Does Unemployment Mean Failure?

We are all indoctrinated quite early to think of ourselves in relation to work. A common question we ask children is “What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?”. The answers we prime children to give are almost always career-oriented (e.g., firefighter, astronaut, YouTube star). Seriously, check out this video where a hundred children are asked this question. Only a small fraction of them said anything beyond a career.

Rarely do we ask what values we want our children to strive for. It’s an omission that can have some adverse effects on their development. When we ask children to define their self-worth in relation to what they can do, it can create unnecessary anxiety. Some evidence suggests that a search for a calling in of itself can lead to an unhealthy amount of indecisiveness. In the words of organizational psychologist Adam Grant:

“When we define ourselves by our jobs, our worth depends on what we achieve.”

This line of questioning, sadly, never stops. In the United States, one of our primary icebreakers is asking people “What Do You Do?”. Again, this line of questioning is almost always implicitly asking people about their chosen career path, as opposed to what values they strive to achieve.

That’s damaging, and it’s not merely probing questions about employment that create this feeling of inadequacy. We see this expressed on a cultural level in the way we demonize the poor for insecure or total lack of employment. It’s not uncommon for more well-off people to assert that unemployed people are undeserving of help. In his article Why I Don’t Give Money To Homeless People, contributor Charlie Pabst stated coldly:

“You and I have jobs. We work and probably work very hard. We put in the time and we get paid for it. That is called fair exchange.”

A similar sentiment can be found among politicians, CEOs, and even presidents.

In the US, we have a society where people are trained from adolescence to the day they die to believe that employment is the most essential thing in the world. When a person doesn’t achieve that ideal, they are forced to internalize a lot of stress. A simple Internet search reveals thousands of testimonials from people who feel like failures for not fulfilling that ideal (check out some here, here, and here). This psychological stress can correlate with increased drug usage, alcoholic consumption, and even TV viewing habits. The meta-study referenced earlier stated that an increase in psychological stress among the unemployed was the primary reason why they self-medicated.

Sometimes this shame can lead people that need financial help to reject it outright. In one well-known example, a homeless man in Canada returned a sum of $2,400 he found on the street to the local authorities. The story went viral, and a GoFundMe page was made to reward the man for his selflessness. The page raised over $5,000, and the man initially turned down the funds and instead requested that the money be funneled to a local nonprofit. The thing the man really wanted, police later confirmed, was a job.

There is an undeniable stigma around asking for help, especially when related to safety net programs. In one terrible example, US Representative Jason Lewis infamously called recipients of government assistance “parasites.” This stigma means that sometimes people don’t take the help that society has already allocated for them. The federal food stamp program, which is known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), never reaches full eligibility. In places such as Nevada’s 2nd congressional district, it’s not uncommon for only about 2/3rd’s of the eligible population to be reached, and shame is a huge reason why. In the words of Vicki Nash when discussing her experiences with unemployment:

“I don’t claim welfare of any kind, because apart from anything else I am far too proud, another one of my failings.”

Of course, unemployed people are depressed and self-medicating. They are actively being told that they have failed to uphold basic societal standards. They are then shamed into not accepting the financial help that would mitigate their hardships. A person in that position is unlikely to have the emotional or physical resources necessary to be happy.

If unemployment-related stress were solely an issue of internalized shame, however, then it could easily be rectified through awareness. It would only take a couple of people living their “truth” to eventually dissipate that shame.

The problem is that employment is linked to a lot of people’s ability to subsist as human beings — i.e., you need a job to eat. This leverage prevents employers from receiving negative criticism about the systemic failures surrounding the nature of work. Employers don’t have to listen about how their jobs suck, and they often choose not to. Those who challenge the structural problems with work are routinely dismissed as problematic and “unprofessional.”

Unprofessional people have trouble eating.