The last thing anyone wants is to make excuses. Times have never been perfect for anyone, ever. The best folks, or anyway the successful ones, take the situation at face value, synthesize the sensory data, and figure shit out.

Pursuance of an M.F.A. didn’t lead to much? What about working for a brewery, and maybe one day starting your own? Law school didn’t lead to a high-paying big city gig? Marketing companies need Project Managers, and perhaps there’s written work for legal publications to be had on the side. Laid-off from a job at which you were comfortable, but one you hated all the same? Well, you always talked about wanting to be a chef…

The recent Jason Reitman movie Up In the Air is in no small part about this very impulse, about what a good person who played ball is supposed to do when employment dries up for reasons beyond his or her control.

One guy vows to follow his passion; another kills herself.

During such a time, it’s easy to take another’s example and use it as inspiration, as something to aspire to. In the current situation, one in which people everywhere are looking for work as the economy continues to shed jobs even though leading indicators augur good times in the offing at some point in the unforeseeable future, the problem with doing so is that so many other people are doing the same thing.

Reading articles, hearing stories, processing affirmations, listening to successful folks talk of how they got to where they are, following muses that may not otherwise be followed, and applying their spiritual renaissance to everything in sight, any job they feel they may enjoy, any occupation that may lead to greater existential, personal joy than the one they had before.

When looking for a job in a creative field, having such lark-minded professionals strewn about the landscape is a situation wherein, were you comfortable, in a position of your choosing, perhaps not the perfect one for you but one that you enjoy and could make a living at without hating yourself from early morning to early evening, you could enjoy the scene, and have fun with it, instead, currently, of seeing a field of job-eating Venus Flies that laugh together after particularly brutal kills and take nothing into consideration beyond their own hunger and the expanding void it leaves inside when not satiated.

In times like these, melodrama does nobody any good, but holy shit does it make you feel good.

It is nice, freedom, the unattachedness that comes with being unemployed and having the entire world before you, whatever job you feel like working available to you, if only you can find the person in charge of hiring people to that position, and only if they are hiring. A lot of love these days, more than at any other time in civilized history, is attached to finding work that enlivens the spirit, that makes you whole, that completes you, not unlike Tom Cruise to a cuter-than-she’s-ever-otherwise-been Renee Zellweger in Cameron Crowe’s third- or fourth-best movie.

But what if you just like writing? What if you’re better at it than most people? What if you want to get paid for it? What if every job to which you might aspire has very well-defined, experienced-based parameters, guidelines which limit the amount of people who can even aspire to the position, jobs posted for weeks at a time, and then weeks later, because they can’t find anyone to fit those exact parameters? Jobs you apply to that, if you could just get an interview, the people in charge of hiring would see you are qualified for, but job postings and, more important, recruiters and H.R. pros, that are inundated with responses from people who have lived a professional life and yours is just beginning, professional lives that look so much better than yours on paper, ones that seem so much more impressive?

What if all you want is a chance? An open door? An open door in front of which 900,000 other people aren’t also standing because they too just want a chance, a line prohibiting you from ever being seen by the people on the other side of that doorway because, after all, they can only see so many people, and only read so many emails, in any given day?

A life of crime?  Might that be the answer?

Yes, when you are unemployed, the entire world, the whole entire world, is wide open to you. To you, and to everybody else in your unemployed position, a growing number, more than those being hired, and every month the discrepancy increases. The entire world, at your disposal, the whole entire world, and to so many others, ones who may not be more qualified, but ones with families, kids, mouths to feed, chances to take, looking to seize an opportunity, to take the situation at face value, synthesize the available data, and work the shit out.

The world. The whole entire world.

It’s a big fucking place.