Unemployment Benefits (Part III)

After the first post I wrote about unemployment benefits (the only one about actual unemployment benefits and not some witty wordplay) I didn't imagine I'd be writing another two. Part II and now Part III aren't strictly about unemployment benefits (as in jobseekers' allowance), but benefits aren't just about the government giving away their hard-taxed money...

This is what I looked at in Part II: the joy of being able to watch all the Formula 1 coverage humanly possible because I didn't have to go to work. In this post I'm going to look at another benefit to being unemployed, but this one has a sting in its tail.

My birthday is coming up. I love birthdays - I spent my 21st in Venice, but then again I was on my year abroad so it was less impressive than it actually sounds. This year isn't a special birthday, but that didn't mean I was going to let it wash over me in a sea of apathy...

During one of my long and lonely afternoons last week I began to think of what I could do. I very quickly ran into a problem: most people on their birthdays like to spend time relaxing at home, or doing something out and about because they don't have to work. This is pretty much my day-to-day existence and one more day spent in the same vein wasn't really going to make it any more special.

Oh.

I'd pretty much decided not to do anything - I wasn't going to mope all day, but I wasn't going to go out of my way to celebrate what hadn't been a vintage year. I don't know what is important for other people when celebrating a birthday, but for me a birthday is normally representative of the year. My last birthday was enjoyable and only slightly tinged with frustration (I wasn't having a great final year at university). The year that followed saw more of this mild unhappiness and all of my unemployment - understandably I didn't really feel like celebrating, especially in the same way that I spend most of my days...

It was by a serious of bizarre unrelated events that I came up with a fantastic plan for my birthday including a concert, a roll-together bed in a Travelodge and a trip to Sheffield, but it only came about after a chat I had with another friend.

My friend has the same birthday as me and we'd often celebrate it together when we were at university. I had asked her what she was doing for her birthday and she hadn't really realised it was coming up, but was probably going to spend it, like me, doing normal things. We graduated last year and she's in a very similar position to me in that she's not doing what she ultimately wants to and is having to do a number of jobs as a stop gap.

She felt exactly the same way that I did about her birthday: what is there to celebrate? And with many of our friends moving on and away - who is there to celebrate with?

This might just be a personal issue for me, but I think it's representative of a wider issue: there are lots of young people - maybe graduates - and they aren't happy. If they don't feel like they can celebrate their birthdays, surely that is a sign of apathetic unhappiness. This is a bit depressing isn't it - but for me it all worked out in the end.

This too is representative of the problem of youth unemployment - most young people are still under the impression that jobs are mailorder and will arrive in their lap on request: it's a passive procedure, and if they don't get what they want, then it's ok to send it back to Amazon and in the meantime keep on taking unemployment benefits or working in a dead-end job. What we should all be doing is getting out there and being proactive - very rarely do you walk into an amazing opportunity without putting in the leg-work beforehand.

So just like my birthday plans, I think we should all be trying to be as proactive as possible - only then will we  stand a chance of getting where we want to be.