Job Search - Part 1

On the Market

Being without work is a uniquely challenging experience, psychologically. There is plenty of social science data about jumps in the male suicide rate during recessions, or the often-mortal implications of retirement. I don’t understand the dynamics of the effect of employment on mood and self esteem but I certainly relate to those dynamics. I fear aimlessness more than almost anything else. This is a point which should be introduced into the conversation around universal basic income proposals, for example: is there any way to mitigate the psychological effect of no longer having an occupation? I tend to think that these effects are more dire for high-productivity people and (for some reason) for men but I don’t think anyone really understands the nature and distribution of these impacts. If we had more bona fide social scientists in this country (and not just ideological midwits using the lexicon of post-modernism to assail the status quo) perhaps this is a question they could set themselves to.

After a month of unemployment I started to feel completely unmoored. I had saved thousands of dollars and was living rent-free in a friend’s empty apartment. I know the area and have hobbies and many friends. This is South Florida… there’s always the beach, after all. Even after finding my job as I waited to begin I had about two weeks to do more or less whatever I wanted, and all I wanted to do was start my new job. I began to feel a kind of panic, and then a lingering depression.

Despite these incipient sensations I managed to find a job as an administrator for a financial securities company. Immediately upon starting work I regained equilibrium. My sleep troubles receded, my mood and sense of ease returned. The sense of impending panic dissipated.

This series isn’t about that, though. This will be an exploration of the social issues and cultural trends that I encountered during my month of joblessness: inflation, housing shortages, credentialism, digital creep, online application processes, crime, sex differentials in employment and recreation, HR imperatives, changing attitudes toward education and meritocracy, cultural shifts. I simply could not write (anything) in a sustained way for the past five weeks… but I can now. I have my notebooks and my recent memories.

Indeed

The United States used to be a country in which a man could move to a new city and prove himself through initiative or skill or work ethic and begin work at a business in a single day, based purely on the decision of the owner. ‘Disability’ benefits didn’t exist. Welfare was limited to religious and private programs and some basic services in the largest cities. Few credentials or degrees were required for most jobs. A blue collar job could yield enough wealth to buy a house and a car and raise a family. College was reserved for serious professional endeavors and was loaded with useful and precious information. The differences in the interests and natures of men and women was taken for granted (restricting the options for many women, especially before the 1970’s). A laborer’s pay was enough to pay for housing and food and transportation. Initiative and skill tended to yield promotions. Overall, and in many profound and specific ways, we are now a better and richer and more interesting country than we were during those decades. But we shouldn’t shrink from analyzing the costs of cultural and economic trends simply because we live in the post-Civil Rights era. There’s a tendency to see the blossoming of opportunities for women and black Americans (and other minorities) and to bundle these changes with all of the trends which have played themselves out over the past 60 years. That would be a mistake. Our families are dissolving, our communities are weakening, our border is porous, our federal agencies now focus their bulk on divisive cultural projects, and our currency loses value every month. The aggregation of all of these changes (and more) makes a more rigid, regulated, complicated, and less meritocratic and flexible world for young people who just want to work jobs, earn money, and invest their earnings into homes and businesses. There’s a looming sense across much of the political spectrum that these goals are somehow overly simple or even contemptible… that the working class should want ‘climate justice’ or a re-examination of heteronormativity, or a dismantling of carceral systems. They do not, and this earns them the disdain of well-placed and -educated but unproductive workers. There are now millions of such people in our country.

As George Orwell wrote:

The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.

There’s also a tendency (on the Left) to imagine that because the progressive wing of American politics held the moral high ground during some of those battles that it maintains it today, and onward into the future. The difference is that the Civil Rights movement (and similar efforts for reform) were fighting for equality: civic colorblindness and expanded opportunities for minorities. Once civic equality has been granted there are no more stations along the line. Either progress can be acknowledged and the associated political energy can be put to other ends… or the movement begins to curdle and be hijacked by authoritarians and opportunists.

Unfortunately there is an entire academic and nonprofit complex which has grown up to solve problems which effectively don’t exist any longer on a nationwide scale. Some problems (homelessness, mental health crises) are worsened by the complex, and others (racial discrimination, transphobia) are created from almost nothing. The only way to effectively rectify these social distortions would be to cut funding for the hundreds of thousands of college graduates busy addressing problems which are confabulated or misdiagnosed, most of which comes through the government, or academia (heavily subsidized by the government), or private foundations (set up by wealthy people of generations past and which now have often been captured by progressive ideologues to subvert the system which enabled the wealth to be created initially).

We should always be willing to examine the effect of policies on our contemporaries. Sexism is wrong… but that doesn’t mean that every profession should have equal male and female participation. The Civil Rights Act was a triumph of American legislation… but that doesn’t mean that the huge corporate HR industry which was created in its wake is without flaws or negative externalities. Education is important… but it doesn’t follow that continuously increasing spending on failing public schools is wise, when most of the surplus seems to be diverted to paying for a growing army of useless administrators. And so on. Anyone who dissuades a person from exploring the implications of rising disability rates or out-of-wedlock births or plummeting public education requirements due to political affiliation, or a vague sense that the answers might be awkward or incendiary, is not an honest thinker. They would probably claim that their dishonesty is justified by the worth of their political vision but I don’t think political change works that way. Always be wary of people who shrink from honest conversations about the world and its people.

This is my introduction to my brief series of reflections about my 5-week job search, which lasted from July 1st to August 12th, 2024. In our managed capitalist system unemployment puts one into a strange netherworld, and reveals the system of privilege and control which undergirds our society. That system now has a distinctly Leftist flavor and is accompanied by the usual externalities of state intervention: waste, bureaucracy, distortion, and contempt for the individual-who is merely trying to freely make his way through the world and build his fortune.

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