This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
I would be perfectly happy without a job. It's the income I'm concerned about.
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
And no, even if you skin all the rich and put all their money to UBI, it will only last a year or two (you can take Excel and calculate). The bulk of income and taxes comes from the middle class.
Real estate in particular (but there are others) is a bottomless pit that society dumps money into, and speculators scoop money out of.
Partly true. But today there is no way to live off the land either, as people used to in the past by raising cattle and pigs. Either it's illegal or you owe the govt taxes.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
My last search was in late 2022 and I got a job with my (great) employer via an online form as well.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
Some say this has already happened...
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
I'm trying not to upset the people around me.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
This part is correct.
>if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know.
This part is incorrect from _my_ point of view. Most people believe that they somehow live on through one's kids. I don't.