The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

SimuAndy writes "David Dvorkin, a programmer and writer of some repute, has published an essay on The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed. Well worth the reading time as a small break in a busy day."

Comments

Been there, am doing that

[JayBlalock]

Laid off in April. The usual. Have to say, pretty much everything on this list rings really true. Although in my case, the biggest benefit was:

Time to read up on any obscure or interesting subject that sprang to mind.

I think I advanced my self-education more in the last few months than I had in years previously. I know a whole lot more about our legal and political systems, can tell you all sorts of fun things about Wicca and Buddhism, know more about more obscure European bands than I care to name, and I'm even getting closer to really understanding why the Middle East is the way it is.

But things are looking up. Getting out of the cube farms seem to have freed my mind. I've been taking on odd freelance jobs. I've just gotten hired by a tutoring company which'll let me more or less make my own hours. Been doing some freelance writing. I'm not out of the woods yet, but if things keep going the way they are, I may be able to build up enough contacts and experience to make a good enough living without ever stepping foot in an office, and 3/4 of it from home.

I feel oddly like the Campbellian hero having passed through the Cave. (Week of May 15th: Read "Hero of a Thousand Faces")

So, just to chime in with the message of this article, if you're unemployed, take heart. Look at it as an opportunity. If you've got the money to ride on for a bit, DON'T spend all your time looking for yet another cube. Use the time to boost your knowledge or skills.

Re:Been there, am doing that

[JayBlalock]

But ultimately, it IS all about food. We're plotting to get food, one way or another. (and shelter, and sex)

The problem, ultimately, is that as we moved away from the insular village\tribal life, the idea of people's contributions to society became more and more abstract. At its heart, the most romantic definition of money is that it's a symbol of how much you have put into society. (I know, I know) Without trying to slip into some idealized Marxist fantasy of a world-tribal culture where everyone does exactly what work they want, and is rewarded with a decent lifestyle in return, money is pretty much the closest you can get.

Those people who have the ability to make money entirely on their own are, ultimately, in the minority. Not bragging here - I have a real problem with self-motivation that's a hinderance. Many people simply don't have the resources to work for themselves. But more than that, as our world gets more streamlined, more efficient, there simply are not enough "fun" jobs to go around. Once we were a huge nation of millions of farmers, now we have corporate owned farms with thousands of workers.

But you can't get rid of it without getting rid of all the infrastructure we take for granted - power, the Internet, running water, etc etc. Every modern convenience creates a new category of menial drudge work that SOMEONE has to do.

It's pretty much an unsolvable problem. If you have the resources to get out from under the corporate thumb, then more power to you. But for our world to function as it does, large numbers of people have to stay put.

Kind of unimaginative....

[puppetman]

What about,

- working on that interesting open-source software project. Good for the resume as well

- do some volunteering (hey - just go to the park and pick up garbage for an hour or two, till the unionized city employees chase you off)

- get in shape (running is cheap, and so are push-ups)

- eat better; too broke to eat out, so buy lots of veggies; kick the coffee and beer habit (too expensive)

- go to the library and get out all the "classics" (whatever your definition of a classic might be) and read them. No essay at the end required, unless you really want to.

Time like that should be used in a positive way. The silver lining around the dark cloud. And when you go for interviews, let them know what you've been doing - makes you look like a well rounded person who knows how to organize his/her time.

Everything this man says is true.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently had quit a job at a large fortune 500 company developing systems software for a shaky startup. I figured, I'm young, so why not give a less structured job a try where the fruits of my labor would come back and benefit me. Well, long story short, this particular startup had some issues; there wasn't a decent chemistry, and the management was somewhat capricious, fickle, inexperienced, and unaware of just what was involved in having a legitimate, organized business. (In fact, I think unemployment caused me to realize the importance of great management.) So, with legal dilemmas and financial dilemmas at hand, I decided maybe I made a mistake joining this particular venture. So, I ended up unemployed. I stopped going out because of a lack of health insurance, and COBRA didn't really cut it, because the insurance premiums were ridiculously high.

I ended up finding another job, but I went through everything the man who wrote the featured article went through. I was dating a girl at one point; when she knew before that I had been making money, things were fine. However, as soon as she found out that I was in trouble and that I needed employment, suddenly I became a lot less attractive and we went our separate ways. (She's now dating another guy with a nicer car and presumably more money in the bank.) Everyone kept insisting that my failures were somehow my fault. Perhaps they were, but I like to think that in the grand scheme of things, this little experience of unemployment was to teach me a lesson about the value of a job.

In college, you'll hear a lot of talk about how engineering is worthless because it only pays some petty 5 figure salary. People like to talk about how you should start a business, and how real losers become engineers. Increasingly, there's a trend for good American engineers to try and get their MBA or JD. All in all, I find the situation really disappointing and hard to cope with. I got into engineering thinking that I would be able to build cool things and be creative. Instead, I found insane market deadlines, invasive work spaces, no offices, ridiculous cubicles, no room for creativity. But, one thing is for sure, ... unemployment taught me to have more respect for having *a* job. I just am wondering how long it will be before the pendulum swings from "job is good" to "fuck it, maybe I need the fear of unemployment or business failure to drive me into a state of action again."

Anyway, I wish the best of luck to anyone else out there in the same situation.

Re:A thinly veiled political rant, actually

[Golias]

I've been working shit jobs for two whole years now. Temping, laboring, substitute teaching. If you have any kind of education and experience at all, I assure you that you still feel unemployed when you are that badly underemployed.

Were it not for my sporadic tech consulting jobs, I would probably be forced to throw the last 15 years of my life out the window, and start pursuing a new career.

Thankfully, the job market is gradually improving. I've had more interviews for programming jobs in the last 2 months than I did in the previous 22, and I'm expecting an offer sheet in the mail from at least one of them this week. I suspect that, a year from now, people will be talking about the "Bush recovery," and whoever emerges from the Democratic primary is going to be scrambling for issues to run on.

What I "Learned" from being out of work

[SupahVee]

1 - That while average Joe Worker makes 66% more salaray than he did in 1980, Joe CEO is making 1996% more than _he_ did in 1980.

2 - that having to sell your house after 8 months of being unemployed, SUCKS, worse than anything you can imagine.

3 - That moving a thousand miles away from a place you consider home for a job fixing Windows boxen is about as fun as it sounds.

4 - That companies do job postings with no intention of filling them.

5 - That of all the oddball things that helped while having a mortgage, a newborn and no job, Wife's Unionized insurance plan is at the top of the list.

6 - that I can now be lazy at work, and get fired, or bust my ass at work, and get fired.

7 - that startng over is as shitty as you think it is.

Depressing read.

[zapp]

This is one of the most depressing things I've read in atleast a month. This guy lives in Denver, an hour away from me.
His resume is filled with the same buzzword bullshit as mine, only more of it and with more experience.

I feel right now like I just lost everything in the stock market. 4 years ago when I started college (investing in a skillset), those skills were climbing in value at a good rate. I remember being told that I'd be making an easy 50-60k right out of college - as in the day I graduate.

Now the prices on my skills have collapsed. What once went for $60/share now goes for $2.50. Everyone knows Java. Or Perl, or SQL, or blah blah blah.

I want a real career. Without computers. Without the corporation.

Fuck this.

Re:What kinda 'diot would want to be unemployed?

[Ohreally_factor]

Being unemployed and/or underemployeed is really kind of cool. You really ought to try it for 6 months or so. I don't live in a ghetto, I'm not next to prostitutes or crackhouses. My needs are really pretty modest I've found. If I was trying to raise a family, and if someone with those kinds of responsibilities has lost a job, you have my sympathy. I live with roommates. I drive a 12 year old car. I cook most of my meals. I steal music. Oops. I mean, I infringe copyrights. =) I do occassional low stress jobs to pay the bills. My standard of living has plummeted, but I really don't care. I'm much happier. Let the Indians or the Chinese work their asses off for a change. They need the money more than i do.

Re:Al Franken said it best

[Mikey-San]

As a matter of fact, when the Clinton Administration moved into the White House, their audit team discovered that things were far worse than they knew:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cl in ton/chapters/2.html

The excerpt:

Reich: Well, we knew the deficit was large. In fact, years before [Reagan budget chief] David Stockman had referred to '$200 billion-a-year deficits as far as the eye could see." And during the campaign, the president did talk about the importance of reducing the deficit, but it had been of second order priority to investing in education, in job skills, in health care, and a lot of other things that the country needed to do. But, obviously, when the president is on the cusp of actually governing the country, he's got to know how bad that deficit projection really is, how much damage has been done, what he's inherited in terms of an economic mess.

And so I headed over to the Treasury Department to talk to officials over there, officials in the Bush administration, and try to get the best estimate I possibly could as to how bad the numbers really looked, how bad that deficit was going to be the next year and likely to be in years to come.

Frontline: And you found out it was going to be worse than you had been told, and on December 7th I think it was, you go to tell the president the news. What's his reaction?

Reich: The president was not happy when he heard that the projected deficit was much larger than we had assumed, larger than we had been told, larger than the Bush administration had told the public. He knew that it meant that we couldn't do everything that he wanted to do, everything that he had promised the public. Now, he was both upset, but he was also -- I remember this very vividly, and I was surprised at the time because he was also kind of excited. He said, "Gee, that's a great challenge. We're going to really, really have to work on that." And I remember sitting there thinking, "Now, wait a minute. This is going to set a lot of our plans back. Certainly this is going to put a major crimp in all of this public investment.

Not just a rant it's true...

[Savage-Rabbit]

<rant>

This is true, my brother in law decided to get a new job and got the idea to move into locomotive maintenance (he's a truck mechanic). He called up a number of train operators in the UK and was told at every turn that they don't train people any more, he should go to Virgin trains (apparently the only ones in the UK who still train/educate personnel), complete their training course and then when his contract with Virgin expires they would be happy to hire him. So in summary the training program of every train operator in the UK consists of poaching the people trained/educated by the few haples idiots in the corporate community (in this case Virgin trains) who still still live up to their obligation to provide their field of industry with a new crop of trained professionals. This attitude is pretty typical for much of Europe, of course I dont know how things are in the United States but I can't imagine they are much different. Companies are screaming for:

- Experienced personnel

They are not:

- Providing training programmes
- Entry level jobs

Apparently the overhead involved in training new personnel or hiring somebody with less than a minimum of 5 years experience is too great for this to be a viable option for modern European companies. Just getting an engineering degree is insufficient. They only ray of sunshie here is that they are prepared to hire you, even if you are not especially experienced, if you have a set of cetificates the length of your arm. Unfortunately most certificates are obscenely expensive to get, they are slightly less obscenely expensive to maintain and in Germany at least, where I used to work, many companies seem to expect you to pay for your vast portfolio of obscenely expensive certificates out of your own pocket and to do the studying on your own time. And with all of this plus the ever present danger of being dropped like hot potato (ie getting your ass fired) every time one of the CO's feel in a mood to draw the magic cost cutting sword from its stone and go on a crusade, they expect you to be loyal to the company. It kind of makes me glad that after 6 months of being unemployed I finally found a job with one of those haples idiot companies that will still hire people with limited experience.

</rant>

Have karma will burn it!

Americans who have work work too much

[Nice2Cats]

(I realize that my subject line might sound cynical to those out of work; sorry for that.)

There is actually an entire movement of people that have discovered this.

There is at least an entire continent that has discovered this: Europe. Industrialized nations all of them, the top nations on all quality of life rankings, little violence, though a bit crowded. Now check the hours they work. Now realize that, by law, they have weeks and weeks of vacation time -- if I remember correctly, it is 20 days by federal law for Germany. You have 35 hour work weeks in a lot of places. You have paid maternity leave and sick leave. You can't be fired at the drop of a hat.

Why does this work? You don't buy every piece of crap that some ad throws in your face. Consumer spending is two-thirds of the U.S. economy. In Germany (to stick with the example), it is about one third. You don't pay your CEOs so much money that a company's pay chart has to have a logarithmic scale: Read up on what the Daimler managers at DaimlerChrysler get and what the Chrysler managers get. Try to explain -- with a straight face -- why some Chrysler manager who couldn't keep his company from being de facto swallowed gets more money than they guy who is now his boss.

It used to be that the U.S. economists pointed to all of this and said, yeah, sure, you have universal medical care while we have children who can't get antibiotics, you are home with your families while we are putting in more hours than the Japanese, and you are getting tan on Spain's beaches five weeks out of every year while we don't dare take those pitiful few days of vacation we have. But your unemployment is high and not coming down.

Well, guess what: This is basically going to be a jobless recovery. Maybe some of Europe's prices can't compete with the U.S., but nobody can compete with India, and even India can't compete with China, or government-sponsored slave labor in Burma. Your job is ending up in Asia just like everybody else's. And do you really think that it is going to come back in our lifetime? Fool.

Tell me again why you are spending all that time at work while those Europeans are at home after 35 hours and playing with their children. What is the justification? More to the point, what is wrong with you? Why are you supporting, maybe even defending this system instead of trying to change it?

Remember when Tyler Durden told you that you are not your job?

Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they really don't need.

Fight Club, book (which this quote is from) and film, are so hated by the establishment not because of the violence, but because the CEOs and such ilk are deathly afraid that the American middle class will figure out that it isn't worth it -- that the Europeans (though politically they might be loathsome cowards), might have the right idea here. That you don't need to by the latest gadget, follow the newest fad, buy the newest gizmo. They might decide that quality of life is more important than blowing their paycheck on crap just to keep the GDP up by one more decimal point. They might decide they don't want to be bombarded with ads morning, noon, and night.

They might not want to make their carreers the center of their lives anymore. They might not want to define themselves by the job they have. They might not be content anymore to start living only after they have stopped working.

It's you choice, really. The U.S. is just about the only real democracy on the planet (ironically, all of those Europeans are living in republics). You can change the system, and get this country's priorities straight -- once you have gotten yours straight.

sleep...

[kidlinux]

As a student one of the most important things I've learned is getting up early. That is, not sleeping in. Getting up by 8am every day makes me more productive than I would have ever guessed. Any later than that, and my day is toast. It's strange.

An even better combination is getting up bloody early and going to the gym. My gym opens at 6:30am, and I'm there when the doors open. A jog and some good stretching is a great way to get fired up for the day. Some weights too, if I have time. I did this in the summer before work too. Makes my day much better.

I even did it when I was home from school and before I started work. You'd be surprised at how nice mornings can be.

Whatever you do, don't sleep in! (well, maybe on the weekends once in a while ;) Seriously, getting up early makes a big difference. Even when I'm fartin around on my computer. I though hackin code was all about stayin up late - it's all about gettin up early! It's just a matter of self-control. You're workin on somethin and you just wanna keep goin - but it's that much better with a fresh mind in the early morning. Some problems I've spent hours on the night before I'll wake up the next day and solve in 5 minutes. It's crazy.

Try it!

Re:A thinly veiled political rant, actually

[dustman]

But what if you have a lot of technical skills? MacDonalds won't hire you because they're concerned that you'll run off the first instance that a better job shows up!

Last year, I got a job stocking shelves at the Home Depot. When I applied, I was up front about the facts: I am a computer person, looking for a computer job. When I find one, you'll get two weeks notice. I am also a hard worker.

You just have to find the right places. And the job wasn't that bad, either... It was nice to do something physical.