There’s a quiet assumption that follows you when you’re young and without a job. It hangs in the pauses during family gatherings, in the politely phrased questions from old neighbours, in the cheerful automated reminders from job portals. The assumption is simple, heavy, and utterly pervasive: if you are not employed, you are doing nothing.It’s a peculiar kind of invisibility. Your days, which might be filled with a frantic search for purpose, with sending out applications into silent digital voids, with learning a new skill from scratch in the blue light of a laptop, are flattened into a single, static image. That image, in the public imagination, is often one of stagnation: a person adrift, passive, waiting.
What this assumption fails to see is the sheer volume of unseen labour. There is the emotional labour of maintaining hope in the face of repeated rejection, a full-time job in resilience that offers no pay stub. There is the intellectual labour of trying to construct a future with few clear materials, of piecing together an identity that isn’t prefabricated around a job title. There is the logistical labour of navigating bureaucracy, of networking with the anxious cheer of someone building a bridge from the middle of a chasm.
For many, this time is not an empty space, but a crucible. It is a period of radical self-audit—asking what you’re good at, what the world needs, and if the intersection of those two things even exists. It can be a time of creation, of writing, of building, of caring for others, of volunteering, of simply figuring out how to be a person in a world that often values doing over being. This work is profound, but it is quiet. It doesn’t come with a business card or a salary to cite as proof of your worth.The assumption that ‘no job equals nothing’ is a relic of an older script, one where linear progression was not just expected but guaranteed. That script has frayed. The landscape of work has transformed, becoming simultaneously more connected and more precarious. The path from education to a lifelong career is now less a highway and more a tangled path through a dense forest. To be paused at a clearing is not to be lost; it is often to be gathering your bearings.This societal reflex to equate productivity with paid work ignores the entire spectrum of human activity that sustains, enriches, and prepares us. It dismisses the value of reflection, of rest, of exploration. It tells a young person that their current worth is a function of their economic output, and in doing so, it risks rushing them into any slot that fits, rather than the one that might be right.
So, if you are in this space, know that the assumption says more about our collective limitations than it does about your reality. Your ‘nothing’ might be the most important ‘something’ you ever do. It might be where you learn to hear your own voice beneath the noise of expectations. It is the unclassified, unformatted, unapproved work of becoming. And while the world might not see the progress, you can feel it—in the hard-won clarity, the skill forged in necessity, the quiet resolve that builds when you have to define yourself from the inside out.
The next time someone implies your days are empty, you don’t need to justify them with a hidden list of accomplishments. You can simply understand that they are looking at a canvas they perceive as blank, while you are in the midst of mixing colours they’ve never seen. The work is happening. It just doesn’t have a name yet.