“Everything Is Kung Fu”: Rethinking How We Show Up in Unemployment

There’s a kind of suffering that comes with unemployment that’s hard to talk about. It’s not just about the money, though that’s very real. It’s the slow corrosion of confidence, the mental haze of waiting for a response, and the strange sense of being on trial every time you’re on a call with a recruiter.

I spent a long time thinking I just needed to get better at the game, better prep, sharper pitch, tighter answers. And while those things helped in small ways, something unexpected shifted when I quietly gave up on trying to win interviews and started to see them for what they could be: an opportunity to just be curious again.

The same curiosity that got me into programming in the first place, the joy of cracking a new problem, not to prove anything but because I wanted to see how it worked, started to come back. I stopped walking into interviews with the heaviness of trying to vault over the next obstacle. Instead, I approached each conversation like a puzzle. A chance to share my real experience and ask honest questions. A chance to learn something new, even mid-interview.

And it changed the atmosphere. The tone of the calls. Even the quality of my thinking.

When you stop rehearsing every line in your head, and start genuinely responding to what’s in front of you, your mind actually clears up. It’s like some part of your mental bandwidth that was being spent on fear, judgment, and self-monitoring is finally freed up. And what’s left is the ability to calmly drill into a problem with surprising clarity. The same way you’d debug an issue at 2 AM with no one watching, just for the satisfaction of solving it.

Over time, I started to see how fragile the “quick-fix” mindset really is. The kind of mindset that treats interviews like a sprint, or assumes there’s a secret unlock to get hired faster. What I slowly came to realize is that the right and enduring approach doesn’t feel like a cheat code at all. It feels like a reorientation, an ongoing reshaping of how you respond to challenges, how you communicate, and how you show up whether someone’s watching or not.

There’s a line from The Karate Kid (2010) that stuck with me:

“Kung Fu lives in everything we do… It lives in how we put on a jacket and how we take off a jacket. It lives in how we treat people. Everything is Kung Fu.”

That line helped me understand that interviews aren’t isolated events to optimize. They’re part of how we live. The way we respond to pressure. The way we treat our own thoughts. The way we carry ourselves in uncertainty.

This shift didn’t magically fix everything. But it gave me something better than a short-term result, it gave me a way to grow that carried forward into all areas of my work and life. And slowly, that growth added up to outcomes I couldn’t have predicted from the anxious place I started.

So if you’re in the middle of that long, quiet space between jobs, maybe try this:

Don’t focus so much on winning the next round.

Focus on how you show up to it.

Everything is kung fu.