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.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
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 don't have a job right now. I've been applying about 100 places a month. I just graduated with a phd in a quantitative field and have all the skills of an ml data scientist + my own domain expertise. And, it sucks. I am so broke. I have no money in my bank account now, maybe $7. Family helps me with rent but until then I can't bear to ask them for more money. I've been waiting on unemployment claims to process for a month now, even then the projection is around $150 a week out of that based on my former teaching income. I generally eat 1-2 meals a day these days. Some meals are things like a pile of peanuts or toast with butter. I go to bed hungry many nights. I haven't engaged in any of my hobbies since my teaching contract ended, hiking takes too much time and makes me too hungry and I can't afford to golf right now. Trying to fix my bike so I can start doing postmates with it and bring in some money to not be so dependent on other people while I am in this limbo during the job hunt. I don't have any health insurance right now. Haven't been able to see my therapist due to out of pocket costs. Routine panic attacks and anxiety. Three credit cards maxed out. Falling behind on other bills. Yeah, I'm in bad shape. Hoping things turn around for me soon. The silver lining is the jobs I'm qualified for would pay me at least 10k a month if I manage to land one. Four months of that I'll have all my debt paid off and be out of this hole.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
"I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
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.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
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.
In countries without sovereign currencies it's more complicated, but in the US money wouldn't even need to be collected (technically it would need to be collected/added as debt, but that's entirely due to the Constitution and not some kind of natural law). The only real considerations needed to spend are whether or not adding more debt is politically viable and whether or not percepetions of and expectations for inflation are manageable. A UBI would be way too big to be able to avoid triggering inflation expectations and opportunism. Ending hunger would be much more manageable as the costs are very low relative to the impact and so it could be more easily hidden from financial doom-speakers.
Nominal wealth is useless if supply of products and services is in decline. The population histogram of pretty much all developed societies has passed the curve where the supply of labor is decreasing so that “wealth” will be competing to buy less and less labor.
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.
Hunger is easy. It is housing, medicine and education that are unsolvable.
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.
Just try and calculate. The rich are rich, but there are too few of them. Even $1000 UBI (which is not enough for anything) is like $3.2 trillion per year. All the rich taken together do not earn this much.
>I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job.
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.
What are you talking about? That's not the issue for most people. For most people the issue is that if you don't have a job for long enough, the government will send people to throw you out on the streets to suffer and die.
I have tried various forms of non-work (including unemployment while unqualified for government aid), and the by far most mentally devastating thing I've done was to take an extended sabbatical where I really just did nothing but sit on my ass, play video games, watch netflix, and scroll social media for 8 months. Took me years to get my brain sorted again.
It's tough to watch the change when not too long ago a software developer with decent skills could literally submit 5 resumes and end up with 3 good offers.
I'm not sure, but that's still happening. At least it happened to me this year. I consider myself a decent developer (in every job I have landed, I was always considered the "best" in the team after not much time in the job). I'm not faang-silicon-valley level, though. I haven't written a compiler or an OS, or contributed to the linux kernel. I have read all the popular tech books out there, I do more or less know what companies (and interviewers) want to hear, and I'm easy to work with.
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.
The only way for anybody to have any good jobs at all is for millions to have none, and/or have nothing resembling formerly respectable pay.
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 . . .
In the recent UAP hearing, whistleblower Borland talked about how financial ruin is the real fear holding whistleblowers back:
> 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.
There is something fundamentally broken about this entire user journey and industry. There are lots of jobs to fill. But hiring managers don't find people reading through resumes submitted in a form. People don't get jobs by submitting resumes into a form.
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
It's just an abstracted and bureaucratic repackaging of the difficulty with searching for prey and forage during a succession of harsh seasons that some of our unluckier ancestors experienced, such as those who lived at the time of the Pleistocene Toba eruption.
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.
My kids are happy, thriving and optimistic about the future. For me, they bring more joy than I thought existed. Having kids is the best thing that happened to me ever and pretty they’re glad I did too. What world are you talking about?
I mean, if it's so cruel, then why wouldn't you just commit suicide?
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.
Agreed, but I would say talking to someone isn't a magical fix here.
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
This is good advice, but needs to be bookended with through research about your rights, and the consequences of discussing this with a medical professional, and all the various ways in which you can be fucked over.
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
