I think that wishing death/suicide kind of crosses the line for me. I agree that I think the college loan industry is a bit ridiculous, but something about this comment just went a bit further than I'm comfortable with.
Ruslana Korshunova's death [1] was disturbing. If this guy committed suicide, it would not bother me the least.
Ruslana had a life ahead of her. This guy is in his late 50s, he has already exceeded the life expectancy of a few decades ago. He made a career as a parasite. Now he has no job. He could have moved to some remote place in Central or South America, or Asia where his savings would allow him to live (albeit frugally) for a few years and start a new life. Instead, he moves to NYC, which is not exactly cheap, tries to get a job in the dying financial sector, tries to publish idiotic novels, and when that all fails, he goes whining to the NYTimes, thus humiliating himself in front of everyone. Newsflash: the world does not owe him anything. He made bad life decisions, now he's paying a price. To each, his own.
To me it makes more sense, if he can live for 2-3 years off savings in NYC, to live there. Also, he didn't just seek a job in the "dying financial sector" (are we really naive enough to think it's dying?), but rather applied for over 600 jobs in a range of areas including supervising admissions at a college.
Applying for jobs can be soul destroying. A good friend of mine has applied for a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, but when there are only a few in your chosen field with a large number of people applying for them, and applying gets you no replies it can feel like pouring time into a black hole. It's easy to point out what somebody should be doing, but it's several orders of magnitude harder to actually do it yourself.
For this situation, we have the aphorism "beggars can't be choosers," which I find particularly apt for someone who became the former through being the latter.
1) lives in NYC and has no prospects of finding a job
2) thinks he may become a beggar when his savings are depleted in a couple of years
is in NO position to be picky. It's not a matter of whether he wants to move elsewhere or not. What he wants is irrelevant. It's a matter of buying time and of bleeding off as little money as possible until the economy starts recovering.
For instance, he could move to a small village in the Northeastern coast of Brazil, where a beach house can cost as little as $50,000. And let me tell you, I have NEVER met anyone who moved to Brazil and would rather live in that filthy, stinky, rat-infested metropolis called NYC...
The guy has an MBA, so he should be smarter. NYC lost tons of jobs in the financial sector. Economies such as Brazil's are actually growing. It's simple: move to where the action is. His experience would perhaps be valued in some company abroad that needs to do business with American clients.
Saying that the financial sector is dying was an hyperbole, but the sector is undergoing a huge transformation. A lot of tasks that were done by humans should have been done by computers. The crisis only triggered the inevitable. Again, I shan't shed a tear...