ARE YOU DESPERATE?

Why is it that lazy people accuse people who are helping themselves of acting out of desperation?

I was waiting for the uptown #6 subway train in New York City when I overheard a conversation between two men in early middle-age; one standing and the other sitting.

The one sitting said “The market sucks; I can’t get a job.”

The one standing said, “I know. I lost my job at the end of 2008 and I couldn’t find anything for nearly a year.”

“Tell me about it. I haven’t worked since then either. At first I wondered what was wrong with me, and then I realized it wasn’t me, it was the economy. It isn’t even worth sending out resumes.”

“I gave up on that too, and if I got an interview, I stopped trying to sell myself. I would just ask, ‘What do I need to know to get this job?’ and usually I didn’t have what they wanted anyway.”

“Me too.”

“Then I asked everyone I knew, and everyone they knew, ‘What’s hot now?’ It turned out, just knowing HTML and Java isn’t good enough. And the big thing is social networking.”

“Don’t worry. It will come back when the economy recovers.” The man on the bench said this in a reassuring tone.

The train came, and I followed them into the car. I had to hear the end of their conversation.

“I’m not so sure. I signed up for this thing called MeetUp, and I found some people who told me about some free classes and study groups.”

“Sounds like a scam.”

“Well, I learned a lot and worked on some projects. I didn’t know anything at first, but it was good just to be with people. It didn’t cost me anything except my time. It took five months, but I landed a job.”

His friend said, “I’m not that desperate.”

When I got above ground, I Googled the definition of “desperate” on my Blackberry, and the first definition was, “marked by despair or loss of hope.” Perhaps our subway rider meant, “frightened and in need of help,” another one of the definitions.

Funny, I find that people who say they are not desperate are the ones who aren’t helping themselves. Could it be that they aren’t frightened enough yet? But, why wait until you’re that far down that road?

And, I’ve noticed that the people I admire the most, especially during hard times, are the people who don’t wait for someone to manage their lives, and who don’t need to be bribed, coerced, or even taught in order to learn or do something new.

And yet, these are the very people who are called “desperate” by the people most in need of help?

And psychologists have discovered that, if you work really hard at improving your circumstances, it is almost impossible to become depressed, and that if you wait until you feel like doing something before doing it, you might be waiting a long time.

Are you doing nothing? Or doing things that don’t work, time after time? I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I don’t think that your situation will be improved by accusing people who are doing something of only doing it out of desperation; at least not before consulting a dictionary.

But if you’re reading this, you’re already doing something, so I doubt I’m referring to you.

- Brooke Allen