‘Occupational’ hazards of unemployment

In a sense, there’s no such thing as unemployment. It helps to realize that work in the form of jobs has only been around for about 200 years, a product of the Industrial Revolution.

If you’re currently unemployed, your job is finding work. And in that sense, there are some occupational hazards of unemployment. Take Relational Deprivation, a relatively little known phenomenon.

Obviously, the person who’s just lost his job has also lost a major part of his social network. You might not think so, but it’s virtually inevitable. When I lost my job last November, my brothers and sisters at Focus on the Family treated me like a leper. They avoided me, apparently not wanting to catch what I had and not knowing what to say or do about it.

And these are Christians. Their own leader, Dr. James Dobson, has remarked upon how medical professionals avoid bonding with their little patients in the pediatric cancer ward out of self-preservation because it’s just too painful to invest your feelings in somebody who’s going down. It’s just human nature.

But the unemployed person has an even greater natural tendency to withdraw from human contact–out of shock, pain, embarrassment, shame or a combination thereof. And it is this tendency to withdrawal that is the jobless person’s greatest enemy, for it robs him of job-related relational and networking opportunities when he needs them the most.

This is one of those times when our natural impulse is our greatest enemy and the solution–becoming an all-star networker–is so damnably counter-intuitive.

So, if you know someone who is unemployed, reach out to him. He may be emotionally paralyzed. You don’t have to have magic words to say. Nobody does. But this is also true: Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Be one who cares.

And if you’re unemployed, get off your butt and get into relationship with other human beings. You may not see it from here, but it’s the way out. When you’re all wrapped up in yourself, you’re too small a package.

Unemployment: The movie

This will take your breath away.

The American Observer (http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html) illustrates the deterioration of the U.S. economy from January 2007 before the start of the recession to the most recent period with available data.

See the black eating from both coasts toward the center right before your eyes.  Thanks to Professor Mark J. Perry’s Blog for Economics and Finance at http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/11/unemployment-movie.html.