The Labour of Looking and Being

What if the hardest work we do is not what we are paid for, but what we carry in silence: the labour of looking, and the courage to be?

"Unemployment is an opportunity."

That is what the tbd Community website said, and it made me pause. I have been sitting with that thought.

What does it really mean when someone asks, “What do you do?”

The expected answer is usually tied to a job title: something at somewhere. Rarely is the question meant to ask who you are, what inspires you, what makes you happy, what saddens you.

Rarely is the answer expected to be: simply living, pausing, exploring, or healing.

I have come to realise how little value is given to simply being. To existing. To trying. To dreaming. To choosing a life that does not always follow the LinkedIn script.

Instead, worth is often tied to how much one produces. Our value becomes transactional.

For the past few months, I have been in friction with this narrative.

I get up each morning, check my tracker, scroll through LinkedIn, and write to people and organisations I imagine enjoying working with. Some reply. Some don't. I move on the next.

I write about what moves me. I do the work of hoping. I do the work of imagining. It is not romantic. It keeps me together. It drives me. It is living.

As American anthropologist David Graeber argued in Bullshit Jobs, there is a profound disconnect between what moves people, what inspires them, and the jobs they end up doing just to survive.

I am in that in-between space right now, and I am learning that unemployment is not just a gap, but a mirror. A reminder. A question: What does it mean to live meaningfully beyond job titles and productivity?

I have not found “my job” yet. Maybe it is still finding me. But in the meantime, I am here. Building. Learning. Showing up. And that counts too.

A mirror photo I took on May 17, 2024, while covering an exhibition in Vienna about Turkish guest labour in Austria — a moment that quietly mirrored my own questions about work, worth, and visibility.