Times of Trial and Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, living in exciting times often turns out to be a bit unlucky, from a certain point of view.

To say we’ve been living in boring times would be the lie of the decade. The twenty-first century has proven to have nearly as many pitfalls and joys as the twentieth, albeit pitfalls of varying types. We’ve avoided the great cataclysmic chasm of world war so far, but that portal to the Underworld remains visible off in the distance. How close our collective human path comes to its shadows remains ours to decide. What we have that our ancestors didn’t is their collective memories of the century now past to ensure we avoid some of the same mistakes they made in their wanderings through life.

As a child I had many dreams about what my future would bring, what sort of job or jobs I’d have, who I’d spend my adulthood with and the kids we’d have together; the joys and griefs that would come with the waxing and waning of our days. I figured my adulthood would be straightforward, that I wouldn’t have any trouble finding work or building a life for myself, after all that’s how my parents’ lives seemed to me. Yet in the last decade as I’ve entered my twenties and now see the great stone gateway leading to my thirties near the horizon, I have to laugh at those juvenile ideas of what my life would be like. 

The last decade has been tough, and everything that I’ve done that I feel truly confident about has yet to really translate into a stable long-term career. This is a sentiment that I doubt I’m alone in expressing. For all the benefits of our modern world and its advances, for the threats of the past seeming to be in the past (until they reawaken like the zombies that dominate our popular culture), many in my generation remain stuck having trouble finding work or finding that the industries that we’re interested in working in are “broken” or simply aren’t hiring.

I’ve been very frustrated at how the whole hiring process hasn’t worked for me yet, no matter seemingly hard I try and how many applications I send in. It often feels like there’s some lesson that I missed in my close to 27 years of schooling about how to get a job. It makes me angry when the response from people around me is “oh, don’t worry, you’ll get something eventually” or any other related phrases and sayings that aren’t constructive or helpful.

Today’s title comes from the first volume of President Truman’s autobiography, the stories of his starts and stops as he tried to build his own career a century ago here in Jackson County, Missouri. I’ve always felt that I could relate to Truman more than many other presidents, perhaps because he came from the same area as me, or because he was good friends with some of my more distant relatives. Whatever the case, Truman’s words ring true to me. These are truly times of trial and hope, and I think despite how trying the current time may be, we have to keep up hope that we can drag ourselves out by our fingernails if we have to and into a better tomorrow.

The best solution in my Sisyphean task of applying for jobs is to keep rolling that boulder up the hill and hope that eventually I’ll make it through. The funny thing is the security that graduate school provides with a stipend and a position in an institution hides the fact that in many ways the activities central to graduate school are also Sisyphean in wrangling together support for your work all with the hope, however dim it may be that that work will ensure you a job once you’ve earned your credentials.

It’s hard to be hopeful right now in 2022, and there’s so much to be worried about. I don’t really have a positive spin to put on this one because I’m still not sure what that positive spin might possibly be. All I’ll say is that it’s up to us to figure out a solution to move from our times of trial and hope to our times of decisions and maybe eventually into a new age of optimism.