Craigslist Memories of the Great Recession

When you’re unemployed (like most of us were in the Great Recession), craigslist is your job. You learn how to write professionally phrased emails quickly, and then in a few days you learn the crushing fact that the perfect job you’re applying for is really just a resume aggregator spam-site that won’t get you work, only junk mail from University of Phoenix. You learn to understand the warning signs: random text blocks (to avoid re-post detection), applications that require a credit check, websites with privacy policy written on the bottom of the page but when you click it -- it isn’t a link. Everything starts to smell like bullshit.

I needed a distraction from the crushing reality of the job market, so I became an avid reader of Missed Connections. I was the guy who would always email his friends and be like: “This has to be you that this chick is posting about”, because we were all single and felt some pride in ownership over whatever scene it was that we were in. It became a compelling reason to leave the house everyday, even though I was miserable. I’d think, “Hey, there are a lot of MCs from (such and such place), I think I’ll go there just to see what the girls are like.”

I was really into the sartorial look. I’d always want to wear something that would be easy to describe and I’d dream up the ways I’d want to be seen, like: “You had on a tweed coat and cardigan with a tie clip shaped like an oil derrick, and you were drinking a coffee on the patio at the Cedar.”

I even posted a missed connection for my girlfriend after the night we first met and I gave her my number. It wasn’t until she called me back two months later that I learned she had no idea what missed connections were.

From craigslist I obtained (in chronological order) a futon, a barback job in the North Loop, and a volunteer job selling grand pianos that turned into part time work. I also had two more jobs that were referred to me from other guys who found them on craigslist. One as a carpenter’s union picket-line demonstrator and one as an amusement park gift shopkeeper.

Craigslisting for jobs convinced me that I wasn’t specialized. I wasn’t destined to do anything in particular, I just did whatever needed to be done until it was finished or I messed it up. I would usually search under the general heading “jobs” or “gigs” and try to find something that I wouldn’t need a car to get to. I’d rewrite my resume, send it off, and wait for a return email while I looked for more more potential positions and sulked around my parents basement.

My friend Adam was a craigslist “powerlister”. His job was craigslist, in a more literal sense. He and his dad would scour the freelist for vintage electronics, lawnmowers, and computer parts then refurbish or cannibalize them and post it back on craigslist for profit. Their house looked like something out of Hoarders mixed with the Possum Lodge from Red Green. Every time we’d hang out he’d have to leave early to go pick up a Commodore 64 in the exurbs or something.

I would read the free list often, but I never went to pick anything up. Just like the MC list, I had some compulsion to see every post (or at least every title). I felt like it was my responsibility to see all that craigslist had to offer and filter it down for my friends. Scrolling through page after page, all you’re really looking for is the familiar post that says: “You’ve seen all this before, so you can stop now.” The only thing I ever got out of the experience was a heightened sense of duty and memory recall.

Today I have a job, a car, and a girlfriend. The way I use craigslist has changed a lot. I don’t mindlessly scan, searching desperately for anything that I could use/relate to. I use focused searches and know exactly what I’m looking for before I even open my laptop.

I think there’s something about scanning craigslist that symbolizes Gen Y’s endurance of the Great Recession. Not having jobs left us feeling defeated, and we became unfocused and unspecialized. The time spent on the internet during those years of underemployment made us develop ourselves for our own sake, for a sense of completion, and not in the direction of any particular goal.

That’s why I feel you see more well-rounded individuals with general knowledge in the post-recession workforce. The people with hyper-specialized knowledge were likely working during the recession and have leadership roles in their businesses today, but the people working underneath them have a more comprehensive, cosmopolitan knowledge of both intellectual details and the the bigger picture grit that comes from being pampered with knowledge by the internet while simultaneously being told you’re worthless by the world at large.

--Beck Kilkenny