Comment on Be Happier

Tue, 01 May 2012 05:36:05 GMT

I'd suspect most people feel both stress from unemployment

Mmm. Possibly, but remember that "unemployment" has a fairly arbitrary definition in most cases -- it measures the number of "potential workers" (as in members of the "labour force", which is tough to pin down exactly) who've looked for work within a given time period (usually about four weeks) but haven't been able to find it. It doesn't capture: homemakers, full-time students, incarcerated people, disabled folks who want to work within their abilities but can't find a job, people who've become discouraged from looking for work, people who prefer not to, the self-employed, involuntary retirees, the underemployed, stay-at-home parents, children, elderly folks, most disabled people, and independent farmers. It's possible to be neither "employed" nor "unemployed" by this measure.

My point is, the stress probably isn't from lack-of-employment itself; that's probably a proximate cause, a triggering event that's playing on something else, like simple desperation.

guilt when they are dependent on someone else

That's a matter of culture, I daresay. The Protestant Work Ethic and the self-supporting individual memes are not generalizable to humanity the world over.

Which isn't to say it isn't a common reaction. Just that, as my ultimate point here goes, you should probably not conflate "an inability to meet one's own survival and psychological security needs that's recognizable within one's mental framework" with "leisure." I have lots of free time, in the sense that I'm unemployed and not carrying many obligations day-to-day, but it's hardly all leisure time, and there are things that need to be done in terms of practical upkeep even if that doesn't look like trading labor for biosurvival tickets.

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