In the UK a lot of people stubbornly believe the unemployed live lives of luxury*. Not helped by reality TV shows just a decade ago like Benefits Street which showed people on social security living it large.
In reality the vast majority of people want to work.
E.g. 3 years ago I lost 2 jobs in 6 months during their respective probation periods. I’d been employed all my life and helped launch 2 successful companies in my 20s. But suddenly in 6 months my entire world view collapsed after losing two jobs.
Since then I’ve attempted suicide 4 times. Had 3 psychotic episodes. Self harmed and been convicted of a crime I don’t even remember committing.
My probation officer has known me 3 months and is already pressuring me to start work.
Have I had help for my mental health? Have I fuck. Well, except being stuck on antidepressants that don’t work. My psychosis has stopped but could start again when I’m under stress (paranoia & hearing voices).
But wait. What caused such a significant spiral? Losing my fucking job - twice!
But I’m being pushed by society and a probation officer to restart work with no mental health support or treatment. I’m being pressured into something that runs the risk of me losing the job and once again spiralling into substance abuse and suicide.
That isn’t fair on the company I may eventually end up at or…and I feel guilty for saying it…me.
I feel guilty every fucking day for being on ‘benefits’. I’ve been almost a complete shut in with no friends or family. I’m utterly fucked.
I want to work. I’d actually love to work in an office cos I wanna be around people again even though my options enable WFH. But it runs the risk of killing me via another psychotic break and no one is helping me except a 3 month waiting list for therapy.
Even when I tell people my state (US resident) only give ~$225 a week for unemployment they still insist people don’t work because they get free money and don’t need to.
We’re talking not been $1000 USD a month and these people are just so convinced it’s a life of luxury. When I was on it I could barely afford food.
You’re using them exactly as intended, and that’s a good thing.
Being on benefits alone does not mean people dislike you. I think the way most people see it is that there are two groups: the people who try and get jobs and use benefits to live in the meantime, and the ones who intentionally coast by and live on the taxpayers money without ever intending to work honestly.
You are part of the former group. The good ones. So please don’t feel guilty for accepting help.
Do you are using any antipsychotic and/or mood stabilizer? I’m 90% sure you are bipolar from what you are saying, and from my 27 to 29 I was barely functional in my job and not functional at all in any other area of my life without a mood stabilizer. And my life changed hard after it
Second on the other response about mood stabilizers and bipolar disorder.
Not to internet doctor here, but giving certain antidepressants and other medications to someone who is bipolar sends them into severe mania. That happened to me and I had no idea that anything was really wrong with the drugs they gave me. I didn’t even know what mania even meant.
The psychiatrist at the university health center only had a 15 minute conversation and see you in a few months. If I wanted real therapy I had to go somewhere else. So thus I was pretty out of my mind for god knows how many months until I decided to stop taking them. Maybe almost a year? It was all a blur.
Takeaway is to advocate for yourself, take a look at the drugs they are giving you, and keep calling these doctors to tell them what is and isn’t working. It is an uphill battle and the system is broken here in the US. I don’t want to assume gender here, but I really feel for you if you are a woman and have to deal with sexism in the medical system on top of everything else.
Mental health is hard and it sucks when your life spirals so far out of control all at once. Take the safety net. You got this. I like spending time in cafes, so I can be around people for a while. I always find it kind of relaxing to be there, but not have to interact with anyone if I don’t want to. Be kind to yourself, internet stranger.
Life doesn’t have to be high stakes, there is only artificial scarcity. We have the resources to take care of everyone on the planet and live in harmony with nature.
We can split the atom, put a super computer in every pocket and build a logistics system to air freight me a bowling ball over night from anywhere to my door if I pay enough.
The stars are ours as a species if we choose, but not this way.
Where can you hunt and forage and live for free without a job? As much as I’d love to go innawoods, the law tends to frown on farming and sleeping in public parks. I have to pay to park at national parks lol.
In my state, and I believe most in the United States, you need a permit in order to hunt. Those cost money and often have limits on how much you can hunt, where and what equipment you can use. Hunting is more of a rich people’s (or at least hick rich) hobby here. Fishing also requires a permit with limitations, although I think those are easier to get around.
As far as foraging, it’s pretty difficult without knowledge of your local area. We had a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants after the Vietnam war, many families died because they misidentified a common mushroom thinking it was the same as a species back home. Can you tell the difference between a wild carrot and hemlock?
So… You’re just lazy. Why should society support someone like you again?
I don’t know about wild carrots, but I know plenty to forage local berries and mushrooms. Did that my whole life, just like my parents and grandparents.
Okay, awesome, show us a haul! Teach me to get up my butt and go foraging. Are we just eating mushrooms and berries? Not that I mind, it’s giving Pythagoras.
Around here we have pokeberries, which are supposedly edible if you boil the fuck out of them. They can kill you if you don’t do it right though; that’s not something I’m willing to brave yet. You did call me out - I’m pretty lazy and I could grab pecans from random folks’ yards.
All of the edible mushrooms I know of tend to stick to wooded areas - do I need to start walking there to build a shelter now? (I’d drive, but again, nearest wooded area costs $10 to park and I’d rather just buy a rotisserie chicken at that point).
Look, I have no clue where you live, but there are plenty of free resources on foraging online. I currently live in the UK, you can forage mussels, seaweed and pretty much anything else. There are big dedicated YouTube channels with indepth guides and groups which do foraging walks where more experienced members will show you what to pick and what not to touch. Saying that foraging is impossible is just completely false.
The high schoolers and their families I worked with in the inner city had no access to natural areas. I guess they could dumpster dive, but most places lock or contaminate their dumpsters. I’m not arguing that it is impossible everywhere. But foraging requires living an area that supports it, and having the knowledge base specific to that area. Some areas will have kind and knowledgeable people who will be willing to help educate, some will not. Foraging can be dangerous - deadly species can look like edible species. If you use online resources without training, you could easily misidentify a species - there are many many poisonous plant and fungi species that look identical to choice species. Areas can also be contaminated - the area I did my field work had extremely high levels of arsenic and there would have been no way I could have known if I wasn’t doing field work there!
Suggesting that one is lazy by being unable to forage for their survival is, well I’m struggling to find a word less unkind than idiotic but maybe naïve is better.
Yes, we all have the choice to go rogue, drive to the middle of nowhere with nothing but a tent, bags of lentils and rice, some other basic supplies. You need to find a place remote enough to be not harassed by forest rangers, forgo all medical care except that you can provide yourself, research enough to realistically subsist on nothing but the species indigenous to the nearest possible location one could do this. I think for any of US based folks - maybe Alaska?
I genuinely would enjoy hearing a good faith explanation of how one can do this. I fucking loved reading /k/ shit lol.
Mate, the point is that life is free. If you want to enjoy comforts of a modern society - pay up. But no one is forcing you to do so, just live off nature.
Even if this wasn’t condemning disabled people to starve, where do you live where there is any unclaimed land? Also, where do you get your tools from to build shelter and to hunt? Surely you’re not suggesting that one person alone can survive in the wilderness and we already know you wouldn’t want this person to benefit from someone else making them tools
There’s plenty of public land here in the UK. Even more in countries like US and Russia. Make your own tools or learn to pay people who make them for you.
Wow, that’s just an amazing insult, and an even better oversimplification of how jobs work. Having both skills and time is not a guarantee of income, and employers have an obvious incentive to reduce pay in every possible way.
And life is too complicated to guarantee both skills and time no matter how much effort you put in. The person you’re replying to mentioned disabilities. I’d add that being young means you don’t have skills yet, but you still have to eat. Having kids means you don’t have time, having a medical emergency often means no time or money, being born poor means less resources to developing skills, having some skills but not all the ones needed for the particular job you are trying to get, having skills but only the skills for low paying job, I could go on and on.
I’m glad life is so straightforward for you, but it’s not for many many people who put in an immense effort into just surviving with very little hope of having extra money to buy things they want like tools.
marking success where you hoard food and take food out of another persons mouth when there should be plenty of food to go around isn’t a success story. It’s not even qualified to define it as a job.
No one is saying that society doesn’t offer efficiencies over rugged invidualism but that the excess value that could go towards benefiting the living quality of all is hoarded by the rich. Eat the rich.
Yes, every single day my man. I produce excess of the product that I make (I’m a coffee roaster), that is I produce more coffee in a day than I am able to consume myself. Due to my experience I am able to produce at not only a higher yield per hour than an inexperienced person would be able to but I’d also argue a higher quality product. Every single worker does this in some manner I luckily work for a company that shares my values and pays a fair chunk of that value I create back to me, our owners main job is sourcing coffee bean for us to roast and managing the business which he is paid for. In larger corporations the owners are the stockholders who do no actual production or value adding tasks of their own yet they reap a large chunk of the value created by their employees.
If we’re talking about “larger corporations” then we’re talking about publicly traded companies. The stockholder is YOU. Maybe you should spend a bit of time learning the basics of economics.
That’s not how stocks work, in the UK or the US. You’ve demonstrated throughout this entire comment section that you don’t understand what you’re talking about with those “basic economics”
A stockholder is someone who buys stocks. Working for a company does not mean you are a stockholder. And you cannot buy stocks with all that freely forged food that’s everywhere in the forests around all of us.
You’re great at trolling, maybe leave the economics to everyone else tho.
I’m not in school, I graduated and now am working for a company. Which I’m not a stockholder in because that’s not how it works. I AM a stockholder in other companies because I’m trying to profit off this broken fucked up system in any little way I can.
Maybe you should try buying stocks so you can see what the financial world looks like
So you support unionisation of workers to demand higher wages? Because you seem ignorant of the fact people DO work and are NOT being paid a living wage for that work. The world doesn’t owe billionaires anything either.
Where did I say a thing about unions? Also if someone is being paid only X amount of money that means that the value of what they produce is X. Not enough for a living? Try producing better goods and services.
I followed from your logic that you should be in support of collective bargaining by the labour force to negotiate a living wage in exchange for the collective labour the provide. But you don’t apparently because you either intentionally or mistakenly believe the falsehood that employers willingly pay the full value of the labour they employ others to do. This has been shown to be false through most of human history.
This is not true. Workers are de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs in the firm. By the tenet that legal and de facto responsibility should match, the workers should jointly get the positive and negative product of the firm (i.e. the property rights to the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs). Yet, the employer is who gets 100% of this whole product and workers as employees receive 0% @workreform
Despite having a degree, which shows that you can do the job, employers still ignore your application, or reject you.
Now, college students have a thing called loans. Whether or not you have a job, those loan providers still want to be paid.
If the student can’t pay the loans, and their family cosigned the loans, but they can’t pay it, then thats a LOT of pressure from family, and everyone involved is going to have a bad time.
My degree is in game programming. I rolled a nat 1, I guess, cause all the gaming jobs are abruptly disappearing this year, and I just graduated last year. I’ve given up on pursuing a job for a game company, for now.
I’ve been in the red a couple times. I’m barely afloat as it is. During December and January, I was thinking about either suicide, or abandoning my life. Going on the road.
But I didn’t have the strength to really do it.
I’m at about $130,000 in debt. I am working minimum wage. And entry level for my field is 60-90k.
You can imagine how gutwrenching it might be to be that close to having a liveable income, when you were raised poor, and you’ve only had minimum wage jobs your whole life. Now I’m back at a minimum wage job, and I have to pay ~$1000 a month in just school loans.
In the USA, make sure you fill out a SAVE Plan, if you’re really working minimum wage then you probably qualify for $0 Repayment and in 10 years it will be cancelled under the contract terms.
I’m sure others have probably mentioned some options, like food stamps, and ai know it sucks, I was in a similar situation after graduation having been sold on the salaries my diploma would demand. One thing I wasn’t aware of as an easy way to make a little bit of extra cash to help out, donating plasma. It’s not something I want to do forever, but the extra quick cash can really make a difference. Best of luck, don’t give up
TMI , did you ever have any experience to go with the degree? Did you not work at all during college? why don’t you start making some games that are worth two fucks and the money will flow champagne like at Gatsby’s homie, back in the black!
You are right, they should just give up and make coffee or hamburgers or something… What do they have to lose? If anything they hone their skills and get practice for when they find a job… and can show a portfolio of some projects worked on.Knowhatimsayin?
The problem in America is that more and more skilled workers are having to settle for making hamburgers because of shit like this. Good luck getting any “portfolio” shit done when you’re working 2 unskilled labor jobs and still not making your monthly bills.
This also doesn’t address the fact that employers give zero fucks about that stuff. Portfolios. Gimme a fucking break. It doesn’t matter if you singlehandedly made an entire Linux distro, no one’s going to care.
Prior to Covid, I worked part time. During college, I worked on personal projects. It’s hard to have industry experience if you haven’t yet entered the industry.
That’s tough, I was lucky to get a foot in the door through some different organizations I participate in personally. It pays about the same as flipping burgers but from those I’ve seen succeed, experience is equally as important as the education. I was ready to manipulate and lie to get experience. Keep trying and don’t be afraid to overstate your accomplishments and projects. Have you looked for any volunteer projects?
Had a very similar experience, even with game dev. You should honestly just avoid game dev jobs but yeah, right now it’s impossible to pivot out of game dev anyways. I wish I could say it gets better, and it will, but the game Dev job market will never be good. I graduated 4 years ago and still don’t have a job in the field. They want you to be working on personal projects while working 40+ hours a week, probably because they will be working you 60 hours a week, lmao. We picked the worse major, I wish I wasn’t scammed into serfdom at 19.
I am not at home to check more into this, but have you looked in the Industrial Automation industry? A lot of game devs ended up being a good fit. While I am hesitant to recommend my old employer, the software guys make good money and I still have a few friends over there. My reasons for quitting had nothing to do with the software department. Check out Dematic and some similar companies. Dematic was at least good for getting experience and I learned plenty.
It may not seem super glamorous at a glance, but it is worth a shot.
Game dev is extremely hard to break into. I’ve been in and out of the industry for some time now.
If you’re dead set on working in the industry I’d strongly advise going the platform integrations route.
Gain experince working with API services and creating some C++/C# integration wrappers for UE and Unity (GoDot potentially too).
Pick up some contract work doing API development outside the games industry to strengthen your knowledge and experince developing solutions.
Find a game team that needs a platform(s) integration engineering role or a central publishing engineering role.
Develop a host of solutions professionally for a year or two.
Make the jump into the role you actually want.
This also gives you a ton of job flexibility in an industry that values knowledge breadth and has waves of job stability. Automation & tooling engineering, API development, services engineering, etc.
People react to traumatic incidents within their daily lives, well after the trauma has ceased.
Losing a job, your means of survival, is traumatic.
I feel like everyone always puts trauma square within the realms of war and abuse, but trauma comes at all of us, in a multitude of ways.
People who have been recently traumatized need help. People struggling with trauma need continued help. We should help others, so that their trauma does not define them.
That means a strong social safety net, and access to health care, housing, and food. Regardless of who you are, or your circumstance.
Suicide is never a rational response to a lack of economic opportunity. The story here is that he was sick. The fact that he had trouble finding work maybe was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it seems misleading to imply direct causation between that and suicide.
You'd be surprised how many homeless people have hard science degrees or previously ran succesful businesses. Bad luck, ill health, medical bills, a family member who needs to be taken care of, (government) corruption, fraud, theft, builders didn't fix your roof right and you're stuck with the bill and negative equity, etc.
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.
The idea that hard work will set you free, a slogan that historically featured above many a concentration camp gate, is a comforting lie but a lie none the less.
While that’s true, I feel like sometimes people take it to the opposite extreme.
Life isn’t just wholly random and you have absolutely no agency in whether you are successful or not.
While it’s true there are homeless people who used to be successful or who have advanced degrees, it’s a huge minority.
And while you can do “everything right” and still fail, you’re wildly more likely to succeed than the person who did “everything wrong.”
Is there always a chance of catastrophic failure? Sure. But you do have agency over your life, and can in fact exert heavy influence over your outcomes.
It’s possible to do nothing wrong and still be convicted. I can have a positive mentality in bad weather, but I take issue with being taught that I have rights and then seeing the checks and balances just push me through the system.
Homelessness is heavily correlated with mental health issues, childhood (sexual) abuse, and/or childhood deprivation. A lot of these people were fucked before they even got a start in life, through no fault of their own.
It's easy to think they're in the position they're in because of some kind of moral failing. It's comforting, it allows us to pretend it couldn't happen to us. It's good for our egos, we get to pretend our relative success is a result of how great we are.
But the sad reality is that for a lot of people, especially outside the western world, life is fundamentally unfair and no amount of talent or drudgery will do much to significantly improve their situation in life. Realistically the most they can hope to improve their children's chances, and it's still a long shot.
Hell, it is almost certain that there are cleaners working at Tesla, who are both more intelligent and hardworking than Elon Musk. But they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, and with the wrong skin colour and/or genitals.
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