Here's what I think when a life-form (other than my wife) tells me it's newly jobless: So What? That's right, I'm indifferent (and obviously comfortable with hypocritical double-standards). But I'm not indifferent because I lack concern for Humanity, nor because I'm unafraid of the Recession. I'm indifferent because I've been jobless since the year after I graduated college. Well, not exactly jobless. I work--a lot. But I have a career that I spend time and energy trying to expand whenever I have a waking moment. I just don't have a Job. Not in the "I work for WastefulCompanyName, Inc. all week" type of job. In fact, I probably work more than many people--I just get to visit the grocery store when it's empty. (And I'm not complaining: I literally think this is a rarer perk than health insurance, especially given the full-body high I get from no line at the register versus having to decide what disease I can afford to die from with the obtuse managed-care healthplan that I feel lucky to have.)

But back to the main issue: I don't have a Job because I'm a writer. But I'm just one member of that funnily sorry-lucky lot--the type who hasn't chosen to align with just one Corporate Deathstar. I want stability like the rest of us. I'm just a writer who doesn't expect stability because I can pretend to have honed a few "skills" (as if any mammal can't negotiate Microsoft Office) and because I sent a batch of e-mails to bots advertising for project-managing androids on Monster.com (which, by the way, never seemed to me like an odd name for an employment Web site). As this type of Flexible American Worker, I actively attempt to create--and improve on--employment stability by diversifying my means of employment. I like to think of my gigs like all the animals, carbs, and junk food I need to eat in order to avoid the kind of complete health that would render me free from illness-anxiety, the kind that keeps me in just the right amount of chronic discomfort, always a little hungry to feel better (the good pain, I call it.) Then, when tough times come (and they come for me, too; I'm not rolling in tons of new unsolicited work, despite my optimism, solid ethics, and lucid argumentation style) I can deflect the acid-showers of Recession. As my insurance company would tell you, I'm somewhat numb to a lot of stuff thanks to some pre-existing conditions.

But I actually think something useful can be gleaned from how I've structured my working life, whether or not you choose to sell that hot new commodity called Words for a living. My assignments vary; so, too, my rates and the payment models that furnish those rates. I'm spread out, open to new stuff (including Crime), and non-committal with my day, which also, incidentally, renders it genuinely satisfying to be in a monogamous relationship, for anyone out there feeling the need to cheat. In this way, I can adapt to a changing economy and the models that might pay me to continue this charade. So, no: It doesn't pain me to hear the whines of the newly laid off jokers around me, or those who fear for their jobs. They bought into a promise that the world can't keep; they probably also think that Splenda is good for you because, as we all know, it's "made from sugar."

Here is where I should probably explain that I also don't currently have the good fortune to know very many honest, hardworking people who never had the opportunity to develop even more intrinsically marketable skills than they currently possess because they have worked in a plant of some type since high school and now can't afford a computer. (And while the rare few of these people I do know happen to be whiners, it's better not to generalize, at least in this paragraph.) Moreover, many of the lovelies I have had the pleasure of knowing since attending (and paying for) my overpriced and increasingly pointless college don't lend themselves easily to freelance work. Key word? Easily. No one's keeping anyone from making a few clams on the side, and no career precludes someone from using those skills in the Gig Marketplace. Many of these people just can't break free from the molds that they find alternatively comforting or frightening; they can't psychologically see how they could become diversified freelancers, and that's a Problem, as I'm clearly not facing enough competition given the fact that I'm writing this blog-essay when others sleep-in.

Even if all of the world's money is hidden in a hatch trapped in a Very Special Lost Script, guest-written by Bernie Madoff, no form of work or career has ever ceased to progress from someone acting self-promotionally--from self-starterism, entrepreneurialism, or what we, in my line, of work call "daily whoring." And there would seem to be a serious lack of that entrepreneurial, self-confident spirit in a lot of people I tend to come across, whether I'm in my phony incarnation of a socially responsible Los Angeles neighborhood or the boldly high-and-fast-living New York region in which I grew up, where people still think a wasteful neocon mindset isn't responsible for the magical pixie dust that's become of their investments (as if money is real, to begin with!). Wherever I am, it's obvious: Plenty of people think they deserve more cash, but few people run out and get it in the way that they grab a daily latte equivalent to the cost of the inexpensive legumes necessary to feed your LinkedIn "friends" for a month.

I mention these facts not to inspire ill-will in my direction. (I seem to do that rather easily by voicing some of my honest opinions; I know I'm just meeting the wrong people, or at least I have to hope society provides more satisfaction for others). But it simply appears to me, as a somewhat newly married writer-person in my early thirties, that too many people I know are too afraid to make work happen for themselves. Many graduated from college, studied something broad but specific enough, and ended up working for a company that paid them to complete certain tasks--while checking their e-mail, turning in simply average assignments, watching YouTube, and taking long lunches or futzing with time-sheets to get out early. Frighteningly, many of these people haven't had to personally sell things--haikus, Amway, coffee, fake Rolexes, faker religions--in order to eat. I often tell my wife that if I didn't do my job--say, the way the pharmacist decides not to fill my prescription one day, citing "forgetfulness"; the way an apartment manager doesn't fix anything but can blame the person he called for help; the way a doctor doesn't call you back--I wouldn't receive payment. It's true: Never have I been paid for an article, story, or multi-media project that I haven't thought about, researched, outlined, written, and submitted to an editor, director, or producer. Never have I been paid for sentences I haven't strung together (except for those rewritten 10 times by a team of 20 because print magazines didn't know how to cut the fat). The bottom line: If I don't turn in work, I don't make the green stuff (Envy).

It would seem to me, then, that the good thing about a Recession is that it can act like a filter, blocking from so-called "success"--say, the ability to buy a one-bedroom cottage in Los Angeles, even today--the people who don't know how to ask for and take from the world what they need--the lazy, uncreative, and entitled; essentially a lot of writers and people who went to school with us. It can also spur along the most entrepreneurial and creative to generate new ideas, get-subsistence-quick schemes, new models of work and productivity, new connections, new skills with all the free time and Twitter access we have on our buggy smartphones. But this is not the majority of the group called American Humans. Most would much rather complain about bank bailouts and a CEO's private jet (I rather enjoyed those news-bits, too, but I like getting angry about sillier stuff--say, the fact that studios might give one entertainer $100 million instead of splitting that up among 100 worthy people so we don't have to watch Celebrity Apprentice.) Either way, I propose something Revolutionary: Try getting some of these hardworkers off their gym-sculpted asses to find new paying opportunities. Unpleased you lost your job? Pick up a potentially lucrative hobby. Pick up a broom, or an eBbay junk-selling habit. Hell, pick up some more pot from the "landscape architect" who sold you the last batch and sell it for a higher price. It's time to start getting Darwinist. Especially if we believe in Obama. I mean, do you think he just expected us to give him the worst job in America? Genius had to kill for it.

But what's funnier to me than the fact that so many people simply expect to be paid for their work (discipline unimportant) are writers who expect to get paid in an age when the media biz is imploding--to say nothing of those who represent writers. Let's start with the first group. For example, I happen to know some scribes who have recently group-e-mailed each other about the fact that a bunch of Web sites (including this one) doesn't pay for so-called content. They're outraged, these undiscovered Whitmans and Joseph Mitchells, that anyone, anywhere would take some time to pen even a short prose-poem for free. And yet these are the same writers who always complain about a lack of assignments--often through poorly written sentences (takes one to know one!), rife with entertainingly bad syntax that could render Perez Hilton Graham Greene-esque given the right mental haze. These long-form poets think there's some sort of progression in our thing--that if the last story netted five grand, they deserve at least five (or eight) for the next one. They don't know how lucky they remain to be even dabbling in their trade--that sometimes you have to work to get work. And when their careers come to a hault, they'll blame the Economy, the Internet, or the Death of the Newspaper.

In fact, I wonder: Should I try (albeit unsuccessfully) to write something intelligent and maybe even funny on the Huffington Post today? Or should I spend the same amount of time complaining to my faux-friends that no one is willing to pay writers anymore? I choose not to answer these group e-mails: If my writer buddies knew that contributing to HuffPo has, for me, brought in more work and intrigue from editors, agents, producers, and others than writing for small payments on, say, eHow, or low-circulation magazines and newspapers going bankrupt because they can't keep up with the times (no pun intended), they might think I'm rubbing it in. And I don't want to rub it in--not with people who don't deserve the sea salt in their virtual papercuts. I like to write, so I'm a writer; I also like to work, so I'm a working writer. Sometimes, I get paid little or nothing; sometimes I do very well. It evens out if I show a commitment to and flexibility about what I have chosen to do (whine, ruminate, ask annoyingly rhetorical questions, make lists) with My So-Galled Life. People respect others who go the extra mile, as long as it's not out of the way, the way my poor great uncle used to drive his Impala in circles trying to find the ultimate black-and-white cookie.

Then, there are writers who want to work but writers' representatives who would Stop Them. Recently, for instance, a hard-working, self-promotional sit-com writer in Hollywood met with her new Management Team (read: illiterate Pepperdine grads obsessed with finding the next downer-cum-inspirational world-culture movie shot sideways, with jump cuts, and driven by a contrived narrative device). Anyway, the foursome spoke for an hour, ran up a huge bill at a Beverly Hills "bistro," where the chef thinks he understands marinara sauce, and then, over coffee, finally told her that none of the five (five!) objectively excellent scripts she had shown them would be right for the company's actors and directors. Nor had they sent the writers' scripts around to producers yet. Could she write something else--something a little more like this or that? The writer was confused. She told the team that she'd sent her most recent pilot to a well-known director with a development deal looking to produce new scripts. "You sent it to him?" they asked. She replied in the affirmative. "Who said you could do that?" they said. "Well," she countered, "It's my script. He replied and said he's interested. He's set up a meeting with me for next week." The team was flabbergasted. How dare a creative professional disallow those who think they know how to sell creativity (despite the fact that they don't try to sell it) in an attempt to make a sale? Here is a writer who works and wants to make a living but won't be able to do so until she cans her team of thumb-twiddling no-peeps. But you don't do that in Hollywood. You keep going to meetings and having your wheels spun; feeds the Beverly Hills "bistro" economy.

The moral of the indulgent blog post I've now nearly finished contributing for free isn't really a moral. It's more like three rules that I live by. If you're laid off, try to work every second you can, even in another discipline, even with sporadic "gigs," and don't field every offer with a question about the per-minute payment and what you can get out of the position before you even start it. If you're a creative person who doesn't work enough, get to the brain-and-finger-gym; plenty of people would die to make a living doing what you purport to do; and it doesn't hurt to remind people you're happy to do some of it for free. Lastly, if you have some dead weight on management duty, run. They're probably worse than the savant who won't write for free: they won't let you write for anything, lest they make the deal and it somehow serves to benefit them in more ways than getting 15% of your measly option. As for those "Office Space"-like employees, newly laid off and complaining every time I walk into a coffee shop, well, how about making your own Joe as you start a new business premised on selling complaints. Maybe India can outsource to you; surely some of those hard workers will soon be in need of original American whining-ingenuity.

For now, I plan to continue celebrating the fact that I lack a Job. It's the perfect way to avoid layoffs, even if all those fired people used to work at the magazines and companies that hired me. There will always be a place for decently composed sentences and bright ideas in this world. Whether this specific Web page is one of them is an entirely different issue.