Why do employment and unemployment feel just as bad as each other?

r/

For real, my employed friends hate their lives and are stressed out from work, my unemployed friends also hate their lives and are stressed out from not working.

How do you even catch a break?

Comments

  1. OGigachaod Avatar

    Unless your family is wealthy, life sucks.

  2. ThatstheTahiCo Avatar
  3. jenny_loggins_ Avatar

    Not being able to do whatever you want when you want sucks, but I’d much rather deal with the stress of employment than lack thereof.

  4. UnavoidableLunacy25 Avatar

    Because it’s designed that way.

    There is no winning unless you’re wealthy.

  5. GotWheaten Avatar

    Unemployment is far worse.

  6. baw3000 Avatar

    Employment might be miserable, but do you know what else is miserable? Not having a house and electricity and food. Dealing with work shit is way better than all that.

  7. GlossyGecko Avatar

    Your unemployed friends aren’t stressed out from not working, they’re stressed out from not earning any income. This is a very important distinction.

    Nobody wants to spend a majority of their waking hours generating profit for somebody else. The problem is that we don’t live in a society that’s friendly towards people who want to try to start a business. The barriers to entry are high, the cost of failure is that it can ruin your life, and the odds of failure are really high because bigger businesses are allowed to sabotage you.

  8. ItzOctober3rd Avatar

    I left my job in November because I accumulated absences, I was feeling so drained. Well I thought I’d wait a few months before getting another job.

    I started looking in February and I barely found a new job! I was feeling just as drained as when I had a job. I start a new job tomorrow and on to the cycle I go…

  9. fadedv1 Avatar

    honestly as someone who is unemployed since few years in Germany on benefits, it doesnt feel bad, my mental recovered

  10. Crusty_Dingleberries Avatar

    Jobs aren’t emotionally, spiritually, or personally satisfying.

    If you work in a field that you hate, where you’re forced to comply with standards you don’t see the point in, or where your inputs aren’t valued, then eventually you’ll come to hate it.

    Similarly, unemployment is stressful because life is expensive so you feel like you’re always behind on your financials, and because most western countries’ social safety-net like the welfare systems are designed to be difficult to navigate, with miles of bureaucratic red tape to discourage people from just quitting their jobs and sucking the state’s teet, it gives people stress to be unemployed, which ruins the point of it being a safet-ynet…

    …but that’s kind of what a lot of people have felt like was necessary. Because while people hate bureaucracy, people also hate when people are (perceived as) unfairly benefitting off of the safety system (like, if a lazy person doesn’t even want to work and just collects welfare checks). so Imagine that you bring in a shitton of migrants, or you experience a generational shift, or a law is changed, and suddenly you have a demographic of people who doesn’t want to participate in the workforce, the solution was always to just make welfare more complicated, which sometimes works, but not always, but this solution is also guaranteed to make life a nightmare for legitimate citizens with a wish to participate.

    So if you’re unemployed, you have forms and meetings, application requirements, proof of this, that and the other you have to adhere to in order to get a cheque you can barely survive on.
    And if you’re employed while not being personally fulfilled by the job, then your job will start to feel like a nightmare of you having to kiss the feet of your mortal enemy.

    The solution is to stop chasing prestige, stop looking for better, and find something you love. I have so many co-workers who quit their promising careers to chase their dream. One moved all the way around the world to become a cowboy in the Australian outback, one quit his lucrative sales job to be a personal care assistant to autistic boys and act as a full-time mentor where he’d push them to ask out a girl if they were interested in her, or go fishing, or just help them in their daily tasks. One quit her director job to become a PA to one of her influencer friends. Loads of different stories and life paths created, with the commonality being that their salary was way lower at the end, but they’re a lot happier. There’s nothing shameful in becoming a pizzaiolo, or a kindergarden teacher, if that’s what you love doing.