Also, if you can't find a job in a year then maybe you need to lower your standards somewhere. Even as a self-taught, very junior (at the time) engineer it only took me 4 months to receive (competitive) competing offers.

>a job gives you a basic social identity

Just because this is a norm doesn't make it healthy. When your identity is rooted in something that can easily go away, it makes for a weak foundation. Lot of examples of jobs that are relatively short-lived (athletes, military, etc.) can show how difficult transitioning is when your identity is tied to your job.

We need to distinguish between being at some particular job and being in a profession or similarly in any job at all.

I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.

However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.

I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.

Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.

Part of the distinction I was trying to make is that it's dangerous to have one's identity tied primarily to any singular thing. In western culture, it just seems like a job/profession is the easiest identifier.

Will Storr writes about this much better than I can explain it here. But his point is essentially that the healthiest approach is to have your identity tied to many disparate parts of your life so that if one falters, the way you view your status doesn't hinge on that one failure. Just like you stated that "people identified themselves as successful", is a measure of status. If your esteem/status is based on that one domain, you're putting yourself at greater risk. It doesn't matter if a buggy-whip maker was the best tradesman around, he's status is still at risk when cars become popular.

The other part is that I believe research shows it's typically unhealthy to have one's social circle centered around work because those aren't very tight bonds. Again, it's a point to spread your social circle across shared interests and values rather than a job.

What I'm really talking about when I'm talking about the threat of extended unemployment is the threat of losing socioeconomic class. So much depends on class: where you live, what you eat, where you worship if anywhere, where your kids go to school, who your friends are. Almost everything. It's very difficult to diversify your social and professional network outside of your class.

In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.

All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.

I don't think we disagree on much here. When you say "socioeconomic class", that is largely valuable because of the status it confers. When your status changes to a lower rung, it hurts. Will Storr is saying having your entire status/esteem wrapped in a single measure like socioeconomic class is unhealthy. It is much healthier to have your status spread across multiple domains so that if you lose your position in socioeconomic class, your entire identity isn't shaken.

We probably do disagree on the buggy-whip/factory point. Being a craftsman carries more status than being a cog in a factory. The reason why Henry Ford made $5/day a thing was workers were leaving in droves because the work was miserable and monotonous. High pay compensated for miserable work and lower status. I've known people who go from being "somebody" in a particular field (like the military) to being a "nobody" in a different field (like a factory). Even though they got paid better in the latter, they yearned for the former because of the lost status.

What your replies seem to confirm is how much we as a society base our identities on work, sometimes to the exclusion of so much else.

I'm referring to class as a person's conception of themselves, and others' conception of them, as someone who can live the life they're living and can expect to continue living that life. Losing this doesn't just mean the loss of some sort of social authority, of having an impressive job title at parties, but also and more importantly it can mean almost everything in that person's life changing for the worse, indefinitely: worse neighborhood, worse housing, worse medical care, worse food, worse schools and college funds, worse retirement, worse jobs, worse hobbies, worse transportation, worse life expectancy. That would devastate anyone, and it's not so much about how a person self-identifies but about how much they can afford.

By that same measure, anyone who lives in a lower socio-economic class would have a lower sense of well-being. This is true for people with extrinsic work orientation, but not to those with intrinsic orientation. Again, a lot of it comes down to one's relationship with work.

People who are forced to receive worse medical care, for example because they can't afford necessary medicine anymore, are tangibly worse off than they were before. It's not a sign of an unhealthy relationship with work if someone is upset at not being able to buy medicine. Framing it that way is unhelpful.