It’s one thing to be employed and read the layoff headlines that are flooding the country; it’s entirely another to be one of the masses. Now I am part of the ranks of daytime TV watchers. It’s been a week and so far I’ve repainted my entire apartment, reorganized my furniture, found my good friend a job (ironic, yes), and spent two hours hiding in the Twilight Saga universe. For someone who has made a recent effort to keep professional achievement at the front line of her life, this is a nonsensical time. For someone who is constantly skeptical of the work world, this is an even worse time.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer: work and life must be separate and self sustaining entities. This is nearly impossible, I know. I recall ranting about work needing to be satisfying and fulfilling, adding to our lives instead of squandering its pleasurable moments. I don’t feel that way today. Today, a job is a job. It is an unfortunate bi-product of the world we live in and the hard financial times we’re facing.

Many of us are in the Next Step phase of our lives. We’re dealing with employment downturn, financial instability, and the New Media revolution. It’s become too easy for these worries to spill over into our personal lives and bring us down. I, for example, find it daunting to even enter job-bulletin websites; to start that grueling search all over. That fear of job instability can be crippling, making procrastinators out of us, suppressors of our responsibilities.

Investing in a new job. Emotionally. Financially. Are we ever ready for this undertaking? Probably not. Maybe a better question is, should we be so invested? Should we really force ourselves to fall in love with out careers, depend emotionally on them, and let the rug be pulled from under us when they are taken away? Or should we fight to separate our personal lives from our jobs as much as possible? Punch in and punch out.  I’d love to know what the masses think.

September has come and gone, and I’m not sitting behind a desk and taking notes. This is the first fall in many, many years that I find myself out of the classroom. I was excited to graduate from that stage of life and enter that “real world” I kept hearing about. Working through the summer was an exciting taste of adult life, but now fall is here and it’s time to go back to the classroom to sit, adsorb, and regurgitate the teachings of wiser women - except it isn’t! Naturally, the grass is always greener where your ass isn’t, so my yearning for the smell of new books isn’t a total shock. Neither is my desire to go to work in my pajamas… What is a shock is my desire for knowledge. All of a sudden, my brain feels light and useless! Yesterday I found myself picking up an old textbook for some “light reading”. Is this is just an old habit? I don’t think so!

I’d like to send a wake up call to all entry-level, recently graduated, employees. Just because we’re out of school doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the daily grind. Work is exhausting, life is even more exhausting, but I don’t believe we have to let go of all our curiosity. All these posts keep coming back to the life-work balance we’re all looking  for; how to distract ourselves from monotony, how to keep our lives interesting and our experiences new. Something about being in school kept the feeling of excitement and anticipation alive. Graduation tends to feel like we’ve arrived somewhere, somewhere concrete and finite. I have to keep reminding myself that this isn’t true. That what we commute to everyday doesn’t have to overpower our lives (unless we want it to), and that we can still be curious about the world and our ever changing place in it. I may just be trying to prioritize my life, or I may need to go back and hide in the academic world. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that grad school idea…

Technology is meant to better our lives; to deliver fast results, convenience, and to connect us with people we care about. In our life-work-balance discourse, I wholly nominate technology as our saving grace. Smart phones and wireless internet help me to make a smooth transition from the office to the bedroom. Answering my emails on the train ride home leaves me with one less thing to do when I get there. The ability to maintain constant connections via phones and social media has been an exciting aid in reaching out to friends and building relationships. I wonder though, have we become overzealous in our long distance relationships?

From what I hear of the analog days, it seems like people networked within a relatively small radius. You met someone in school, in your neighborhood, in your office building…etc. Now however, long distance relationships seem to be springing up everywhere. We’re not pen pals anymore. With phones, texting, video messaging, Skype, AIM, and a goodie bag of social media websites, we can stay in touch with our distant significant other, have real time conversations, and see each other on our computer screens while we chat. It’s possible that two people living many miles apart will communicate more now than two analog people living on the same block. This sounds great doesn’t it? The only problem is, we’re seeing people less and typing messages to them more. Are these digital relationships realistic, hopeful, and meaningful? I’m a little skeptical…