81–90 of 141 posts
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I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often t…
I know it's important to do science that comes to obvious conclusions, but sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this 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'…
I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.
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.
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I have a friend who got lucky in his mid-30's and never worked again. He doesn't suffer from any of the symptoms described in TFA. I know its anecdata, but it seems to be borne out elsewhere. So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.
Unemployment is a specific term in economics which refers only to workers who don't have a job and are actively looking for a job. People like your friend aren't unemployed they just don't have a job.
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.
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.
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Exactly. So the chronic effects that the study found are not linked to the lack of a job, but the lack of income that a job brings. Because people without a job but with money don't suffer those effects.
This isn't complicated. People like the feeling of doing productive work. If you are independently wealthy, you can do whatever you want. Hobbies or volunteering, among other things, fill that need. 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 wo…
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.
I was never really unemployed, but even for the short period when I was on a sabbatical, migrated to a new country and didn't work for just over two months, I felt weird about it. I remember seeing all the people going to work, complaining about it, and felt somewhat inadequate, fraudulent and maladapted for not working. So I can only imagine how hard that must be when you experience that on a longer term, get reject…
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".
I have trouble keeping a structured schedule on my own, so I highly value having a reason for doing stuff on time and on the regular. 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 eve…
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.
Chicken-egg situation really. At least _some_ of the unemployed are just disengaged and apathetic, at least where I'm from. 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"
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.
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People use their job as an identity - and via extension some use religion, one of the lessons you learn later on in your life is that your identity isn't your job, achievements, money, anything. You identity shouldn't be dependent on any of those things.
While this does seem rather zen, what would it look like?
I like the idea of identity including mostly abstract things. Like, for example, if you donate to charities or spend time volunteering, don't hold "philanthropist" as a part of your identity; instead think of yourself as "generous" or "giving".
Instead of a "computer programmer" I think of myself as someone who likes to solve problems or likes to build things. The nice thing about that is it's more flexible, and unlocks creativity and enjoyment in places I don't expect, when I find that I can also solve problems or build things that have nothing to do with computers.
And identity should be a frank evaluation; your identity might include some things you consider negative. That's fine; you might be working on those things, or not, or whatever.
I'm far from perfect, of course. There are still things I consider part of my identity that maybe I shouldn't, because they constrain me or because they can cause conflict. But that's something to work on another day.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/identity.html -- though I disagree that discussions about Javascript don't devolve into religious arguments
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent a little bit of time responding to each of your questions with why I think they're much less harmful to an employer than pretty much anything an employer can do to their employees. But I realized none of that point-by-point stuff really matters, and deleted it all. An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often t…
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As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust.
Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it.
I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.