Long-term unemployment leads to disengagement and apathy
psypost.org
psypost.org
In most countries in the world, money is what allows you to have any control over your life. For most people who aren't already rich, their having money relies on being employed, and we tend not to describe people who don't work because they're retired as "unemployed". Thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true. I guess it's good to know that they are aware of their situation. It would be weirder if they weren't
So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.
If you are employed, you get that reward with your paycheck at least. Ideally the work itself is also rewarding, providing the satisfaction of doing something productive. This is why people can be happy doing rewarding work even if the pay isn't all that great.
If you are unemployed and looking unsuccessfully for work, you have no income reward and no work accomplishment reward. If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.
So you're saying that you think the chronic long-term effects found in the study are not from having little money, but from the lack of rewards?
I mean, there's no data on that, so you could be right. We'd have to find a bunch of people who have little money but find their own rewards and see if they suffer the same consequences.
Possibly the "starving artist" folks - people whose motivation is their art but who earn no (or very little) money doing it. Anecdotally, the ones I've met veer wildly (almost daily) between euphoria and despair. But I think that's different from the symptoms the study is talking about.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a job is just a useful proxy for measuring how people feel they are contributing to society, but it's an imperfect one.
It was hard to start off, of course, because it's unconventional. But now it is sweeter than conventional employment ever was for me, where I did not fit and caused issues for everybody involved.
That's not to say one or other is inherently superior. And that's the point, in a way. Conventional employment is only one of the possible means through which the claimed rewards of life can be had.
Beyond that, the reliance is only a function of social structure. That is, if we collectively choose to "look down" upon certain demographics, then those demographics will indeed feel perenially looked down upon! - because we've made it so.
No, societal conditioning from birth has taught people that if they aren't doing productive work, then they're worthless people who don't deserve happiness.
We can break away from this nonsense. While the retirement age has indeed been going up lately, there are still older folks who could retire on their savings and 401ks and pensions, but they don't, because they can't fathom what they'd do in all the spare time they have. It's so incredibly sad! There's so much more to life and self-worth than a job.
I guess you can try to stretch "productive work" to encompass hobbies like creating art or playing sports or whatever other leisure activity, but I don't think that would be particularly intellectually honest about the topic.
> If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.
If that's truly the case, that's due to propaganda associating that sort of thing with lazy, entitled leeches who are taking what they don't deserve, taking from those hard-working people doing back-breaking work to support that laziness. Again: garbage societal conditioning.
(Also, unemployment benefits in most places in the US are barely enough to live off of, not something that you'd be comfortable staying on, for the most part, even though some do it. True UBI would presumably not only provide for basic needs, but also for the ability to spend a decent amount on leisure activities.)
My future utopia is a place run by benevolent AI where there's a surplus of everything, no currency, and no jobs. People do literally whatever they want, and want for nothing. (Want something? Ask the AI and it's provided.) Some people will do things that today we'd call "employment", but they'll do them because it truly brings them joy, not because their prosperity depends on it. And yes, I imagine transitioning into this utopia would require a lot of de-conditioning. Many people would reject it, and feel listless and disaffected. It's... super sad. Work culture is lame.
I have a different take that doesn't necessarily put those in conflict. I think we are hardwired to have our status tied to our value to our tribe. When feel like we are no longer valued, our limbic system starts acting up. We feel anxious and stressed because our evolutionary brain is worried we'll get thrown out of the tribe. Unfortunately, in a modern society many have conflated value to mean a job. That's why I think some of those people who can retire continue to work. But the solution isn't to just replace "productive work" with more leisure time. I think that can also lead to bad outcomes when the other necessary parts of well-being are left unaddressed. I think people need* "productive work" that leads them to feel valued, but it doesn't have to be a wage/salary job.
* there's obviously large variance at the individual level, probably associated with certain personality traits. E.g., people who are high on the conscientiousness trait may need more industrious activities than others to have high levels of well-being
Or to the constant failure / hopelessness / whatever from a constant job search getting no results; if it was just money then the correlation would very obviously be with peoples monetary situation rather then their employment status.
We do know (anecdotally) that people with money (regardless of employment status) don't suffer the same symptoms.
You could study the well-being of those with relatively low-paying "grind" jobs but whose jobs are also held in high-esteem by their society. E.g., junior enlisted in the military.
The reason people become disengaged and apathetic has nothing to do with employment. They become that way because they lack the finances to control their lives, and because financial instability causes stress and anxiety.
Let's change the study a bit. Instead of just watching and tracking these unemployed people, say the people running the study started depositing money into these people's bank accounts. And they just told them, "keep doing what you're doing in general, but you don't need to worry about paying your bills or feeding yourself or your families".
I guarantee you those unemployed people would start feeling engaged again. It's not the job, it's the money.
Yes, autonomy seems to be a fundamental aspect of well-being.
>I guarantee you those unemployed people would start feeling engaged again.
I'm always a little hesitant when I hear someone say they "guarantee" something based on a thought experiment. But the little data we have, like the recent Sam Altman-funded UBI experiment, doesn't seem to back up this idea. While people said they were more open to thoughts of aspects like entrepreneurial activities and education, it didn't actually manifest in real actual engagement in those activities.
It would be quite irregular for someone who received a career ending windfall in their mid-30s to feel a lack of control. There is a whole other can of angry cobras for them.
I think if you were to look at the disengaged and apathetic unemployed among us, more times than not you'll find that their finances are tenuous at best, and more often in complete disarray. No money, in our society, means no prospects, and constant stress and anxiety around how you're going to simply survive, let alone do anything that feels "engaging".
The problem is no money and lack of a social safety net. Unemployment is related, but it's far from the whole story.
If you slip into a pattern of not waking up at a reasonable time, staying indoors and not exercising, not making attempts to socialise, etc, then it can be quite easy to throw your brain chemistry out of whack and spiral into what is essentially a form of depression.
A job (or a business, partner, family, serious enough hobby, etc) forces you to do all of that, it sets you up with a basic framework, whereas if you are completely free from constraint no-one is going to tell you to get out of bed at 8am, 9am, 10am.... 2pm...
Of course, if you're poor and unable to find work, then you have all of that _on top of_ the financial stresses.
This need for agency is not rational, and cannot be reasoned with. You cant offer it trades of money or favor, and it seems that it is absolutely incapable of being fooled. It asks not for agency over others, but only that what an individual does each day is self driven.
It probably has very different influence on someone whos goals naturally synchronize with those around them, rather than naturally invert.
When I was younger I missed the boat on a very successful local startup. The people who graduated a few years before me and joined the company at the right time exited with multi-million dollar equity. The CEO’s equity was in the 9-figure range.
I remember being intensely jealous that I had just barely missed the boat on that life changing equity. Just a couple years difference and I would have been wealthy enough in my 20s to never have to work again. I fantasized about all the ways I would live my life.
Over the years, the only people from that lucky group who remained happy were those who continued on with their careers as if nothing had happened. The ones who used that opportunity to exit the workforce have been universally cursed: Divorces, unhappiness, and now seething anger at the world and society. There’s a Slack for former members of the startup that I’ve been in for years and it’s sad to see the swirling anger and unhappiness of those who left the workforce.
I never would have predicted it at the time. The way people fantasize about not having to work is often very different than reality.
I know it’s not literally everyone who has this experience, but after seeing it happen to so many people I know it’s also not a rare outcome.
I work and have similar problems like you have listed but I have to pretend I'm a smiling person to remain employed.
Add alcohol to the mix and you're cooked. An alcoholic in this state can take years to come back to some sense of functional. Or any other addictive drug. Not a nice spot to be. with or without the drugs.
I saw a similar line of reasoning when WFH took off. Many people lamented the death of their social life. But, if your social life consisted of going to the office, did you ever really have a social life? Or did you have the bare minimum and then used to convince yourself everything is fine?
Sometimes people say the true purpose of modern human society is to keep people in poor enough conditions we can extract the maximum value from them, but in just good enough conditions they will never revolt. I think that's ridiculous, but then I read stuff like this and think... maybe there's some truth to it.
How is it ridiculous? If too many people achieved financial independence (and as long as labor is still necessary), this would cause inflation until enough are no longer financially independent. In reality losing the gene, health or heritage lottery sets you up for a life of exploitation (as an employee or consumer).
For the average HNer having contact with or awareness of working poor may be beneath them, but they exist, not in small numbers either. The hamster wheel is absolutely real and the intense bubble many on here live in becomes clearer to me by the day.
>sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true.
you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of finding work, and even doing a poorer job of keeping a job; people whose self esteem is more fragile being more likely to lose their jobs, reinforcing their negative self images: but that's not unemployment doing it (the study does hedge a lot by saying "associated" as if they are not suggesting cause).
I'll bet if they had done a Big 5 Factor analysis of the samples in the study we would see lots of clustering, a much more interesting result than what the study found, and Big 5 Factor results are not known to change as the result of unemployment.
When an employer abuses an employee, we're usually talking about life-altering things like overwork, withholding pay, denying promised benefits, canceling promised time off, up to the truly awful stuff like firing for biased and discriminatory reasons.
I don't think you can really compare these two directions of abuse at all. The power imbalance is staggering.
> but not materially
One employee of mine stole $70,000 (about $200,000 today). It very nearly wiped the company out. (If you can't make payroll, you are forced to close.)
Yes, and that's allowed. If anything workers are much more gracious in this regard - typically termination happens quickly, with no two week notice. Workers typically at least give that, which they're not required to at all in the US. It's purely goodwill and generosity, so you're welcome.
> One employee of mine stole $70,000
Okay? And Bayer Pharmaceuticals gave thousands of people HIV/AIDS. What's your point here?
We gotta look at the big picture, not your experience.
BTW there's a lot of data that shows that it's the opposite of your assumptions that's true.
They still work for the ecolieux: prepare food, care for vegetables, fruits and poultry, odd jobs, but they aren't paid for it.
Otherwise I eat when hungry, tinker until distracted, sleep when drowsy, and that tends to isolate me from the real world.
I'll say one thing for old-fashioned prime time TV, it anchors the days for people like my parents, and Dad always knows when to find a newscast, yet still get everything done. Me, I try to have some social engagements in public, or get involved in some community groups that meet.
When I'm not working, I also eat when I'm hungry, tinker until distracted, and sleep when drowsy. But I also stay in touch with friends, exercise, have fun, and it's great.
I think the isolating bit is the problem, not the lack of someone bossing you around for 40+ hours a week. I'm not saying your tendency to get into that state is easy to fix, but I think it would be a valuable thing to figure out.
> Otherwise I eat when hungry, tinker until distracted, sleep when drowsy
Dog, that’s how it’s MEANT TO BE. Being on a schedule is unnatural.
Really have another think about your response
A slavish adherence to a schedule might be unhealthy, but so's a 100% impulse driven one. We're humans, not lizards, driven only by instinct, hunting for food on the savannah. We buy our food from the supermarket and have concepts like money and time and consent. The invention of the lightbulb extends the useful part of the day, so if we want to live as our ancestors did, we'd have to give that up and rise with the sun and live in darkness after night has fallen.
Personally, I'm not willing to live like that except for camping trips/similar.
Nine AM Monday morning meetings aren't my favorite either, but they're part of living in our modern society, some have opted out and are happier for it, but not everyone would be. Scheduling is a tool to help with the coordination problem of doing things with other people. Unless your all live together and get on the same schedule and have also the same cadence for sleep/tinkering/eating, you'll want to coordinate. a time for lunch and sleeping so that paired tinkering can happen.
My last job, 2020-2024, was 100% WFH. My first role was on an exact schedule, 3 days a week. I found myself falling asleep during work and I was caught, too. Then I transitioned to a role with a flexible schedule. They paid lip service to shift schedules, but in reality, I clocked in/out whenever I could, and as long as work was done and hours were clocked, nobody batted an eyelash. And I hated it. But I loved it. Because I couldn't sit still at home, I found myself leaving my desk constantly, getting hungry or sleepy just after clocking in, or my insomnia presented an opportunity for long graveyard shifts where nobody was on Slack. No meetings, no cameras, no dress code. All this was detrimental to my work ethic and my attitude. It's not easy to feel like a professional in my living room wearing pajamas. So I do not recommend WFH unless you are highly disciplined and independently capable.
Mental hospitals and other rehab facilities impose rigid structures and schedules on the residents. You'll know what time they're waking you up, what time to eat, when to do hygiene, when medication is coming, and the groups/events that are planned. Patient improvement, often attributed to medication, is often thanks to the peace of mind, and lack of uncertainty, brought by all that discipline.
Being on a schedule like a train timetable may be unnatural. But even agrarian societies clung to their timepieces and calendars to tell them when and how to work on the farm, to care for animals, and to prepare for climate changes. I don't know about you, but I enjoy being asleep when it's dark, awake when the Sun is out, and sometimes I go a little crazy because I forget that stores and businesses have hours, and may be closed if I don't check before heading out.
The world around us is scheduled and programmed, and I don't know, perhaps unemployment is an opportunity to cut loose and make our own time, but for me it's crazymaking. Someone who's on a cruise ship or hanging out at a beach resort may feel differently. If you're unemployed and actively interviewing, do you schedule interviews, or do you just say "I'll be in when I finish eating and traffic is light"??? It would seem in our best interest to continue observing a schedule, so that inertia doesn't kill our employability.
I also find that I am a better worker when I can estimate how long a task will take, how much I can get done in a typical shift, and how to prioritize my time so that management is satisfied with my output and productivity.
I worked as a receptionist for two years, and boy howdy, I learned how to be jack-of-all-trades, and multitasked according to business demands, but at the end of the day, I had to pop everything off the stack of my desk and clear it off entirely before I could lock up and leave the office, so you can be sure that I anticipated quitting time. That was indeed unnatural for me: I am someone who starts things I can't finish, leaves windows open for weeks, makes a mess on the floor and runs out of energy to clean it up again. So the opposite experience at work was quite welcome, and helped me achieve better results outside of work.
I argue all the above is natural tendencies!
Though I entertain that certain schedules can be healthy - rising and sleeping with the sun, sorting hygiene upon waking.
I really question the modern way of working since moving to a 4 day work week. I think we are all cucked into accepting that working during all the waking hours at a screen should be the norm 72% of the week with only 14% of your waking hours relaxing
If someone follows the passions of their flesh, day in and day out, they will feel unfulfilled and lose pleasure; their mood could become depressed; they will be out of touch with the world's cycles and rhythms.
If you can count on waking up regularly (whether based on sidereal or railroad time zones) and count on meals at appointed times, and you dress for the day and don't lounge in your pajamas, and you get to the gym or have a walk, and you keep up your physical appearance and hygiene, then I guarantee that your mood and pleasurable experiences will benefit from that. And an unemployed person at risk of depression needs that regularity and discipline all the more.
And yes, if none of this comes naturally, then we gotta fight our inherent tendencies to fall apart, we need to establish structures that are reasonable and achievable, and we need to strive for adherence, hour by hour, day by day. For other people, chilling out and letting go is more important, and relaxation is always beneficial--recreation should be built into any structured, disciplined schedule and not neglected by any means.
So do schools. So does the military. Those are structures of control.
There are a variety of opinions pro and con on control and well-being.
> But even agrarian societies clung to their timepieces
Agriculture doesn't require timepieces. For thousands of years we farmed without them. Timepieces originated with religious practices, fwiw, as more control mechanisms.
> I also find that I am a better worker when I can estimate how long a task will take, how much I can get done in a typical shift, and how to prioritize my time so that management is satisfied with my output and productivity.
The "good little worker" who follows instructions, does everything on schedule, and exhibits small timed movements/tasks is an invention of the industrial revolution so that workers could be treated as controlled cogs in machines.
Some people respond "well" to these control mechanisms. Some don't. They're all really recent changes in the way humans do things, though.
Yes, it can be described as "control" from the authority's viewpoint. Is this always bad and wrong? If control is manipulative, if it is oppressive, if it tramples on rights or freedoms and fails to serve the interests of the controls, then control is bad.
But discipline and obedience to legitimate authorities are virtues. Discipline is what drives exploration and discovery. Timepieces were crucial in helping navigators find their way across the open seas. Perhaps Columbus was religiously controlled, perhaps Captain Cook was controlled by the British Empire, perhaps Magellan was controlled by his chain of command, but their ability to discern the structure of the natural world and subdue it was due to their discipline and the structure of their very small crews aboard isolated vessels.
If you are not a "good little worker" aboard a ship, or in an Army unit, then you are dead and your battle is lost. Perhaps you conflate control with unity--whether it was Joshua instructing his troops to shout, or everyone showing up at Stonehenge on time for the fertility rituals, or Romeo and Juliet checking the time for a pre-arranged tryst, having people all do something at the same time is incredibly useful even for atheists and pagans.
I don't know if freight and passenger trains are religiously controlled, but they're the ones who gave us modern timekeeping and as a consumer, I hope you'd agree that it's important that freight shipments are picked up and delivered according to a schedule, and if you had trouble getting pasta or toilet paper during COVID-19, then you were a victim of a lack of control in regards to the world's vital supply chains.
If you are not a "good little worker" for your startup of 10 employees then you're bankrupt and you're unemployed and you're sitting around, posting on Hacker News instead of applying for jobs. I honestly do not see the trouble in doing the will of teachers in school or parents at home, provided that those leaders love their charges and want what's best for them. Many of them do, and it's important to recognize that "control" and discipline is usually oriented to the common good and even the individual's good.
With the rise of gig work, constant firings and layoffs, large 30 year debts or school debts on people are unsustainable. So is healthcare being tied to employer and 401k tied to employer.
The risk is all individual, the gains are all to corporations and lenders aka asset owners.
This is unsustainable. Something has to change.
A 401k is your money and goes with you if you leave, it's the older pension model that has issues with people jumping around.
What if your chosen employer runs into bad economic conditions and needs to shrink itself to match?
What if something comes up with family and you need to move to a different state?
.
The 401k model is much less fragile if life goes less then perfectly.
I mean, IRA limits should match 401k limits instead of keeping 23k limit only for employer-sponsored accounts.
There is zero reason an independent person should have to rely on fickle corporations for that limit.
I’m honestly fascinated that people think gig work, firing, layoffs and 30-year mortgages are recent phenomena.
If you had to pick a point in the last century to enter the job market, now is certainly not the best time. However it is far, far from the worst time.
I think it speaks to just how distorted the tech job market was in recent years. For a couple years it felt like everyone was hiring, nobody got laid off, and you could always get a job as long as you had a pulse and could name a programming language. That wasn’t normal but many people’s expectations very quickly reset to that.
These things are not a recent phenomena but lack of union jobs is recentish - last 30 years.
It was unionization that gave any sense of stability, which made the 30 year mortgage, 401k and, healthcare-from-employer sustainable. Gig work and constant hiring/firing was only left for small employment. Not at large City-sized employers.
Now without unionization, the 30-year mortgage, 401k and healthcare from employer model is obsolete.
Gig work has been found to be intensely on the rise, with very little of the already meager protections of full time employment. Companies that basically run saas + employment marketplaces reduced their overhead and risk strategically by only hiring 'gig' workers. Most of these people, uber drivers, doordashers, thumbtackers, etc, etc cannot tell you whether an LLC is better for them than an SCorp, cannot navigate a defined benefit plan and cannot afford insurance, retirement, sick days, and so on. This was purposefully strategic and shared openly.
30 year mortgages are not recent, but their relationship to the average income has changed drastically in just two years. Educational debt has been on the rise for 20+ years. These honestly are all well documented.
People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65. For many 65 means a job at walmart, sam's club, or other forms of low level employment.
And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.
From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.
(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)
Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).
Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:
If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.
If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.
People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.
People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.
Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.
Someone has been paying close attention... Now for the next question, how does one "get there" first? Answer that, and you too can become rich.
Personally, I've voluntarily gone without employment for many short stretches, as well as a 2 year stretch, and each time I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Trips to Thailand, Europe, working on my own projects... The only real downside has been watching my bank balance go down. Otherwise, it's great.
There's no actual reason for us to feel that way. It's just a way to ensure that nearly everyone participates in the economy and keeps it humming along.
But sure, when you are out of work, actively looking for it, and keep getting rejected, finances dwindling, of course that's going to have a negative effect on your mental health. But the key things about that have nothing to do with work, specifically: it's "constant rejection" and "approaching homelessness".
But we don't need science to tell us humans need purpose and to feel they have some social value. The problem is more fundamentally the industrial era idea of a "job" as something you "have". Just "be" and "do"
Though I do wonder - what, in your opinion, should one's identity be based around?
> that one is contributing to something
I feel sorry for people who measure their self based on some consumerism yard stick, it is pathological.
I don't consider the urge to help others a negative one. But one shouldn't measure. It is doing the thing to do it for whatever your reasons are, that matters.
If I choose to build something to help a kid walk, I am contributing to many things. And yet, I may get paid nothing, and not even care.
Even if you did get paid, it doesn't take away from what you're doing.
Without an interchange of value, you can focus on the thing as the thing, instead of as a value exchange.
I mean, if you think this sums up every job everyone has, then I feel sorry for you. Many people are doing laudable work that has nothing to do with "consumerism"
I enjoy programming. I program for a living. But, I also have riders on my employment contract that allow me to code outside of work, and enjoy that.
For others, it will be gaming, sailing, anything. The key is to fill that void that your work identity leaves behind with things that you do and control.
In doing so, you take control of your life. I am not perfect here, but because I can balance several different things... none of them control me fully, I control me.
It is good to be a little picky. I don't see basing an identity on a professional community as being clever - that community isn't going to do much for its members except maybe help them find a job from time to time.
I like the idea of identity including mostly abstract things. Like, for example, if you donate to charities or spend time volunteering, don't hold "philanthropist" as a part of your identity; instead think of yourself as "generous" or "giving".
Instead of a "computer programmer" I think of myself as someone who likes to solve problems or likes to build things. The nice thing about that is it's more flexible, and unlocks creativity and enjoyment in places I don't expect, when I find that I can also solve problems or build things that have nothing to do with computers.
And identity should be a frank evaluation; your identity might include some things you consider negative. That's fine; you might be working on those things, or not, or whatever.
I'm far from perfect, of course. There are still things I consider part of my identity that maybe I shouldn't, because they constrain me or because they can cause conflict. But that's something to work on another day.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/identity.html -- though I disagree that discussions about Javascript don't devolve into religious arguments
I came to this conclusion back in high school by just observing my workaholic father and grandfather. They when asked about themselves would talk about their job first. My grandfather gave everything for his employer moving around the country for his employer. In they kicked him to the curb when they felt the financial squeeze just a few years his before retirement, never mind he had devoted his life to them sacrificing his family life to them. And worked for them for over 40 years. My father is from the same bolt of cloth you ask him about himself and he starts talking about his job and what projects they are working on. When I was growing up he worked 80 hour weeks, now that his children are grown he work more. He deals with depression and burnout but is to afraid to quit. He complains of loneliness and lack or friend but spends all of his time working and is afraid or retiring even though stress from his job is killing him. Neither of them could see themselves separate from their occupation. Neither really got to do their hobbies or have a healthy social life or family life Seeing them growing I thought fuck that. I wont be my job and have been happier for it.
I'd really say it's less about chickens and eggs and more about selection bias: the 12 month unemployed have something extra wrong in their lives.
The world is so wondrous, and there are so many other ways to find purpose. Imagination is the only true limit. I'm not saying everyone can live off all these other purposes, but that's part of the problem: linking purpose with livelihood is a recipe for mental health issues.
This sort of assumes everyone who goes to jail deserved it, but there are many people locked up for nonsense like having a gram of weed
Furthermore, even if someone was in jail over some nothingburger, they would still have more reason to expect to have a hard time with a criminal record and all than someone without a criminal record. This is really my point: If you did nothing wrong yet have difficulties finding a job, it is hard to feel like you have agency in your own life.
I’ve taken two in recent years, spring-fall 2021, when the world (nyc) was reopening after a year locked in my apartment and expanded unemployment was paying enfough to get by so I wanted to reconnect with the world. And spring-now 2024, where right after getting laid off I fell into fractional contract work that pays enfough to get by, but less than a living and has reduced the urgency to find something else when all I hear is how
Both cases, I’ve ended up a bit directionless, lost, and alone (although this time less than last), and with a strain placed on my marriage not because of money, but because I’ve started leaning on my wife too much for my source of meaningful human contact. And after a day of her slogging through that at work, she doesn’t always want to be “on” and have thought provoking conversations or do activities together.
Those without employment can achieve all those things, it's just much harder and most average people would crumble.
Remember the idea that if everyone had a universal basic income. They'll be an explosion of creativity and arts as now everyone is free and liberated. Except that isn't the case. People turn to harder and harder drugs to pass the time.
In my case, I went from a fast upward career trajectory, working on world-class silicon valley projects with famous investors; getting more phone calls from recruiters than I could answer to unemployment and zero opportunities suddenly.
I was literally applying to hundreds of jobs per months without any replies. Not even getting first interviews.
I had already lost a lot of trust in the system even before I became unemployed. I've experienced stuff that would turn anyone into a conspiracy nut. Unemployment sealed my view of the world as 'Clown World'. It made it hard to take anything seriously. Everything feels fake, constructed, inefficient.
Even now that I have a job, I struggle to abandon this mindset, technically, I'm a software engineer but I feel more like an actor who acts the role of a software engineer. Everything feels fake and I'm just playing the role pretending that everything is meaningful and I wonder if people around me are also just acting. I feel like I turned into an office psychopath. Like a split personality disorder.
Kind of like how I have a somewhat separate online persona which is a concentration of all my frustrations. I've developed a separate work persona, the stakes just are too high for me to be genuine; I just act genuine; after being genuine for most of my life, it's not difficult to get into character.