>I always take issue with the idea that people should just make themselves more "valuable" to get a job.
In America the market dictates your self worth.
In America the market dictates your self worth.
As it does everywhere in certain factors.
If you aren't attractive to a life partner, you don't get a life partner. Why should a work partner or an employer be different?
Because you don't necessarily die of starvation or become a burden to the state if you don't get a life partner, unlike what happens if you don't have any source of income?
However, the job market is qualitatively different, which is why it should be held to different standards. Loneliness is definitely harmful, but still many people don't want sexual/life partners. However, everyone needs to eat and have some sort of shelter and access to health services. If you lack money for this, you either die or become a burden to someone else, possibly the state.
Coming back to what I believe was the parent's point when they said "in America the market determines your self worth", your worth as a person isn't -- shouldn't be! -- how much money you make or even whether you have a job. That simply doesn't seem right to me.
First, only eating is really required, and it requires far less than a healthy diet. The rest of that you can find people who forgo. Also, there are some who choose to not eat and a subset of them do hold this choice until they die (which tends to be soon after and caused by not eating). Consider some monks who mummified themselves through strict control of their diet as one extreme example.
So what do we consider a need? If you'll live 40 years on gruel but 50 years on a balanced diet, is the balanced diet a need? What if the difference is 5 years and 15 years respectively? What if it is 3 months and 10 years and 3 months respectively?
>your worth as a person isn't -- shouldn't be! -- how much money you make or even whether you have a job
Then what should be? And what ever criteria you do choose to determine your worth to others, what of people who lack that criteria through no fault of their own?
When society doesn't value you as a human being, you don't value yourself as a human being.
There are many cultures that don't value people based on how much they earn. I think valuing people based on economic success is largely tied to Indian and Asian culture. As a white person from a white family in the middle of the US, no one that I care about values me based on my salary. Some cultures seem to be more obsessed with economic status than others. To me, it's repulsive.
As someone of the same background and also from the middle of nowhere mid-US, I can say this is certainly true. It seems a bit different on the coasts.
That said, even my family doesn't think too highly of the unemployed, which seems a bit inconsistent.
But how many cultures value people regardless of who or what they are? Even if it isn't tied to financials, it is tied to something and there are the haves and the have nots. You can even artificially create such values among children if you give them information to suggest that some arbitrary characteristic is a have and competing arbitrary characteristics are have nots.
I cannot say the same.