Unemployed Fishing
drakemag.com
drakemag.com
It was outdoors, physical, and cheap. It was art and science, and a moment where skill and control could lead to accomplishment. It was solitude, and a moment away from the internal stress of thinking of what you were going to do next, how you were going to cover bills, or even worse; talking to wife/parents/friends about those same things.
In the end I was fine, and in some ways I am grateful for that time. It gave me a healthy dose of perspective, and a certain amount of self confidence that I now know how to find additional work/clients if I need to. Getting knocked down sucks, but looking back after a successful climb back up is something I wish everyone could experience.
- learn to fish, as the author mentions. Hunting is similar, and good for relationships, as is canoeing, camping, and general outdoorsmanship.
- buy a year+ membership at a cheap gym so you have somewhere to go a few days a week while you are off. The cheaper it is, the more social it will be. Think of it as social and mental health insurance.
- join volunteer, church, or fraternal organizations to develop cheap activity based relationships. if you are a committed atheist, join a secular volunteer organization, and barring those, a theatre or activist group.
- No matter what you hear about others, your severance will be a nasty insult and you will very likely have to spend to hire a lawyer to get what you are owed. Find one now and agree on a rate while you have a job.
- keep lines to recruiters open while you are still employed, even if they are obnoxious. Don't let them know your current/past salary ever, because they will just use your lack of job to pressure you down on the next one. For them to "have your number," literally means being at a disadvantage.
If you are unemployed or just about to be, it's very stressful, but it builds character, and for everyone I know who experiences it, living through it is always better than living in fear of it.
STEM people are not typically taught negotiations, sales, political science, marketing, or business and we're often given this conceit that we're above all that, which I think keeps us stupid and cheap.
Yup!
> we're often given this conceit that we're above all that, which I think keeps us stupid and cheap.
I was thinking along these lines some years back after finally realising that (i) I was underpaid; and (ii) I had no idea how to negotiate effectively; and (iii) that there are many opportunities in life to negotiate, and getting better at negotiation from "I don't even recognise that this situation is a negotiation" to "this situation can be negotiated, here's my very awkward and mediocre effort at doing that" would have a much higher return on investment than learning yet another technical or mathematical thing.
> point of an undergrad degree is to produce credulity
I went through a period of suspecting similar things: if there's a STEM education pipeline that products highly specialised technicians and engineers who aren't equipped with knowledge and skills to navigate and exploit a commercial environment or hierarchical political organisations, isn't the pipeline doing what employers might want? Producing very useful and focused and naive "resources" who don't understand their own value. Tools to be applied.
I'm not sure how much I genuinely agree with this. But perhaps some part of it is true, with the STEM pipeline being tuned to serve the interests of employers and universities and government, but not necessarily the people going through it.
If you're thinking along these lines, check out the book "disciplined minds". The author's argument is roughly that the major part of graduate education is political: demonstrating that you can serve the interests of your masters and perform creative and intelligent work on the problems you are assigned, within the constraints you are assigned.
It's a good read but probably far less actionable than cracking open a few books about how to get better at negotiation, or marketing, etc.
i ended up doing mostly pure-math in undergrad -- because i found it interesting, with no view on how it might contribute to a career -- so my naivety is arguably partly self-inflected!
This is usually said as criticism, but I worked wit few people who could not above. It was special kind of hell.
Working with someone who can't serve interests of team, can't work on assigned problems somehow switching to problems nobody needs or can't fit into constrains we have is not all that useful.
While it's a nice sentiment for thought, severance pay isn't mandatory in the U.S. and there's no requirement for it in the Fair Labor Standards Act[0]. Severance seems more like a customary courtesy, like tipping.
There wasn't a sudden ban on journalism. And the story behind why he stuck around until the end is what interests me.
So there's really no place to go. There are no safe harbors.
B. I left a corporate job in part because I was having nightmares that I was on a sinking ship. I've done freelance work and similar since then.
All things considered, I feel like I made the best choices available to me. But see A above. I'm still not rolling in dough, though I'm no longer homeless.
Go, me.
As an adult I've turned to spearfishing as well. It's an even more immersive escape, loaded with all of its own techniques, tricks, wonders, surprises, and challenges. Getting in the wetsuit is a hassle but no worse than hooking up a boat and getting it in the water. Really, once you spend your first comfortable moments 10-20 meters under water you might wish you never had to come out.
I've always thoroughly enjoyed reading about the satisfaction and joy others get from fishing as well. I guess it's a mix of vicarious experience and a sense of belonging or familiarity.
As for the unemployment... I don't envy anyone for having time away from work due to not having work. It's the worst, and hard to handle if you have a family when it happens. As a developer I've been incredibly fortunate due to work being so readily available, but 2 brief layoffs are probably the most stressful work related experiences I've had. It just feels terrible.
I wish I went fishing when it happened, haha.
Of course I had the advantage of earning enough that I was able to live off of unemployment benefits and savings for a couple months without much worry or compromise to my quality of life.
This was true for me long before the internet :-)
I'm the same way, but for fishing it depends on the type of fishing. Bait/lure fishing I tire of quickly. But fly fishing was vastly different, at least the one time I did it. It seemed a bit more technical and required more focus and finesse.
Thanks, I'll see if I can give that a shot. I have a fly rig mostly put together, but I need to update the flies and get new line (it all belonged to a long-dead great uncle).
Let me also add, that the beach is made to surf and/or play games on. Sunning is boring :)
But there are lots of ways to fish. I enjoy being mobile, looking for fish is part of the fun. And since you generally can't see fish, you have to look for other signs.
See this link for a video on reading the water. It's about trout and streams, but similar ideas apply for lots of other types of fishing (including from shore, wading, and from a boat).
Even if you find them, there is still a physical and intellectual technical component. Can you put your lure on the fish, can you present it, did you choose the right one, etc.
Lots of things are dull of you only invest a minimum amount of effort.
Why one of those new skills is never 'march your politicians out, and make them mandate a 25-hour work week, to guarantee that anyone capable of working is able to find moderately dignified and remunerative work', is a question that will continue to haunt me.
Many people would prefer to work 50+ hours/week for 15-20 years rather than 25 hours/week for 40-50 years.
2. You'd rather take all the social ills of 30-40% of the population being out of work, or doing shitty gig economy jobs?
I don’t believe in restricting freedom of employees to work. If that means the hardest working and most skilled live meaningfully better than the median or 10th percentile, then yes I’m totally ok with that.
You have to feed the troll ("orange man") from a different website? It's so irritating that this shit still needs explained to people.
It can be a rewarding job for someone who enjoys constantly solving crazy puzzles but, even for those who love to code, it can still be a miserable experience. Most people aren't particularly grabbed by the ability to control what a computer does the way that we "geeks" are. They would be bored out of their minds the second they have to do Fizz Buzz, which is why a lot of people never get off the ground with coding in the first place. The starting salary is barely livable; the national average is ~65k, and though I now make six figures, I started in the low 40ks. You won't get rich quick, perhaps at all, and unless you're talented or pick the right technologies, you might be stuck making mediocre pay while suffering the bad code of other learn-to-coders who are in it to strike it rich. After about 4 years, you begin to realize that your job is just like every other job, and that is to clean up the mess made by someone else. Unless you're part of the <10% that actually builds brand new stuff, your purpose is to be frequently astonished and make sense of the chaos. How fun.
Some people enjoy all of that, but it's a fallacy to believe that anyone could do it if they _just learned_. More people aren't coding(or choosing unemployment over coding) for the same reason that I and many of us didn't learn to become aerospace engineers, or CEOs, or HVAC technicians. Most of us probably wouldn't be that good at those things because we don't all have the drive for them, and I don't think that having more people who are mediocre at their jobs is a good thing for anyone.
But I agree that if you don't enjoy programming, you're probably not going to be especially good at it.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyC-qmDWkAAKJvU?format=jpg&name=...
When I was living in Piscataway, NJ, I used to roam along Raritan River during the bad period of my life. I used to see lots of central Americans who fish there. I hardly saw any one who is fully employed (40 years a week, with benefits). Just undocumented workers, and those who are out of luck.
I'm reminded of a monologue (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5zShnoU5GY) by an Italian actor. It's called, The Story of a Broken Man. This is my, more or less literal, translation.
This is the story of a man broken by power, commitments, and responsibilities.
I've been thinking about how many years it has been since I've last gone fishing.
I used to love fishing so much, but I don't go anymore.
Perhaps, I had more important things to do, even though right now I couldn't tell you which.
I haven't been back.
We always have more important things to do that don't make us feel better,
as if feeling better wasn't important enough.
When I used to fish, I was so excited that I would wake up before the alarm went off.
Actually, I was the one waking up the alarm. Wake uuup!
And you're there fishing and you are alone, and if you're alone, you'll be at one with yourself,
you don't think about anything else anymore.
You don't think about having to pay the mortgage, or about the current war.
You don't think about having to pay the mortgage to fund the current war.
You hear a gentle, polite voice
A voice we've all heard at least once in our life; a voice from within that tells you...
hey, hey...
You're so lucky!
I'm so lucky... I'm so lucky!
To me, fishing is like washing, a baptism.
The water of the river, if you let it work, will take away all your thoughts
and perhaps even all your sins.
Including the original sin which is the one that pisses me off the most, pure judicial harassment.
The water of the river, if you let it work, will wash away all your thoughts
and perhaps even all your sins and put you back into the world anew,
it fixes everything for you.
And so I thought, let's give a fishing rod to all these people who are paralyzed by power.
Let's give them the possibility to be alone with themselves,
let's help them forget that they're irreplaceable.
It will help them. It will help us.
Fishing might seem a small and trivial thing, but it's a return to simple things,
to the fundamentals we are losing.
Well, fishing gave me a great chance to hear that polite voice,
that gentle voice, that voice that tells you...
Hey, you're so lucky!
I'm so lucky, I'm so lucky!
We're so lucky, we are so lucky!
But...
But every time I hear that voice I'm a little ashamed and I'm almost embarrassed.
So then I thought, we must be really messed up if we are ashamed of feeling good.
Maybe this is why I'm broken, perhaps this is why I don't go fishing,
because I'm afraid of realizing that if I want...
if I really want...
I can feel good.>85 percent of workers worldwide hate their jobs
>Anything that restores hope becomes worth the exercise.
In other words: Many may hate their livelihoods, but liberation can be scary.
Personally, I was once of the benefit of having mediocre tech skills and an employer who paid ridiculously well for them. But when I started having problems with stalking, break-ins and intentional ill will, they told me to just leave. Obviously, a nightmare situation in life.
The journey since has led me around the world on experiences I'd never have had being stuck in office buildings and airports, and I actually wouldn't trade them. And while I wouldn't wish tyranny on anyone else, with a certain mindset you can look evil and misfortune in the face and decide you are not going to have your fate decided by it. I suspect that even without living on the receiving end of psychopathy, this is still the worst part of unemployment for many: the hopelessness in having your fate be determined by what can seem like external forces.
I'm thinking about: what would happen if droves of people fled into the forest to live. Could society function without them? How many?
My main issue is not with societal contract. It's with the notion that we're somehow "free" when we're most certainly not free. Stop paying the state and men with guns will show up on your door step and take your shit. That doesn't sound like freedom to me.
A lot of these people would come crawling back to the civilization begging for help if their life depended on it. Which it probably will as they get older and sick. On a large scale, millions of people who contributed nothing to the society, but then demand expensive medical help would not work well.
I wonder if anyone came
I don’t understand. Was your employer breaking into your home?