>sometimes the interiority-centric framework of psychology seems comically ill-fit for topics like this...thus, people who are long-term unemployed likely feel that they lack control of their lives because this is true.

you and the study are not controlling for people who feel they lack control of their lives tending to do a poorer job of finding work, and even doing a poorer job of keeping a job; people whose self esteem is more fragile being more likely to lose their jobs, reinforcing their negative self images: but that's not unemployment doing it (the study does hedge a lot by saying "associated" as if they are not suggesting cause).

I'll bet if they had done a Big 5 Factor analysis of the samples in the study we would see lots of clustering, a much more interesting result than what the study found, and Big 5 Factor results are not known to change as the result of unemployment.

When an employer abuses an employee, we're usually talking about life-altering things like overwork, withholding pay, denying promised benefits, canceling promised time off, up to the truly awful stuff like firing for biased and discriminatory reasons.

I don't think you can really compare these two directions of abuse at all. The power imbalance is staggering.

> but not materially

One employee of mine stole $70,000 (about $200,000 today). It very nearly wiped the company out. (If you can't make payroll, you are forced to close.)

Yes, and that's allowed. If anything workers are much more gracious in this regard - typically termination happens quickly, with no two week notice. Workers typically at least give that, which they're not required to at all in the US. It's purely goodwill and generosity, so you're welcome.

> One employee of mine stole $70,000

Okay? And Bayer Pharmaceuticals gave thousands of people HIV/AIDS. What's your point here?

We gotta look at the big picture, not your experience.

When an employee with a customer facing job randomly doesn't show up for work, as a manager, what are you going to do about it? Or doing a bit of embezzling? Or filing frivolous lawsuits against their employer? Having more than one "full time" remote job? Or cut special deals with their friends? Getting yourself "laid off" as soon as eligible for unemployment payments? Quiet quitting? Malingering? Padding their expense account?

A manager once told me one of his employees had charged a prostitute's services on his expense report.

All this stuff happens, and it isn't rare.

An employer can systematically destroy an employee's life and finances if they pull the right levers. In places like the US, employees are often terrified of getting fired or laid off because they'll lose their (and often their entire family's) health insurance. Companies use this (and other leverage) to give crap raises, make employees jump through ridiculous hoops to get promoted (and then deny those promotions anyway), "encourage" employees to take the bare minimum (or no) time off, etc.

And employees have to eat it all, or risk losing their livelihoods. Let's think about that phrase, "losing your livelihood". The fact that it's a common saying really tells us all we need to know. Employers hold the power. If they're caught doing bad things, usually there little to no penalty. Employees sometimes do sneaky things (all those things that you mention) and eventually get fired and/or sent to prison.

As an employer you either accept that you aren't strong enough to fight it and thus try to stay ahead in how little trust you apply. Or you accept that you will pay a price (in being betrayed more than you betray and inspiring others to join in) to create and defend a higher baseline trust.

Knowing how much efficiency is lost in a low-trust environment makes dwelling on this depressing/infuriating. But unless you are a great enough leader to drag a billion people back up to a higher trust baseline, then you need to accept it or go mad in denying it.

I mention all this because in a deepening low-trust environment both employees and employers are incentivized to never acknowledge the damage done by this environment as the status quo of who wears the increasing cost of those damages is constantly renegotiated without the stabilization of trustworthy long-term expectations. All of which can surface as threads such as this one.

My default tendency is to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. It goes back to my experience with Caltech's honor system, which is a high trust system and influenced me a great deal.

BTW, the cash register was invented to stop the catastrophic levels of embezzling done by bartenders.

A friend of mine who works at a large store told me recently that management decided to have a look at their surveillance cameras, and discovered a number of employees were filching merchandise. They were all promptly fired.

This is a common misunderstanding.

If an American loses their job for any reason, they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. In fact, they don't even need to take any immediate action. If they need healthcare in the month of, or month after, their loss of job, they can go get it and then later on pay their premium to have the insurance retroactively go back in time to cover them. The only difference is that the covered person needs to pay the full premium, while the standard employment agreement has the employer paying a significant portion of the premium.

For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov. There are subsidies based on income to make the premiums manageable for low-income people if they can't afford the market rate.

This is incorrect, it's "for limited periods of time under certain circumstances" [0] (and citizenship is not required).

> they can always keep their current insurance through COBRA. [...] needs to pay the full premium

This is true but vastly underplays the cost. It isn't unusual for "the full premium" to be over a thousand dollars per month [1] (!). They even get to charge you an "administrative fee". Oh, and there's also tax implications.

> For people who don't want to stay on their previous employer's plan, the loss of the job is a "qualifying event" which allows them to immediately do things like join their spouse's plan or sign up for an individual "Obamacare" plan through healthcare.gov.

More likely for people who can't stay on their previous plan because it would bankrupt them. Or if their spouse is not working. What happens if the employee has children/dependents on the plan? Etc, etc.

None of this is easy. Switching insurance changes which doctors are "in network", so at minimum it's significant hassle. At worst, their or a family member's current treatment is only partially or not at all covered.

So, in practice, parent's description is accurate enough.

[0] https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/health-plans/cobra

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/cobra-insurance-cost-7486539

Not your business policing that unless they actively causes reduced output or conflict in the work they do for your business.

nobody can work 16 hours a day and be focused all the time. heck, most people can't even do 8 hours of focused work. i am not paying you to sit on a chair, but to actually pay attention. if you do two full time jobs, you are not doing the work at the required focus.

sure, there may be jobs where that doesn't matter, and there are jobs that are paid full time but aren't actually full time jobs. like a sysadmin in a small company, where our boss told him that his job was to keep the servers running. if he has nothing to do he is welcome to goof off. and in such a job he could also have used the free time to do side jobs, or a second job.

but for most jobs it does matter that you are focused working for the whole time, and if i find out that an employee is doing a second full time job then i will be very much concerned at that persons effectiveness.

some work is not about volume but about quality. and exactly the fact that the work can not be measured is the problem. some work can not be done effectively when you are tired, and some work is even dangerous. driving for example. paying attention to safety and security requires you to be a wake and able to focus.

as a programmer i have good days and bad days, and noone can say whether my work is the best i can manage or is slacking because i have a second job. and if i am spending more than my market rate salary as a programmer affords then i need to change my lifestyle, not get a second job.

in germany for example the laws for the maximum time of work an employee is allowed to do in a day covers all jobs. two full time jobs would simply not be possible because you are required to have 11 hours of break between two workdays.

The impracticality of measuring the productivity is irrelevant.

BTW there's a lot of data that shows that it's the opposite of your assumptions that's true.

If you slip into a pattern of not waking up at a reasonable time, staying indoors and not exercising, not making attempts to socialise, etc, then it can be quite easy to throw your brain chemistry out of whack and spiral into what is essentially a form of depression.

A job (or a business, partner, family, serious enough hobby, etc) forces you to do all of that, it sets you up with a basic framework, whereas if you are completely free from constraint no-one is going to tell you to get out of bed at 8am, 9am, 10am.... 2pm...

Of course, if you're poor and unable to find work, then you have all of that _on top of_ the financial stresses.

This need for agency is not rational, and cannot be reasoned with. You cant offer it trades of money or favor, and it seems that it is absolutely incapable of being fooled. It asks not for agency over others, but only that what an individual does each day is self driven.

It probably has very different influence on someone whos goals naturally synchronize with those around them, rather than naturally invert.

When I was younger I missed the boat on a very successful local startup. The people who graduated a few years before me and joined the company at the right time exited with multi-million dollar equity. The CEO’s equity was in the 9-figure range.

I remember being intensely jealous that I had just barely missed the boat on that life changing equity. Just a couple years difference and I would have been wealthy enough in my 20s to never have to work again. I fantasized about all the ways I would live my life.

Over the years, the only people from that lucky group who remained happy were those who continued on with their careers as if nothing had happened. The ones who used that opportunity to exit the workforce have been universally cursed: Divorces, unhappiness, and now seething anger at the world and society. There’s a Slack for former members of the startup that I’ve been in for years and it’s sad to see the swirling anger and unhappiness of those who left the workforce.

I never would have predicted it at the time. The way people fantasize about not having to work is often very different than reality.

I know it’s not literally everyone who has this experience, but after seeing it happen to so many people I know it’s also not a rare outcome.

I work and have similar problems like you have listed but I have to pretend I'm a smiling person to remain employed.

Add alcohol to the mix and you're cooked. An alcoholic in this state can take years to come back to some sense of functional. Or any other addictive drug. Not a nice spot to be. with or without the drugs.

I saw a similar line of reasoning when WFH took off. Many people lamented the death of their social life. But, if your social life consisted of going to the office, did you ever really have a social life? Or did you have the bare minimum and then used to convince yourself everything is fine?

Sometimes people say the true purpose of modern human society is to keep people in poor enough conditions we can extract the maximum value from them, but in just good enough conditions they will never revolt. I think that's ridiculous, but then I read stuff like this and think... maybe there's some truth to it.

How is it ridiculous? If too many people achieved financial independence (and as long as labor is still necessary), this would cause inflation until enough are no longer financially independent. In reality losing the gene, health or heritage lottery sets you up for a life of exploitation (as an employee or consumer).

For the average HNer having contact with or awareness of working poor may be beneath them, but they exist, not in small numbers either. The hamster wheel is absolutely real and the intense bubble many on here live in becomes clearer to me by the day.

So yeah, I think what the authors are seeing is the effect of chronic poverty, not chronic unemployment.

It would be quite irregular for someone who received a career ending windfall in their mid-30s to feel a lack of control. There is a whole other can of angry cobras for them.

If you are employed, you get that reward with your paycheck at least. Ideally the work itself is also rewarding, providing the satisfaction of doing something productive. This is why people can be happy doing rewarding work even if the pay isn't all that great.

If you are unemployed and looking unsuccessfully for work, you have no income reward and no work accomplishment reward. If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.

It was hard to start off, of course, because it's unconventional. But now it is sweeter than conventional employment ever was for me, where I did not fit and caused issues for everybody involved.

That's not to say one or other is inherently superior. And that's the point, in a way. Conventional employment is only one of the possible means through which the claimed rewards of life can be had.

Beyond that, the reliance is only a function of social structure. That is, if we collectively choose to "look down" upon certain demographics, then those demographics will indeed feel perenially looked down upon! - because we've made it so.

So you're saying that you think the chronic long-term effects found in the study are not from having little money, but from the lack of rewards?

I mean, there's no data on that, so you could be right. We'd have to find a bunch of people who have little money but find their own rewards and see if they suffer the same consequences.

Possibly the "starving artist" folks - people whose motivation is their art but who earn no (or very little) money doing it. Anecdotally, the ones I've met veer wildly (almost daily) between euphoria and despair. But I think that's different from the symptoms the study is talking about.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a job is just a useful proxy for measuring how people feel they are contributing to society, but it's an imperfect one.

No, societal conditioning from birth has taught people that if they aren't doing productive work, then they're worthless people who don't deserve happiness.

We can break away from this nonsense. While the retirement age has indeed been going up lately, there are still older folks who could retire on their savings and 401ks and pensions, but they don't, because they can't fathom what they'd do in all the spare time they have. It's so incredibly sad! There's so much more to life and self-worth than a job.

I guess you can try to stretch "productive work" to encompass hobbies like creating art or playing sports or whatever other leisure activity, but I don't think that would be particularly intellectually honest about the topic.

> If you receive unemployment benefits or UBI of some sort in that situation, it's more of a reminder that "you suck, you can't even find a job, everyone else has to support you" than anything rewarding.

If that's truly the case, that's due to propaganda associating that sort of thing with lazy, entitled leeches who are taking what they don't deserve, taking from those hard-working people doing back-breaking work to support that laziness. Again: garbage societal conditioning.

(Also, unemployment benefits in most places in the US are barely enough to live off of, not something that you'd be comfortable staying on, for the most part, even though some do it. True UBI would presumably not only provide for basic needs, but also for the ability to spend a decent amount on leisure activities.)

My future utopia is a place run by benevolent AI where there's a surplus of everything, no currency, and no jobs. People do literally whatever they want, and want for nothing. (Want something? Ask the AI and it's provided.) Some people will do things that today we'd call "employment", but they'll do them because it truly brings them joy, not because their prosperity depends on it. And yes, I imagine transitioning into this utopia would require a lot of de-conditioning. Many people would reject it, and feel listless and disaffected. It's... super sad. Work culture is lame.

I have a different take that doesn't necessarily put those in conflict. I think we are hardwired to have our status tied to our value to our tribe. When feel like we are no longer valued, our limbic system starts acting up. We feel anxious and stressed because our evolutionary brain is worried we'll get thrown out of the tribe. Unfortunately, in a modern society many have conflated value to mean a job. That's why I think some of those people who can retire continue to work. But the solution isn't to just replace "productive work" with more leisure time. I think that can also lead to bad outcomes when the other necessary parts of well-being are left unaddressed. I think people need* "productive work" that leads them to feel valued, but it doesn't have to be a wage/salary job.

* there's obviously large variance at the individual level, probably associated with certain personality traits. E.g., people who are high on the conscientiousness trait may need more industrious activities than others to have high levels of well-being

Or to the constant failure / hopelessness / whatever from a constant job search getting no results; if it was just money then the correlation would very obviously be with peoples monetary situation rather then their employment status.

We do know (anecdotally) that people with money (regardless of employment status) don't suffer the same symptoms.

You could study the well-being of those with relatively low-paying "grind" jobs but whose jobs are also held in high-esteem by their society. E.g., junior enlisted in the military.

The reason people become disengaged and apathetic has nothing to do with employment. They become that way because they lack the finances to control their lives, and because financial instability causes stress and anxiety.

Let's change the study a bit. Instead of just watching and tracking these unemployed people, say the people running the study started depositing money into these people's bank accounts. And they just told them, "keep doing what you're doing in general, but you don't need to worry about paying your bills or feeding yourself or your families".

I guarantee you those unemployed people would start feeling engaged again. It's not the job, it's the money.

Yes, autonomy seems to be a fundamental aspect of well-being.

>I guarantee you those unemployed people would start feeling engaged again.

I'm always a little hesitant when I hear someone say they "guarantee" something based on a thought experiment. But the little data we have, like the recent Sam Altman-funded UBI experiment, doesn't seem to back up this idea. While people said they were more open to thoughts of aspects like entrepreneurial activities and education, it didn't actually manifest in real actual engagement in those activities.

I think if you were to look at the disengaged and apathetic unemployed among us, more times than not you'll find that their finances are tenuous at best, and more often in complete disarray. No money, in our society, means no prospects, and constant stress and anxiety around how you're going to simply survive, let alone do anything that feels "engaging".

The problem is no money and lack of a social safety net. Unemployment is related, but it's far from the whole story.

They still work for the ecolieux: prepare food, care for vegetables, fruits and poultry, odd jobs, but they aren't paid for it.