Once you are unemployed for longer than a certain period of time (six months?), you're no longer counted among the unemployed as you are considered to no longer be in the labor market. Statistricks.
For example, I haven't had a job for almost 6 months but I've put 'self-employed' on LinkedIn and have been working on my startup during this time (and already have a fully working product which is easier to use, more scalable and more effective than the competition) but I don't think I'm going to be able to find users in the current environment due to existing media/tech monopoly and insurmountable trust barriers as well as a discriminatory ESG/DEI environment which makes it impossible for me (a straight white male) to raise funding to pay for advertising.
I know other people in similar situations. Apparently in Australia, half of the working age population is on welfare and at the same time there are shortages of many essential services like daycare which prevent people who have children from working as one parent has to stay home. Apparently the government is making it hard for daycare businesses to expand which is driving the shortage.
Also, tax brackets in Australia are based on individual income, not household income and therefore, taxes are very high if only one partner is working (which is often the case due to the shortage of daycare centers as mentioned above).
Property prices are also very high and rent is very high. The government is also ramping up immigration to prop up property prices + rents and foreigners end up taking many of the jobs which increases competition, drives down wages and makes paying rent even harder.
It's like everything is broken and the brokenness compounds. Even the incentives are broken so it's not even fixable with the current political system.
The media and funding environment just doesn't allow new tech ventures to launch and find their first users unless the founders are in some special in-group.
I don't even want to get into the details of what happened to me up until that point in my career. It's been an epic tale about the struggle for survival... Not in some remote forest in the Amazon or lost on some remote island like Robinson Crusoe, but merely survival in a profoundly dysfunctional socio-economic system.