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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the main (valid) reason why the "right to work" is enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights ( http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ Article 23).

Many people define themselves through their career and find their sense of self-identity severely damaged if that's taken away from them. And many people don't have the entrepreneurial urge to go an do their own thing if they can't make it happen "in the system".

It's a dangerous place to be, for any society, when a large chunk of its society (particularly middle class, like this girl) feels like their self-identity is crumbling.

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One man's "right to work" is another man's "obligation to pay"

She still has the right to work. Just maybe not on what she hoped to be working on. And maybe not at the salary level she hoped to be working at. But no one is preventing her from getting a job or making her own, so her "right to work" has been preserved.

Then she probably shouldn't have chose to get a degree in a largely pointless major.

Journalism is pointless?

Rather say that it is "overbooked" from an employment-seeking perspective.

I see your point, but I also think you can get into trouble deciding whether a degree is "pointless" entirely on its current market value. Computer science may have seemed like a pointless degree at one point during the 60's.

How many people in the 1960's came out of Computer Science programs only to end up 'flipping burgers' and wondering where they went wrong? You can pursue a field because you love it, but you need to realistically take a look at your job prospects when you make the decision to go for it.

> Computer science may have seemed like a pointless degree at one point during the 60's.

There weren't many folks with CS degrees in the 60s. (Stanford's department, which is one of the oldest, started in 65 and didn't do undergrad until the 80s.)

computer science was the philosophy department, the psychology department, or the math department.

you never know what will be useful.

But her entire point was that she was that she no longer feels as though her "self-identity is crumbling" and that it was stupid of her to think like that in the first place.

It's a dangerous place to be, for any society, when a large chunk of its society (particularly middle class, like this girl) feels like their self-identity is crumbling.

Yes. Whether French Revolution-style pwnage is in order is a subjective point, but if the country keeps sliding in the direction it has taken since 1980, it's inevitable that something like this, right or wrong, will happen.

(Personally, I think 1793-style pwnage of the actual upper class-- not merely "the rich" or politicians, most of whom are decent people, but the few hundred people who really run the world, e.g. Bilderbergers-- would be in order, but for that the problem with violent revolutions is that blood lust takes over and people kill a bunch of innocents, because the people who actually deserve to die are few and far in between. I'd obviously prefer to see no violence over an inane and unjust slaughter.)

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