Work is a key theme in all of my writing and teaching in mental health. I don’t believe a person can overcome the challenges of mental illness without work. Hell, I don’t think a person can be complete without work. Freud equated work and love as the foundations of our humanness. I’ll go so far as to say a life cannot be meaningful without work.
And work itself can be meaningful. That’s the aspiration of my book, Practicing Mental Illness: Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Manage Challenging Moods. If I have a system, work is the culmination of it.
Work makes you productive, it connects you with others, it can keep the body and mind engaged and active, it can fill you with a sense of purpose, and it is crucially necessary to be independent. All noble goals. All attainable to anyone. Even those with the most severe mental illness.
Work can be anything to which you bring your full focus and effort. Ideally it pays the bills. But even if paid work is not possible, some challenging activity to which you apply yourself can bring you to a place of peace and purpose. And make life worthwhile.
I couldn’t be as successful living with bipolar disorder if I didn’t keep working, even through the worst of it. So now I find myself without a job. I’m actively looking for a new one, but there is something about the process which is dragging me down.
That something is the all-important highlight of key words on your resume and your LinkedIn profile.
I’ve been working for a few decades, and I don’t want to sound like one of those old people who wistfully wails about the good old days, but it was nice to deal with people during a job search. Now the initial, and key, contact is with machines, and a job seeker succeeds only if they can best adapt to what the machine is looking for.
When you upload a resume or fill out an application online no one actually reads it. Call it an algorithm or AI or some scanning software, but a computer scans the resume or application for key words that match the skills the employer seeks in an ideal candidate.
Of course this gets the employer only the people who have been able to adapt their documents to the search criteria. LinkedIn and other websites can help with this. But this process only returns a lot of people with the same skill set, the greatest among them being able to appear to be just what the employer wants by manipulating key words.
Every employer says they seek candidates who are unique and full of potential and diverse experience they can bring to the job. I call bullshit. Mining a search for key words makes this impossible. It makes all the “best” candidates just the same, and it weeds out unique candidates who can bring something new and creative to the job and the company. If enough key words appear on your resume or application you may get an interview, at which time a human make actually read your experience and be moved to ask you how your difference can help the organization. But without the key words you haven’t got a chance.
Being older with bipolar disorder, I sure have a lot of key words, alright. But few of them are what the boss is looking for. A real strength comes with living with a mental illness. A strength infused with creativity, fortitude, and perseverance. That strength will help me soldier on, and I will find a job. I always have. When employees join an organization they may begin by being just what the company wanted. But the best become something different. They bring a fresh perspective and an unexpected energy and the company, coworkers, and that employee able to fully express himself through his work are all better for it.
So I’ll go along with the key words game. There are many ways to say the same thing, but a narrow way to say it to please the machine and convince it to pass you through to the next step. It takes work to get work, and there’s meaning even in that.
It truly is dehumanizing. I wish you well in this. I have found that it is satisfying to do volunteer work as well -- and doing housework in my home, is also truly work, as well, for me. I hate doing it, it does mandate focus, so I know it definitely qualifies as work.
I had no idea it worked this way. Scary. Very "Brave New World," or "1984."