare. Happens to everybody: good, capable people who did miracles at prior organizations and will do them again, they just can’t do them right now.
It sucks real bad. Let’s not understate the horror of unemployment in a modern economy. Talk about a Cliff of Insanity: there is an unbelievable drop in wellbeing from the employed to unemployed. I don’t need to spell it all out—the money stuff, the healthcare stuff, the embarrassment, the boredom, the fear. It’s bad.
And yet somehow in the grand scheme of social sympathy and compassion, unemployment doesn’t get a lot of loving. Tell folks you’ve got knee problems, house foundation problems, college debt, divorce, death in the family, hair stylist went rogue this morning and messed up your cowlick, and here comes all kinds of sympathy. Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop.
But I do feel you. High five. I feel you.
It won’t turn out as bad as you fear. How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment? I mean, they truly never got back on their feet. Maybe previously they had a decent home, but then they became homeless, and now they’re still homeless? I’m not just talking about stories and imagination and movies right now, I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly?
And look, it does happen. I’m not saying that 100% of people spring back from unemployment. But in your experience what percentage of people get back to a decent place? 90%? It’s got to be more than that. 95%? 99%? Most of the time, your friends and family members go through a period of unemployment and then they find a new, good life on the other side. It might be in the obvious place, it might not be. It might be on one of those “weird paths” we talked about, but very often the new path, no matter how weird, becomes stable and sufficient and even joyful.
People—you—are more resilient and resourceful than you think. You are skillful at imagining bad outcomes. You are also skillful at avoiding them. Do yourself a favor, set aside the imagining bad outcomes skill for a year or two and focus for now on the avoiding skill—and the finding skill that runs along with it.
It’s okay to rest. This is the best lesson I’ve learned from these kinds of seasons. When you’ve searched and you’ve searched without success until you’re sick of searches, usually the lesson is: now it’s time to rest.
There is a time for hard work, very hard work. There’s a time to push yourself, even to push beyond the limits of what you think you can endure. But a time comes when you are at the limit, at least for now. In those times, the word is “rest.”
Rest is much more than mere idleness. When you rest you give your mind the space to explore possibilities it never had time to consider. Often this exploration happens without your knowing it. Suddenly you see a new way to tackle that challenge. Or you realize it was the wrong challenge to begin with, that what you needed was a different quest. Rest refuels the mind. It refills the gas tanks. It untwists wounded joints. It builds up sore muscles.
We’re not talking about watching eight hours of YouTube every day or playing video games till 4 AM. Rest is all about space. It engages purposefully with serious boredom. You’re going to need to get in there and stare at some ceilings—or better yet, from a hammock, at some skies. Give the mind space to think.
Rest should involve time with friends but also plenty of solitude. It ought to involve some deep reading—books, not just the short pieces—especially those that are full of new ideas, not on the usual menu, surprising perspectives that get your thoughts percolating.
Rest needs to be done well. Set your alarm. Make appointments and keep them. Get outside. Use your hands.
When you’re Burned Out On Search, what do you do next? When we ask it that way the answer becomes obvious. You rest. It’s the only antidote to burn out. Give your mind time to rebuild and it will find ways forward that you never expected. Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search.