I chanced upon a summary of how a person felt after being unemployed for 2 years.
This was written on Sanlian Lifeweek, a Chinese current-affairs magazine in first person style. Firstly, this is translated into English and there is an AI summary.
I connected with it because… I felt that it describes elements of life that you and I would have felt if we have not work for a period of time. This 36-year old describe a life that we may connect with, be afraid of, or felt comfortable about when we have a chance to explore non-work.
There is a difference between “you will struggle if your identity is too tied to your work.” versus HOW does struggling with identity actually felt like?
Many of us think that life is binary. You either like it or don’t like it.
I would always felt weird to answer folks if they ask me “Kyith, now that you are financially independent, how does it feel?”
Perhaps every one expects I like it or I dislike it.
You might struggle to recall, struggle with vocabulary to give a great representation of how you feel. This person who has been unemployed for two-years, and is educated, articulated enough to be able to think and articulate how he feels.
While I empathize with his situation, those who are preparing for the non-money part of stopping work may appreciate and connect with some of these feelings.
This guy works more as an PHD academic and since laid off has not work for two-years. He thinks that the harder part of unemployment isn’t the money in his case. He has savings, doesn’t have a mortgage to pay , his parents are relatively alright financially. A person who reduces their expenses minimally, have some portlets of work income still can still maintain this lifestyle.
What he struggles with is what he calls “Weightlessness”.
I picked out some of the ones that non-work people would have to deal with. You can read two years without a job – The “Weightless” Life of a 36-year-old PHD yourself.
When You have No Professional Label
When I meet new people, I’m acutely aware that when a person carries no clear professional label, he quickly becomes “not very important” in many relationships.
To put it more bluntly: a lot of people instinctively size you up for whether you’re a “useful” person, whether you can offer some resource, information, or help.
When you lack a clear social identity, that judgment often turns quickly into coolness. Over time, a person retreats more and more. It’s not that I don’t want to make friends — it’s that at the most basic step of “entering another person’s life,” I already feel a flicker of shame.
A Lack of a Skeleton in your Life
Once you no longer have a fixed job, time becomes strange. People who work, of course, complain that the job takes over their lives — but the job also quietly gives the days a skeleton: getting up, the commute, meetings, colleagues, projects, weekends, even the anticipation of a holiday, are all part of that rhythm.
Without that skeleton, the days turn very light — so light you can’t grasp them.
You can get up a little later; what you don’t do today can be done tomorrow; and if you don’t do it tomorrow either, there don’t seem to be any immediate consequences. In the short run, that slackness is a kind of gift. But over time, it slowly turns into something else: a weightless passing-by.
Many days go roaring past in a state that seems full and yet seems empty, and when you look back, it’s hard to say what you’ve actually accumulated.
Feeling of Being Left Behind by Time
My undergraduate school is a famous one in China, and many of the classmates around me are now in life’s fast lane.
Some have been promoted again and again at big companies; some are running thriving startups; some have even achieved a kind of financial freedom.
Occasionally I see a familiar name in a media report; more often, I watch their increasingly settled, respectable lives unfold in my WeChat Moments feed.
The feeling isn’t simple jealousy — it’s more like being left behind by time.
As if everyone else is already standing firmly on life’s podium, while I’m still at the starting line looking for somewhere to put my feet.
Employers are Less Forgiving of an Older You
The most anxiety-inducing thing about being older and unemployed isn’t that your age keeps rising — it’s that your skills and value haven’t kept pace with your age. Right after graduation, a lack of experience can still be read as “potential”; people are willing to believe you’ll get better.
But by my stage, employers tend to assume you should already possess more mature, clearer, harder-to-replace professional ability. Once you don’t, that gap gets magnified fast.
You’re no longer treated as someone who can be cultivated slowly, but you haven’t yet become the person who can prove his worth on the spot.
In a sense, that’s exactly part of my current job-hunting bind: age has already pushed me into the “should be stronger” position, but my past few stints never naturally settled into that hard, professional, immediately cashable kind of ability.
Creating a False Identity… So that You Will Feel Better
To avoid talking about my current state, I sometimes give a later graduation date. Even though I graduated two years ago, the words come out as “I just graduated last year.”
It’s not a big change. Being unemployed for one year isn’t really any better than two and it feels more like an instinctive struggle. Less a way of deceiving others than of comforting myself.
As long as you place a thin curtain between language and reality, the truth blurs into something less hideous. But then this little adjustment makes you feel worse: you realize you’ve already started, half-consciously, patching yourself up. And the patch is just one more reminder of the hole underneath.
You still live inside “The System” and so You will still be Evaluated
Not working doesn’t mean you’ve been wholly released from the system of evaluation.
More commonly, you still live inside that system — you’ve just moved from the center to the margin. You know how others will see you, and you know that you haven’t actually escaped being watched.
It Doesn’t mean He Cannot Find Things to Do
Being without a job means having more time. My daily life isn’t blank. I read a lot of books and watch a lot of films — including, with a slightly perverse pleasure, comparing the Chinese translations of certain novels with the English originals, hunting down the errors and omissions in the translation.
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