7 Silver Linings Now That You've Lost Your Job

Or maybe take a trip. Traveling is one of the most effective ways to cram new, original experiences down your sensory gullet. Multiple studies have shown that new experiences make humans happy and more satisfied with life, and now you've got the time for it. Even if it's just to find out how the television channels are a bit different in neighboring states.

What You Can Do Now:

Pick a place you've never been before, and go there. If you don't have the money to go there (you don't) go to Omaha instead. Omaha is incredibly cheap, and has an Orange Julius.

Or, just take this time to read a good book, read a bad book or thumb through a book before setting it aside and building a cushion fort. With the power of your imagination, the whole world is a book!

If pillows excite you this much, it may be time to re-evaluate your life choices.

What You Can Do Now:

With the lack of income, it's advisable to pursue one of your cheaper interests, like meditation, long walks or collecting interesting sticks. If you don't have any of those interests, maybe consider being more realistic.

Chicks dig butterfly catchers.

• Cleaning them.
  
  
• Putting them on.
  
  
• Taking them off.
  
  
• Binding of fabric.
  
  
• Realizing your fly's still down after you left the restroom.
  
  
• Realizing your fly's still up after you've started urinating.
  
  

What You Can Do Now:

Consider some of the following pants substitutes for your day-to-day, society-of-one garb:

• Shorts
  
  
• A Towel
  
  
• Underpants
  
  
• Kilts
  
  
• Most of a newspaper
  
  
• Barrel with straps
  
  
• The Un-judgmental Wind
  
  

What You Can Do Now:

Do not play video games. You will wake up eight months later with no job, a thousand new insults for people who suck at video games and profound sadness.

What You Can Do Now:

You're the best judge of your strengths (occupying space, blinking) and weaknesses (adequate performance of job-related duties), so you'll be in the best position to decide which areas of yourself deserve potential improvement. But you may also be an unimaginative simpleton. If that's so, here are some ideas for you to get started:

• Go to the gym.
  
  
• Teach yourself a new skill, like magic or fortune telling.
  
  
• Get your simpleton friends to pay you $50 to tell their fortune.
  
  
• One wise guy will probably say, "If you're psychic, how come you're unemployed?" At this point, you should wave that $50 in his face. Who's unemployed now?
  

  
  Not Madame LaGrange.

  
  
• They'll probably want their money back, but it's a good story to tell at the gym anyways.

A period of unemployment is a good time to reevaluate what you've been doing and what you'd like to do. Having a career which lines up with your interests is an excellent way to feel more satisfied with life. Not that you weren't feeling satisfied with life before -- after all, having enough money to eat was certainly satisfying, at least on a strictly biological level. But with the right career you can have psychic satisfaction, which has got to be worth ... something? Those hippies never seem to starve to death, so they can't be too far off track.

Maybe they sell their dreadlocks to wigmakers.

What You Can Do Now:

For example, let's say you always wanted to work with animals. You might naively assume that you should then look for a career with animals, when in reality, you should just give it up. Come on man. There's just no money there.

You think that fox will contribute to your 401k? Well he will, but not reliably or generously.

Instead, trick yourself into thinking you always wanted to work with tax forms. Find a mirror, stand in front of it and tell yourself that you want to process tax forms. Do this 800 times an hour, three times a day. That might sound insane, but when you do the math, it turns out to only be about 14 times a minute, which is easily doable.

Once that's done, it's a simple matter of finding out where all your pants went (check in the cushion fort), hitting some job interviews and hey presto* you're back in society!

Welcome to the long, painful rest of your life.

*presto may take four to 18 months, depending on quality and completeness of pants.

Be sure to check out the lighter side of other depressing scenarios, and keep yourself from being a bumbling wreck in public.