A few nights ago I Skyped with a good friend of many years who is struggling with severe under- and non-employment. He doesn’t have a steady job but does odd, mostly web-based projects that come along.
I’ve been in that dodge, too, earlier in life. Sometimes it springs out of mistakes you’ve made in the past, big or small, or it’s just a matter of circumstance. Thankfully I never entertained the toxic idea that I was owed anything because, say, I went to college or was never incarcerated. There are people who harbor these ideas and sometimes it comes into the light of day in nightmarish form.
It never filled my mind to file for unemployment, though it may have been morally justifiable, because accepting charity where there is no personal attachment between the giver and receiver has some ethical uncertainty with me. Besides the money issue, I would be opening my personal life for grumpy-faced bureaucrats to inventory, which also didn’t seem appealing. And this was before I entered into the “the government sucks” phase I’m in now.
My friend has a similar attitude, but there’s not much one can do, if one is doing everything “right” and circumstances just don’t want to straighten out, except wait. I had to wait much in the same way, financially, and part of having a healthy adult mind is recognizing the need to wait.