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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
