Unemployment

Via TJIC:

Lots of people suffering out there, I hear, because the jobs they thought they could depend on collapsed out from under them and they don't know how to get out of that comfy box that suddenly ain't so comfy anymore.

I sympathize with the situation, if not necessarily with the individuals trapped in it, because oh, how I've been there. This lady's been unemployed for over 99 weeks and can't find any job? It's tempting to get all self-righteous and say she can't be looking very hard. But I've been there, and it's possible she was looking desperately - just not in the right places.

I spent much of last decade, starting around 2000, in an increasingly desperate state of chronic and apparently incurable underemployment or unemployment. This while living in one of the most expensive places on the planet. My living arrangements went from a cheap apartment to a cheaper apartment to a converted garage to a rented room in a pensioner's house. Frequently it was only my landlord's patience that kept any sort of roof over my head. I finally had to face up to the deeply unpleasant fact that my old career had left and wasn't coming back. Root, Hog, or Die.

The only way I could find out was to go around. If I can't work in my old field anymore, what can I do? It was time to go back to core competencies, and resolve that Mr. Respectable Suburban Man wasn't ever again gonna admire the furnishings of his respectable home in a respectable neighborhood. But I didn't have to starve or live behind a bus stop bench if I faced the new reality and made the adjustments that needed to be made.

Those adjustments are jarring - I remember them well. But putting it off, living on unemployment (and dreading the day when it inevitably ends) only makes a bad situation worse. We're conditioned to be picky about where we live and what we do for a living, but that pickiness is a terrible trap. It's a thousand times worse if you've got a family to maintain, which the lady in the linked article doesn't. Except for all that useless debt she took on she's actually in a pretty good position to start over fresh, though I don't expect her to do what's needed to take advantage of it. She'll do what I suspect most people will - She'll keep going further and further downhill till she finally latches onto enough of an eight-to-fiver to resume some parody of her former lifestyle. And she'll spend the rest of her life whining about it.

Truth is I kinda got to liking that path less traveled, and decided to take it to extremes. There's great comfort in simplicity, if you can become the sort of person to first seek it and embrace it, and then relax and enjoy it. But it requires a restructuring of a helluva lot of old and ingrained habits and assumptions. A lot of people aren't going to be willing to take that trip.

The first and most important of those adjustments: You are not what you do for a living. When people ask, "What do you do?" they're really asking "Who/what are you?" Me, I'm not about what I do for money. Cut wood, shovel shit, tend weekenders' gardens, haul trash - hell, I don't care. That's not who I am, it's just how I keep the pantry stocked.

And I'm not here to pat myself on the back for my rugged individualism. Without the kindness of friends I wouldn't be in anything like as good a position. I've been living in somebody else's RV on somebody else's land for going on four years. Now I'm building on a patch of land provided by another friend. It's not pure sponging - I do try to give value for value received. But there's no denying I started out as a charity case. There's not that much charity left in this overtaxed world.

So, like TJIC I sympathize with the situation this lady's in, if not with all the choices she made that helped her get into it. I hope she finds her way out - but I'm not at all confident she will.