Unemployment

Being unemployed for a certain amount of time one gets lots of advice. Most of it is simply supportive. Some of it is more than supportive, with offers of job opportunities and leads. These leads are sometimes useful, sometimes not; regardless, they still require initiative on the part of the unemployed. We have to work at these things.

Then there's another type of advice, which is an annoying type of advice because it's so nagging. These advice-givers operate under the idea that if you're unemployed you have to spend all your time looking for work. Every second has to be productive; any type of break or free-time to pursue non-employment goals gets pushed aside as frivolous. Particularly punishing, because being unemployed is never easy. Anyone unemployed pressures himself or herself just as the critical other does. And hearing it twice only makes it feel like a punishment added on after the guilt we already assume.

I suspect a large part of this critical attitude that people place on the unemployed has to do with their vision of time. Time is a commodity that needs to be maximized at all costs: free-time is really getting-things-done-time, a way to pad a resume, a time to clean the stove, a time to be constructive. But this “free-time-construction” has nothing at all to do with true construction but rather with a separation between “life” and “work.” What we do when not making money becomes equated with “real life”; what we do in work becomes falsified. When we work—for most of us—we simply make money, spend time doing whatever-we-do, and then equate our off-hours with our real lives. This separation is what makes possible a critical attitude towards the unemployed. Without the separation, they technically don't fit into either category: they are neither supporting themselves nor living real lives. Once the binary dissolves, the meaning of both categories dissolves as well. Free time only exists in opposition to non-free time.

And so the unemployed become somehow other, but not totally. The unemployed are still contained within broader borders: even as the work-life binary that usually defines us dissolves them, they still live within the structure of those categories that persist even into the physical realm. We have rent and mortgages to pay, after all, and without this work-life binary we could not afford rent (as we would have no source of income), and we could not have a place to live our not-working lives. So, the economic structure of how we spend and think about our time actually is mirrored in the physical manifestation of our surroundings. Or, conversely, the physical manifestation of our surroundings is mirrored in the organization of conception of work and life. The relationship is dialectical.

Because of the dialectical nature between the work-life binary and the physical things that surround us (commodities, really), we can look down upon the unemployed as those who simply can't live in the world—who can't play the game, who failed at it for one reason or another. And so the criticism starts because there's no escape. Even the chronically homeless and unemployed, the drifters, the beats, the rebels, gutterpunks, all fall under this rubric. By definition it's impossible for them to exist outside the broader world (which is as physical as it is ideological). Like ghosts, the unemployed haunt the remains of a capitalist conception of time, existing solely in reaction.

In general, this is correct. Anyone who has been unemployed or who has lived differently within the work-life dichotomy can feel this. Vacations take on a real-life (and yet surreal) quality; but a vacation from what? From work. From preparing for work, from the act of going to work, from being at work, from leaving work, from eating after work, from going to sleep at a time determined by work. This is not a judgment: hopefully it's merely true. Whether we like our work or not, or whether we can get lost in our jobs, is irrelevant to any accurate description of the organization of time and work.  

The question of alternative organizations comes up. These are fine: for example, there are differences from the self-employed vs. the wage-laborer. Or between farming and city life. The heaviness or lightness of time moves differently depending on the organization of one's day. But these alternatives always exist in opposition to a dominant organizational pattern. Some people work the evening shift, which is a small difference in the organization of life; but it's enough to feel the difference inherent in working such a shift. Likewise working the night shift. The dominant organization always exists. Those who live separately always exist in a connection of difference to this dominant organization, whether they acknowledge it or not. What this results in is a feeling of constant disruption, an aimlessness punctuated by feelings of inadequacy and criticism.

Everything above was written more as a result of feeling than of doctrine. It's not supposed to be some theoretical exposition on the organization of time in modern life. Rather, it's a description of an experience—which may, or may not, correspond to reality.