Ten Better Ways to Say It Than "I'm Unemployed."

Adults often don't understand the difficulty of finding a job in this brutal economy, or forget the general sense of disorientation and confusion that follows a college graduation. They tend to ask insensitive questions like, "What are you doing these days" or "What's your plan for the future?" or "Have you found a job yet?"

Rather than shuffling your feet in embarrassment at your lack of gainful employment, embrace your joblessness. Here are five responses to those pesky inquiries:

1. "I'm taking a sabbatical": Who says you have to have a Ph.D to take a sabbatical? Realistically, a stodgy old prof would kill to have your intellectual prowess AND seemingly limitless time resources. So why not work on your book or thesis? Use this time to contemplate the meaning of life, thumb through War and Peace, or reflect on the fall of the Roman Empire. Or get a list of great books you never got to read and truck through them. Who knows? Your next sabbatical might be 40 toilsome years down the road.


2. "I'm doing an [unpaid] internship": Don't let people label you as unemployed -- tell them you're interning. An "internship" is an umbrella wide enough to accommodate such tasks as making coffee in the morning, retrieving your mail and answering your cell phone. Hey, you would do it for the editor of The New York Times in a heartbeat. Why not do it for yourself? Print out business cards if that floats your boat.

3. "I'm celebrating the Year of Jubilee": In the Bible, the Jewish people would work for 49 years and then leave their land fallow for one year. Called the "year of jubilee," it was a time of great rejoicing in which the rich returned land to the poor. It gave the land and the people a rest. If the God of Israel instituted various points of rest into our lives (nighttime, Sabbath, Jubilee, etc.), maybe we should take advantage and stop working ourselves to the bone.

4. "I'm taking a gap year": The Brits and other Europeans have this down pat -- after graduating secondary school or college, young people take a year to travel the world or volunteer. It's a perfectly acceptable custom across the pond, allows you to take advantage of your youthful tolerance of hostels, and has served China, Korea and Japan by supplying a steady flow of inexperienced English teachers.


5. "I'm doing consulting work": Provided you say it with authority, nobody's going to question you if you say you're doing consulting work. Consulting, like interning, is a broad enough umbrella to encompass a variety of tasks you're already doing: criticizing mom's cooking, analyzing a friend's breakup and telling other people about their mistakes.