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
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
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.
So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
