I am running late. The traffic on Rhode Island Avenue is appalling, as usual. I am currently idling in a queue to enter Logan Circle that runs about a quarter mile (bumper-to-bumper) to my girlfriend’s car on Florida Avenue. This will take the better part of 20 minutes until I can get through the circle only to wait in line for Thomas Circle. I become nostalgic for the days of being stuck on the I-5 crawling into the city. At least I had a mountain to look at.

By the time I arrive, Steve Inskeep has gone through today’s top headlines twice on Morning Edition and I have become filled with the desire to just sit in a quiet place and play a meditative game of Tetris. Nothing solves my problems quite like placing misshapen blocks falling from the sky.

I pull up to the curb and get out of the car, dodging cars to cross the street. I go through the revolving doors and hustle through the lobby of the postmodern nightmare that is a corporate office complex. I call the elevator and when it comes I command it to do solitary task and elevate me to my floor. Before the doors close two strangers board the elevator. We all make eye contact, each of us sharing an awkward smile. The doors close; we are all now trapped in this box until it reaches my floor (the 11^th and penultimate one).

Instead of a few awkward, disquieting moments in the elevator, all six of our eyes become transfixed on the little TV screens in the elevator. The aptly called Captivate Network was actually created to sell adspace while it displayed news, weather, and traffic in elevators to alleviate a few awkward moments.

The day wears on. I spend most of it telling my girlfriend that I love her over google chat while I work on tweaking our network and answering phones. I managed to sneak in a game of Tetris, too. By the time the clock reaches 5:30, I turn the lights off and head back down to the streets of the District. I am going to take the metro home, so I walk the 2 blocks and take the escalator into the seedy underbelly of the city.

The train comes almost immediately and I board, riding the two stops to my yellow line transfer at China Town. A few more minutes pass until I can board the train that will take me home. I take my seat and look around at my fellow passengers. Everyone seems to have some sort of device they are plugged into. The kid next to me has awful techno at full blast on his iSomething. The woman in front of me is speed-reading her Kindle. I spend a few minutes trying to see if I can read the page before she can… I fail every time. A couple a few rows up are sharing ear buds and cuddling. I get to my stop, go home, drink a beer, and drift into a world of talking heads and top models.

Now, I told you a rather typical, if not roundabout story, of my day for a reason. We have surrounded ourselves with technology and innovations for better and worse. They make our life easier, more efficient, and put make the entire world a fingertip away. Conversely, our devices also balkanize us and make the moments we share more superficial. We have a world of relationships and experience waiting out there if we only said hello instead of putting the earphones in and blasting the techno.

Take, for instance, the rise of online dating. What was once viewed as sort of social pariah is now commonplace. I do not have real objections to people who do the online dating thing, but I do think that it falls into this trend of marginalizing human awkwardness and, ultimately, fundamental human connections.

It is the same with facebook, too. I am perfectly guilty of writing on a friend’s wall to skip a phone-call or e-mail in favor of quick superficiality. In the ‘iLife’ world, human connections become quantized by counts of friends, being tagged in pictures, and liking status updates.

I am also just as guilty for succumbing to the luxuries of modern technology and I am by no means campaigning for us to throw away our devices. Technology gives me the news in multiple mediums. I have the ability to tell my girlfriend I love her in the middle of the day, I can be transported quickly throughout the city and the nation. It even tells me how bad the traffic is going to be while I am riding in an elevator. Oh, and it gives me Tetris.

Technology makes our lives easier, but it also creates a few paradoxes. While our devices save us time and energy, we end up spending more of our time plugged into them. While we explore a whole world of global connectivity at our fingertips, we spend more of our time staring into our screens isolated from each other. We add friends on Facebook, but spend less time with our friends in real life.

However, I am not advocating that we “throw away the television”. I actually hate people who don’t have a T.V. I couldn’t imagine a day in my life without being plugged in to the world. As much as I hate to admit it, I wrote the first draft for this very article on my iPhone.

What I am advocating is that we take the time to appreciate an actual human moment. Sit next to a stranger and say hello. People have stories that can’t fit in 144 characters. It might be awkward, yes, but in the process maybe you get a new Facebook friend.

This is part of an ongoing series of articles about being employed or unemployed in today’s economy. We are sharing real stories of struggles and accomplishments, as well as advice on what others can do to make it out in the real world. Read more articles from our writers series on The Vine.

Before I begin this article, I want to offer some perspective. The other night I heard 5 gunshots and the desperate moaning of a man who had just been shot not 40 yards away from the bed I was sleeping in. From what I gathered talking to the police, he was shot in the leg, but I have yet to get an update on his condition.

Unemployment is certainly a serious issue facing lots of Americans, but I just want to encourage us to remember to count the blessings in our lives. Anyways, without anymore preface, the following are the thoughts I had on my experience in the employment market and finding work that you can value.

We were all lied to. We were told that if we worked hard, pursued opportunities, and got a degree that there would be a decent job waiting for us. When I graduated college back in March of 2010 we were still in the early days of the shitstorm that is the employment market. That is to say, there were very little options available to me, but by August I had found employment on Senator Murray’s reelection campaign in Tacoma. I thought I had finally broken through into the world of professional politics.

Campaigns end, though. And when ours did I was staring at the looming prospect of renewed unemployment. I decided that it would be best to take my experience and new connections to D.C. So I packed up a couple of bags, found housing via Craigslist, and embarked on a great journey to find my place on Capitol Hill.

What I found was that to actually enter the world of Capitol Hill requires a perverse amount of nepotism, a healthy dose of luck, and baring those two, it requires the classic internship. My connections were not deep enough to go the nepotic route nor am I inordinately lucky. So I applied and was accepted to be an intern.

The first part of my internship was fine; I learned the ropes and accepted my generally mindless tasks with stride. I was offered some amount of help finding permanent employment, but nothing ever fully panned out.

As the internship progressed, I started to realize that I was highly replaceable labor and that there was no real intention or incentive to help me out. Quite the opposite, there was high incentive to dodge the effects of the budget cuts by using interns for more and more tasks that were traditionally the domain of paid employees. By the end of my internship, I was essentially doing a large part of job where the paid employee was promoted and the position eliminated.

The other thing I noticed was that the egos and attitudes of staffers were overly inflated and fairly appalling. I had interned in college for the Scottish Parliament and came into this experience thinking that people would be grateful for your work, patient with your mistakes, and eager to help you learn. If you devoted the effort to be a good (unpaid) intern, then the staff would devote the energy to be good (paid) teachers. That is how I was able to go from knowing nothing about Scotland to writing a comprehensive review of the legal system’s response to knife crime and the legislative options for changing it.

Instead, I got continually shit on. There were the daily terse e-mails from staffers angry about honest mistakes. Nor was there any real input on how you are developing and what you could improve upon. Even worse, I once got a tongue-lashing for asking a senior staffer her career arc and background (whilst I was filing her papers and labeling her boxes for an office move). I get that people are busy and that the work is important, but when you are cycling through a Pandora station for music you can answer a question or two. I have never understood the culture of general dickishness towards your unpaid grunt force that seems to dominate lots of our culture, especially on the Hill. The great irony was that the Senator was an amazing human being who went above and beyond to make you feel welcome.

The sad thing is that these internships are seen as competitive resume builders. The idea is that you get shit on for 6 months so that you can build a career. However, in this economic climate, you get shit on and spat out, back to a job market where everyone else has impressive credentials and your internship no longer matters. When I was being interviewed for a job after my internship, I was told as much.

So, how did I find employment? The week after I left my internship I applied with a temp agency. Three weeks later I had a position that was only supposed to last a month. Now a few months later, I can finally start to think the burden on unemployment is off my back. Did my internship help improve my standing to get offered the position? Maybe it did. Though I know a lot of other hill interns who are still unemployed. I think I got this position because I have a very diverse background and skill set which was a good fit for the company.

That is not to say that I am in a position that I dreamed of. Far from it, I am doing work that I am good at, but I desperately miss the sense of meaning my jobs and internships once had. Doing work is something that one should always be proud of, but I got a degree in Political Science so that I could go out and do things I believed in. Right now I sit behind a desk and solve IT issues while answering phones. Hardly the life of public service I got my degree for.

Still, the most rewarding work I ever did and the experiences that I value most were the small campaigns and nonprofits I volunteered for. I loved being involved with small organizations and candidates who shared my values. The options for a career in that field are currently very limited, but they are always looking for people to help out. Honestly, it was the network and experience at the nonprofits where I got the most career help, training and satisfaction.

So, my advice to the potential Capitol Hill intern who wants to work on issues important to them is to pass. Go intern for a nonprofit, work for cheap (or free) for a campaign, or just volunteer somewhere that you feel makes the world better. Dabble in lots of fields and learn new skills. Go somewhere that will appreciate you. What is better than an internship on The Hill is an enthusiastic recommendation from someone who genuinely appreciated your work.

The year that I started kindergarten was the same year that Mikhail Gorbachev signed over control of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal to the new country of Russia, the last act of the USSR. A few weeks earlier, William Jefferson Clinton beat an incumbent President Bush in an overwhelming victory to be the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to hold the Presidency. Change was everywhere.

Clinton enacted policies that helped foster the burgeoning technology industry; the world was rapidly becoming smaller and in my little house in the south of Seattle (near the Boeing and Microsoft campuses) I was in the epicenter of it. I grew up with computers, the internet, and the privileges of a technocratic suburban lifestyle. The possibilities were endless. The world was, in my estimation, relatively peaceful and prosperity was everywhere.

We all, as a nation, grew complacent. We largely ignored the strife outside of the bubble we created, and except for the clusterfuck with Aidid in Somalia, things like the Rwandan genocide and the Taliban’s increasing brutality in Afghanistan went largely unnoticed or underreported. Even the intervention in Kosovo was reduced to night-vision views of NATO bombing salvos.  Instead, we began to obsess ourselves with Survivor and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

The 2000 Presidential Election had little to do with foreign policy. Little did we know that foreign policy would be the key issue the next President would have to face. Instead we talked about tax relief and how to spend our budgetary surplus. After one of the most controversial and close elections in U.S. history, President George W. Bush was sworn in on the vows of compassionate conservatism.

By 2001, I had started my first year of high school. I had no real ambitions or dreams, just a head full of punk music and a penchant for rebellions. Our family had just moved to a new town in Southern Oregon.

It was on the second day of my freshman year that I woke up to my mom screaming, “Eric wake up! We are under attack!”

Thinking that the little condo we were living in until our house was built was in some sort of physical danger, I sprang out of bed. As I got up, my mom was planted firmly to the television as they showed repeats of a second plane smashing into the World Trade Center. I had never seen anything like it. I watched for about an hour, foregoing the shower and breakfast that was usually crucial to my morning routine.

I still remember the walk to school that day. It was eerily quiet; hardly any cars were on the street. The nation was collectively glued to their television sets. We spent the whole school day transfixed by images of planes falling out of the sky. From the Pentagon, both the WTC towers, a field in Pennsylvania, and all of the emergency diversions to clear US airspace, it was clear that what we were watching was now going to play a large role in all of our lives.

I remember watching the same night-vision television shots of bombs that I saw in Kosovo, but this time they were in Afghanistan and for retaliation. It seemed more real this time than it did in Kosovo.

I started to understand the global political realities of action and reaction. I was filled with two conflicting emotions. Yes, I wanted to get the bastards who killed so many of my countrymen. I also was disgusted with the world of international relations. Morality and long-term planning played no role. If they did, we would have listened to Charlie Wilson and built up the country of Afghanistan. Instead we used it as a theatre to beat the Soviets and left it in the hands of madmen.

The world was too big, at the time, to think of the consequences of arming the Mujahedeen. While there is no justification for killing thousands of innocents, there is also no justification for using a country as a pawn of war without thinking of the future we are creating. George Marshall knew after World War II that we could lead and shape the world with some amount of dignity. I had hoped that we would do the same in Afghanistan. Instead, we pulled most of our troops out and invaded Iraq.

For me, it was the biggest step in creating the political being that I am today. 

I started protesting the war because it did not make sense. Our enemy was Al Qaeda and the Taliban, not Saddam Hussein. We had a charge to rebuild Afghanistan into a stable country, not destroy Iraq. We cut taxes, we got into two wars that we could never build our way out of. We surged; we turned the tide against the insurgency, but we did nothing to stop the underlying causes of terrorism.

Ultimately, what September 11^th means to me is a lost cause for peace. We saw the ugly side of the globalized world after a decade of growth. To me, the path to create a globalized and more peaceful world out of the ashes of 9/11 was the best way to turn a tragedy into the linchpin for change. Instead, we doubled down on the ethos of action/reaction and the old games of power politics to protect US interests. Maybe human history, from Sun Tzu to Cardinal Richelieu and all the way through Kissinger and Kennan correctly predicts that our lesser nature will prevail in the anarchy of international relations. I can’t stop wishing, though, that in a world of promise, opportunity and global connectivity, maybe we can chose cooperation over conflict.