30 April 2025
What does work mean? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, work is "action, labour, activity; an instance of this." Not only can work be an active action or an ongoing process, but it can be defined as "the result or product of action, labour, etc.; the means or process by which this is achieved." While this definition encompasses a broad range of activities, the work I work to examine here goes beyond my immediate task of writing this essay. Instead, I would like to consider what lies ahead, reflecting on my own journey with work as I work from graduating into the next phase of my life.
I am 23 years old and soon to be unemployed. I currently hold a position as a Computer Support Technician here at the College of Education, a position I will hold until I graduate, which will then pass from me onto the next undergraduate student, and likely the next after, making a very long line of potential Computer Support Technician students. My work is forward and never ending. I don't mind. My current daily responsibilities include helping anyone who comes in seeking assistance, completing tickets, responding to customers, and coming into work on time. It's easy, but soon I will graduate, and my sole responsibility will be finding a new job.
At the moment, I plan to graduate in the middle of May, and at the end of August I will be moving out. As a result, I can either choose to stay in Amherst for another year, and find another temporary position to hold me over, or seek higher ground, or lower rather, because on further consideration I now realize that the Greater Boston Area is closer to sea level than I initially gave it credit for. Regardless, higher or lower, it may be fairer ground, rocky, yes, and likely less suitable for farming, but fairer in that it may offer more realistic prospects beyond the immediate gratification of the soil I toil.
For example, I find it possible that the Greater Boston Area will hold less competition, in that it would likely contain more jobs in a smaller radius than I would be available to take up at any given time, and given the time to take up such jobs, I would likely find a lot of them, existing somewhere out between moving and searching. I am thinking now of the situation I will be in. Either unemployed or employed, but certainly between jobs, until I find one that suits my liking, and if I am unable to find one that suits my liking, I will have to find a way to gain additional quantifiable experience outside of the experience I gain. Of course all experience is applicable, but the experience that I seek to experience is that of which is related to computers, so that I can, with careful consideration towards my future job prospects, experience the experience of gaining focused experience.
What will work here? Besides me that is, in finding work that works for me. I don't want work to work for me in the sense that it would just complete my tasks. I want to complete tasks that work for me while at work, in the sense that while at work my work fulfills me. Although working through this idea has worked me to dread, I find that I am in a decent position to continue this search for work, and as I will soon be done working towards my degree, and can instead work towards finding a career.
In working to work through work, I feel it loops back on itself in a semantic, useless sort of recursive and meandering way, like the word work won't stop working, even while I'm trying to figure out what work actually means for me. This is a terrible situation to find myself in. Maybe it highlights why I'm an English major, and further, why I currently have no job prospects lined up. Nonetheless, my plan after college is to find something to work towards, something to work for, and to work against.
Regardless, as I consider forward, I should consider resolving a few things. To begin with, or to continue rather, what's the point of all this work? Instead of working towards work, I should resolve instead to begin careering towards a career. Why! It does not help that of the many numerous appropriate words one could use to indicate a position, a position of work that is, either down the street or up in a managerial position, approach the idea with a sense of fluidity, with a movement that lurches, and one that seizes me with unpredictable momentum, cackling at me with the heads of non-linearity, the many shifting faces of the reality of language. Damn this unstable beast! A career should not be able to career whereas work should not be able to work. I guess it does not. There is too much movement here. If only the fields of language had been watered in sense. I since make no sense of the matter.