Date Night With Jeff Bezos

How Social Media Melted My Mind, Part II

After 5 years of being unemployed and continually seeking work on LinkedIn & other online job sites, I suffered a schizophrenic breakdown that required police intervention & a protracted period of medical treatment in order to recover a semblance of the life I previously had known.

At its peak intensity, I believed in my heart of hearts that Jeff Bezos, then the head of Amazon & the world’s wealthiest person, was personally invested in my fate & was testing me online & in real life to determine how far I was willing to go to succeed.

In truth, I had been underemployed since 2006, when I completed 10 years of higher education at Johns Hopkins University by receiving a Ph.D. in global history. I was constantly on the job market for a coveted tenure track position in the humanities that never came to pass. After 8 years of trying fruitlessly to find a stable place in my chosen profession, I left academic life entirely to seek out new terrain in Silicon Valley.

First, I tried to make it on my own as a freelance blogger, novelist, & screenwriter. Then, I tried to establish my own environment consultancy in the Santa Cruz Mountains where I hoped to enlist big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, & Facebook as clients. I had no money to invest in advertising. I had no connections to speak of. I believed in the American Dream & felt that I could achieve success on merit & with unstinting hard work.

I was wrong.

Desperate to earn income in a very expensive place like the San Francisco Bay Area, I started to apply online to content writer, editor, & other jobs in Silicon Valley. I assumed that graduating summa cum laude from Williams College & having a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins would help.

I was wrong.

The only job interview I received in 5 years of trying was with an Amazon fulfillment center. I considered it but was unable to make it to the interview given the length of my commute to the location.