The graduate abyss has been looming over me, and many people like me, since early adolescence. When I say “people like me,” I mean people who decided at age 13 that they hated maths and determinedly embarked on a path that they knew would result in an arts degree and absolutely no job prospects. As soon as you make this decision – the anti-maths, pro-arts decision – you’re pretty much constantly told that you’ll never get a job, or, slightly more tactfully, that the fields you’re interested in are “very competitive”, or that you might get a job in this “very competitive” field, but you’ll never be financially stable. When I say that I’ve been mentally preparing for the graduate abyss for the last ten years, I really mean it. 

The abyss has occupied at least a small portion of my mind for the last decade but, of course, it became one of my favourite things to obsess over in my last two years of college. I spent all last year frantically applying for shit jobs in places I’d rather set fire to than step foot in. I remember writing a cover letter this time last year, quite literally begging to write for a website that reviews new technology products. Anything to avoid actually living in the much-anticipated graduate abyss. I even ran in last year’s student elections, which was, at least in part, a way to ensure that I’d be in College and thus not in the abyss for another year. At my lowest, I considered doing an emergency Masters, even though I have absolutely nothing to contribute to academia in any way. 

Now, I’m ten months into the vacuum of graduate life, and I have to tell you – it’s really not that bad. I can’t believe I’m writing that, but it’s true. What I thought would feel like falling endlessly into a bottomless pit of unrealised dreams and existential crises has actually been an extremely normal and fine experience. It turns out that when you finish college, life still revolves mostly around watching music videos and smoking rollies, just like it always did. 

While I am in absolutely no position to offer advice on how to be productive or how to apply for jobs or how to succeed as a new graduate, I think I’m now in a position to offer advice on how to not absolutely hate your life and yourself when you finish education. This, I think, is the insight and advice I’d have liked last year. 

1) The Pandemic Recession

Though the pandemic has been a terrible experience for almost everyone in the world, I do believe it has acted as a wonderful barrier between recent graduates and the abyss. Hear me out. Do you remember when the financial crisis happened in 2008, and everyone was talking about the graduating classes of 2008/9/10 and how they didn’t stand a chance? Well, girls, we’ve beaten them. Not only are we staring into the face of an absolutely ginormous recession, we also have a global health crisis going on. The downside of this is that we do actually have to live through the Pancession, but the upside is that we have a perfect excuse to not succeed.

If this was normal life and I’d done nothing since April, people would be looking at me with pity in their eyes. They’d be tilting their heads and saying things like, “haha yeah it is so hard to know what to do after college”. Not this year, babe. No no. How could anyone expect me to do anything at all? Um, don’t know if you heard, but the world has been closed for eight months, actually. People on TikTok are full time sending out congratulations to people for getting dressed and making dinner. This is the world I signed up for. Like, no I’m obviously not a successful journalist right now. It’s the apocalypse. 

This logic applies right now and it will continue to apply for at least the next ten years. I still hear about the 2008 graduates and what they went through and how their careers were impacted. That’s us now. If we succeed, we didn’t just succeed, we overcame. And if we don’t succeed, we couldn’t have succeeded, the world was a hostile environment. It’s a win-win.

2) Retail job – dead end? Nah, dead right.

Let me tell you something, smexy girls. I absolutely love minimum wage jobs. I love them so much. Life’s rich tapestry is never more evident than in a service or retail job, and it fills me to the brim with vim and vigour. I’ve said this for years, but I know that no one agreed with me on the matter until the pando hit. 

I have been a shop girl for the last few months, so I’ve been allowed to leave the house four days a week, get on a bus, do menial tasks for eight hours, get on a bus home, and then play with my friends. Does this sound like heaven? Yes. It. Does. Structure, routine, seeing people who aren’t my flatmates, having things to say to my flatmates because I’ve been at work all day. It’s perfect, and people can see that now because most of us have been trapped indoors for the best part of a year. 

This mindset, however, needs to stick around post-pandemic. We need to remember how great it is to be in customer service, how nice it is to leave the house, how invigorating it is to be face-to-face with completely unreasonable people on a daily basis. It’s fortunate that I love this kind of work, because I could be stuck in it for the rest of my life. My hope is that other people who could be stuck in customer service forever can experience the sheer joy that I feel when an unhinged middle aged man asks me to leave my shop and move to America with him. It’s the only way to live. In fact, I think it might be better than any dream job that my silly little degree could actually be useful in. Sack your expectations, and embrace retail.

3) Nothing Ever Changes

Over the summer, I was considering moving to London for a journalism course. I didn’t go in the end because the idea of a pandemic in a new city wasn’t doing it for me. However, when I was visualising my new life in the big city, I spoke to a friend from my hometown who lives over there and has a proper graduate job. I was brand new to the abyss at this point, so I was really soaking in everything she had to say. She said, and I quote, “Susie, life is the same. Ninety percent of the time, you go to work and then you come home and make dinner and watch BBC iPlayer.”

This resonated with me big time, and it applies not only to geographical location, but to location in life. Before college, during college, and after college, the things that I do and the things that I enjoy have remained pretty much the same. I love watching music videos from the Obama presidency era, I love really bad reality television, I love lying in a dark room and listening to Mariah Carey, I love hearing my friends talk about really mundane things in a really dramatic way, I love bitching about people I don’t like and I love indulging in a diet coke and a rollie. All this stuff remains completely unchanged. I get to do it all, regardless of what my job is/where I live/how old I am. The same is true for pretty much everyone – the stuff you like will still be there when you finish your degree, and your life will still revolve around doing those things.

Sure, sometimes I still think “I wasn’t even that bad at maths, why have I done this to myself”, but the reality is that if I was an engineer or a Sunday Times columnist, my sources of joy would remain the same.

4) Inspirational Content

When I’m feeling doomy and gloomy, and I’m longing to have some kind of control over my future, I resort to my tried and tested methods of inspiration: smexy ladies. I know the whole “just look at amazing women and feel inspired and upbeat” thing is pretty vague and unhelpful, so I’m going to get specific. 

In the graduate abyss, every day is a Madonna kind of day. As I write this, I am realising why Madonna is such a great artist for this era in my life. She is the single most valuable example of reinvention in the universe. If you ask someone what their favourite Madonna song is, they might say Hung Up, and they’d be so dead right. They might say Cherish, and they’d be so dead right. They might say Living for Love, or  Ray of Light, or Holiday, or Material Girl, or Vogue, and they would always be totally dead right. Madge has had so many unbelievably successful eras, each one totally unique. She gets it right in so many different ways. 

Moreover, some of her best work was released after her 40th birthday. I know people are always saying “it’s never too late to follow your dreams ! Oprah wasn’t a millionaire until she was 30 !” or whatever, but seriously, if Madonna released Ray of Light at the age of 40, we ought to understand that we have the capacity to be class for years. We don’t need to accomplish literally everything we’ve ever dreamed of in the years immediately after graduation. 

In addition to a daily dose of Madge, I found the following poster to be particularly helpful in my quest for acceptance in the abyss:

I’m not saying that this image cured my anxiety, but I am saying that it does more for me than any counselling session ever did. The artist (@famousfemaleartist on Instagram, Sasha Staicu in real life) is a genius. You have to trust that the Future will be a bit sexy. You’ve got to do it, lovey.

5) Urgency Is The Enemy

I have a terrible habit of thinking about something (i.e. the future) so intensely that I convince myself that something must be done about it urgently. For example, in August, I very nearly applied to a Masters programme that was beginning the following month. I did the whole application in about six hours, including rollie breaks. I didn’t want to do a Masters at all. The urgency just got the better of me.

The future is huge and it can’t all be dealt with at once, obviously. This can be hard to remember. Thank God, then, that I have literally found the cure for this kind of thought cycle. Song 4 Mutya by Mutya Buena and Groove Armada is the cure. I cannot fully express the impact this song has on me. When Mutya gets stressed out in the car, she thinks “Don’t panic panic, Mutya, don’t drive erratic!”. When she’s freaking out, she simply says “don’t act too manic manic!”. She also, in a moment of spiritual-leader level wisdom, proclaims “don’t react now, you cant go back now, don’t panic panic Mutya, just look ahead now”. 

That’s all we can do, ladies. Don’t panic, don’t act too manic, don’t react, and do not drive erratic. You can’t do much when you’re in a state of panic, and that is actually fine and normal. She managed to squeeze six months worth of Headspace daily meditation healing into three minutes and thirty seconds. I’ll die for her.

6) Finally – Get Used To It

I’m kind of getting the impression that the abyss never ends, so we ought to get used to it. I think people in their 50s still feel the abyss, and we probably can’t just keep doing panic Masters to keep the doom at bay. Now more than ever, it’s time to get over ourselves. Don’t get existential, stay smexistential.