There’s an anecdote where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, ready to hunt. But the lion can’t seem to focus on a single target and is overwhelmed by the mass variety of options around them and runs around in circles, allowing all of the gazelle to escape. And so the lion goes hungry and takes an L for all their troubles with no payoff.
That’s basically pretty precisely what job searching feels like to me now. It doesn’t help that I’m at this stage of my career and life where I don’t really know precisely what it is I want to do, whether or not I want to continue to try and climb up a ladder that I’m more disgusted and jaded with more often than not, or if I just want to seek out a more menial job that might pay well but have little room for advancement, but would provide me a steady paycheck, financial stability, and the ability to be more available to my budding family.
Furthermore, I’m in this pool of indecision on whether or not I should be looking at actual companies in the Atlanta area, or if I should be seeking out one of the supposed thousands of remote jobs out there in the new, coronavirus-aided working world, where I might consider taking some cuts for the right to work 100% remote.
What it all amounts to is me sitting in front of my computer with very finite amounts of time dictated by the sleeping/eating/awake times of my children, trying to find adequate jobs to apply for, much less even hope for callbacks, and hope that I have a modicum of capability to weed, vet and find potential without completely killing my career.
Needless to say, I’m often times feeling overwhelmed and dejected by the whole process, and I’m beginning to understand why there are services out there now where you pay to set up a profile and have someone else pimp your name out there for you. There’s just so much variety and options in the searching fields now between numerous search engines, job boards and social media services, and that’s not even including the wealth of options out there that are remote.
And much like the lion that gets overwhelmed and owned by the gazelle and indecision, I’m left feeling dejected and a little hopeless that my search during my leave will bear not fruit, and I’ll be relegated to going back to work at a job that I’ve grown to loathe over the last few years. Sure, I’m fortunate to have that to fall back onto, but in not even a perfect world, change is still the priority objective.
