Habits of Unemployment revisited

By

Sampson I.M Onwuka

The question we should ask about unemployment is whether or not we speak of unemployment when we speak about unemployed people, or whether we speak a silent and uncanny language different from employment, placed issues concerning those either in process of obtaining a job and unemployed numbers when we compare and contrast on people’s attitude to obtaining job in any field. 

Does unemployment and depression conjure up a picture of this drug addiction and people that peruse on it, or is it a question of the stages of one’s psychological transformations, perhaps caught between a changing personality and society.

What is the main element in diagnosing the problems of unemployment along the lines of habit and addiction, especially when there are no fitter attached its evolving consequences like the instances of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman?

Perhaps unemployment like some mid-life crisis assures us of the nature of mass transitioning of the great humanity which gradually becomes like gravity a memory stuck with daily exercise of process and passing moments and like the Death of a Salesman, it forces to question the issue of habit and the consequences of this habit from the very beginning.

We may notice that applying reverse psychology and reversal on anything on other things, allows a sense of awareness and control of the unemployed patient who when they realize what needs to be done, either rise to the occasion or surrender to rules that guide and efficiently secure the rite of passage, usually pay more attention to routines of the day that the efforts at forcing the hands of employment and jobs.

 In a sense, it will be better and psychologically helpful, to discourage a rush back to unemployment class or search for jobs minutes or days after getting sacked. There are plenty of chances to have this effectively done and have the newly fired get a job after the first few weeks.

But the issue is that this is not always the case, even if it is, between get the right job and working is a gap that is determined by several factors. 

The right prescription is a therapy with direct intent at destroying that past by embracing the difference.

It may not seem competent to establish that the first treatment a newly fired individual should pursue, either private or publicly is getting over the last Job. Getting over the process is not so easy and when this is done, the newly unemployed should see themselves as patient who could self-medicate by realizing that things will not the same – not that it will change for worse - does not mean that home is best study or hanging with friends is a best treatment or being merry an attitude to seeking employment, rather it only means that the state of mind should be altered with structures gradually defaced one process after another by seeking to change a established attitude to office and to work.

Somewhere between the past and the earliest beginning of the animation for money and for jobs dwells the ‘fear that welcomes the acceptance’ that job seeking and offer is an acceptance that it is no longer in our hands. It looks like the Great Depression was a psychological condition that meets the ‘Death of Salesman’ a series of paragraph in our lives, it is a Play perhaps with no meaning than perhaps a ‘Hen House’ so utterly interfered that outcome is partly lost.

The Great Depression with all hopes and struggles, with its issues of sound money and stable money, with the initial effort being a current problem of money and recovery process, and the later ‘stable money; its government guarantee of further years. In here, as others argued elsewhere, we are not overnight on the depression or day light by the cusp of early employment and unemployment. We are getting there in the middle of somewhere at the beginning of a treatment, which like recessions as symptoms of deeper problems, and like decaying and ineffective solution, the recession no less than the age of the Salesman deepens into depression.

The longer the aplomb and the shorter the resistance leading to the descent into sickness and its treatment, equal effective it’s the deeper recourse of world history.

In parallel stages of psychological decay and dementia, to the issues of unemployment, we may mention that the earlier the treatment, the greater the chance of healing. It is here that we can suggest that a meaning exist for a careful return to this past by Arthur Miller whose Play delivered the Compensation Act to FDR tables, that somehow, somewhere before we gradually yield to fathoms of despairing, there is hope which I for one can preach begins and ends perhaps with earliest therapy – at beginning not deep into the mire.

What unemployment compensation can procure these days is based on the lessons involving old and aging America who by numbers and by traditions of their work, may no longer fit into the process of a new job. For if we conclude that the Salesman was part of the lessons attributable to the new Deals (New Deals) with America we would forfeit the very candid lessons of the frailty of human conditions, human ineluctable and its limits are best explained by the job description.

But this is not psychology, rather new and reasonable ways of seeing unemployment.

Perhaps the best to introduce sensitive subject to compare the reality of getting a new job along the lines of the… Long term unemployment is perhaps relative to a drug addiction than drug overdose, a process where the victim struggles against a habit than leniency to stagger on imagination, or a victim is perhaps driven by something other than themselves – lack motivation or being motivated -, perhaps with tendencies of returning to that past and that hope of returning to the market and labor force gives way to other issue competing for our attention. 

Drug overdose are periods between the triumphalist effort at achieving a process, the high hope and tedious process involved in such exercises and the descent like ether into despair. But gradually, like waking thoughts and new reality concomitant with break of day, the unemployed patient embraces the facts that are not part of the society.

In all, we can suggest that the ether of alcohol dissipates and with it the illusion of confidence, hovering above are the questions of unemployment, at the background it still lingers. The victim is hardly aware of the time which from age and from day is no longer at ease with him or her, like Alzheimer the patient is stuck in the past always. 

And from that past he occasionally returns to reality with fleeting moments of euphoria which may or may not hold meaning. FOR several occasions there is the temptation to blend in, and when public perception promotes an understanding that a job looker or newly working man or woman has new and effective reality. 

In the place of workshops for jobs in any society at the beginning, we can suggest that the long term treatment is no less comparable to drugs and alcohol addiction and treatment, and in terms of unemployment and recovery process should come first. The pleasure principles need not be kept aside in dealing with this objects and should not be drown or smothered out, which in keeping to Freud and his compeers are areas of human dialectical that must be broached and surpassed leading to the uncomfortable discusses of one’s past, more than these areas, are perhaps the deep troubles that bothers and hinders a healthy grow-psychology. 

It leads somewhere between a complex and a standing, for instance, the process of unemployment in the first few weeks do not hit the newly sacked and fired from office as a problem of sickness based on habit. For this reason other than the matters arising from other factors, the patient or the newly unemployed is compelled by personal habits and responsibilities to press forth with elegance and determination in search of jobs, seeking to bounce back gradually and grudgingly learning something it is not easy and experiencing bouts of personal doubts.

  

This process is expected to lead to something more lethal, for instance, t issue of acceptance and estimate for monetary duration and compensation. This is a vicious trap; perhaps a vicious circle that experience tells us should be avoided. 

Their minds quickly revolve around the issues of survival which is not the first motivation towards recovery and snagging a job, or can we place the idea of late recovery as a process equal to the final solutions of any patient. We are not attempting to throw additional light on Freud and his compeers of how a patient with severe psychological processes can….

II

In the previous encounter I argued carefully…..Perhaps, the French man, Roland BARTHES, may have be the better man to narrate the comparison between unemployment and the apoplectic condition of drug addiction. These two disciplines are questions of habit and mental recovery saving that unemployment leads to social and financial imperative and with less urgency in physical treatment, whereas drug addiction likes the problems of habit is very urgent and visible.

I shall comment that Roland Barthes is one of my favorite commentators on human society and culture, and one of the people who made it seem uneasy for us to forgo our signs and signatory in societies of all respect. 

One case for long term unemployed is the Confession of the Opium Eater according to Thomas De Quincey, who grappled the descent from ‘Pains…’ and ephedra of dementia as it by imagination you are in charge where even in the least of all, all is perhaps lost. And here, quoted from popular sources and for our ears…."The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, was both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes…were exhibited in proportions, so vast, as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. “

This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience."

Thomas De Quincey…."Some of these rambles led me to great distances; for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motions of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen."

The hope implodes after the initial revelations of the process concerning inactivity of the unemployed towards even the least prescriptions of Wakke and Lazerfield, an injurious allegation occlusion that is hardly the case since it is only the case from his logical analysis. What it means is that for proscription retained in the process and in this analogy of Wakke and Lazerfield, in not a onetime event, rather we can distinguish between the phases of the struggle and resistance leading to new development of the people and cultures. 

The explanation deepens with disappointment especially after the first acts are performed and degrees of claims battered or presentations misfired on.

I cite in this case, B.F Skinner’s ‘behavioral modification’ et al, his ‘therapy technique’ pertain perhaps to habit, perhaps in addition to Albert Bandura comments, that “learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform their what to do”, we consider the issues of the persons of interest with a background perhaps on Thomas Quincey and his paranoid delusions, which is important in this case since they did not occur naturally or through the impact of any sickness.

It was external and based on other issues taking place in human body, that…. "Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood...."

The imprecations of and high extreme examples of Quincey…such dark embrace hardly justifies the comparative with long term unemployment, but unlike the addiction, we consider…..

Is there pleasure in Opium one may ask? Perhaps like some author once mentioned ‘that there is pleasure sure in been mad which the madman knows’, but we alight on a certain prolegomena of an inevitable from a long term addiction and drugs, perhaps a descent into a different side entrapped by visions of enduring tomorrow when this is only light at the dark and deepening crisis of our state of mind, we return to it ever so slightly ever so compulsively.

Why? It seems that from beginning or some middle of some discuss we are petrified of something, perhaps an illusion that for instance that God does not exist in the way we conceive it, or that our body has its limits or that our Government cannot really protect us – all of the time – or that the Court is riddled with errors, or that our parents are not omnipotent or omniscient, this wry and well treated assumption and acceptances in Psychology applies in sociology and from all asunder, we may mention that these courageous questions of evolving human psychology places us at the middle of it all, we return to a habit because by nature human beings are good.

The Chief opponent and easily way out of the ineluctable is doing differently and perhaps misleadingly and from major eponyms of there are more than a fair share of evil damaging the good.

From Sigmund Freud we praise Illusion at least in parallel with the Future of Illusion, perhaps what happens after smoking joints of a fag and alcohol that blocks the Dopamine or other drugs, we may experience the feeling of easiness, a temporary uneasiness with the brain and delay in its release time, leading to state of one’s world, temporarily leaving the individual worse than he or she found themselves.

Perhaps Sigmund Freud’s ‘Beyond Pleasure Principle’ may serve to explain why African Americans failed to capitalize on some of the doors opened by Americans or why for instance the minority business exercises did not have a staying power in African American societies. According to Freud when dealing with patient for instance with a different experience, we may suggest…that the “…Patient…is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experiment….”

That, “The Physician cannot as a rule spare his patient this phase of the treatment. He must get him to re-experience some portion of his forgotten life, but must see to it, on the other hand, that the Patient retains some degree of aloofness which will enable him, in spite of everything, to recognize that what appear to be reality is in fact only a reflection of forgotten past.” (XVIII. 18-19).

But this is not always the case – not often the case - the past can equally be part of the obstacle holding a process. 

For a fact that the only variously rewarding experience, from that past is the good from the struggle especially the struggles in the good and also the bad…. 

‘Human beings cannot truly grasp the nature of certain reality’ credited to Sigmund Freud, but primitive conception of the mind is the unconscious self-serving ‘law of preservation’, that remains hidden and inaccessible saving for eagerness to justify one’s action through the limited options; Habeas, Certiori, mandamus, especially from self-processed (Pro Se) a parallel of complex ‘Carl Jung’. ….The mirror image, the faith in the complex that is already in decay……

Functionality of the mind therefore takes a different pathways when it enters the orbit of daily living, that there are occasions of the decay in the mind, product perhaps of habits decay grudgingly, perhaps there are problems of assurance and issue of confidence which from all accounts the posture of having only one thing in mind becomes the chief element of a compulsory existence. 

In a sense, the measure on measure of mid-life crisis for men begins and ends with a process of new employment, no less a matter of habit than the culture of justifying once whole existence when as they argue, a man or woman looks back and observes that his or her years are behind them and that…

We look at the blemish of upper room psychology which the English consider ‘keeping up appearances’ but for those lacking the skills for the instruments, they are reduced to spectatorship and to the long rewards that welcomes acceptance. 

In essence many psychologists attempt to breach this hidden crisis in our mind and allow us to air them out publicly.

But this prescription does not always meet the crisis, it leads and lends backward to the past of a patient that when the comparative analysis between a proven technique of the pleasure principle is used in recovery of advanced psychological descent in depression, the process takes a different turn and leads like French medicine and Eastern technique to laxative and long term treatment of drug therapy. If it is used early enough, and by association used in treating unemployment conditions which end differently. 

We need not reach this forbidden part of our human existence, we may achieve the best out of our patient, who must accept that the constipation of habit is no less diabetic as the ability of the human body and blood to treat it’s sugar problems.

The newly unemployed in the view of this author and perhaps elsewhere, should accept the new condition as a sickness that needs urgent attention, the understanding without the acceptance that these patients do merit a second atmosphere and coming, they lead to need form of discussion that their problem on time and not later, and not forced to learn new means of achieving new jobs.

Such discussion of the jobs in group setting demarcate the past from the present, the assistance from the government or job securities and unemployment compensation would become secondary when these are well rehearsed. This must be done at the very few days and weeks of the firing or sacking from office or laid off for other reasons which does not explicate or even temporary delineate on the patient but through deliberate or temporary dissociation from work, the need to understand the problem is quite unique and useful in their own ways.

III

The unemployed must be considered a different kind of patient, sick from habit no less enduring as drugs no less compellingly. Even if the discussion takes the same processes as Freud ‘pleasure principle’, understanding that you were probably fired for a fault that is either yours or not yours, at the beginning, helps the patient to put the past behind them or her as quickly and reasonably as possible. During the opening days of therapy, the patient may do better if they discuss some of the elements of the good times at work and the best memories, which increases year after year or so diminishes, perhaps leading to other things in life and dreams.

This type of therapy is easily a way of reassuring the patient that obtaining a job is really not easy but the real issue is the onset of late and destructive habit. Some recipe or healing and returning to the fore of the issue can be used in narrating the story, but we may stating clearly that the presence of these old forms and traditions of doing business with unemployed people may always work and even the more logical steps are proven by reason to be less effective.

Doctor Phil (Philip Calvin Mcgraw; 2006) for instance narrated in his Love Smart that in choosing a mate, it was advisable to look at the records of such an individual, with due respect to his personal conduct and attitude towards their possession, jobs, previous relationship and perhaps living accommodation. This has a correlation to the unemployed. Some degree of longevity and keeping with possessions exfoliates on the chaser’s behavior towards the female or the chooser’s interest in the male. 

While it is not wrong to look at these incentives mentioned by Dr. Phil in chasing a possible mate, none of these items really influence the decision of either party in real life.

In fact, it may even to serve as a paradox for placing some faith and misplacing doubts in the relationship, especially for the women. Case in point for psychologist, it’s the natural reasons why women prefer bad boys or bad guys than the good ones, vice versa the good men. The explanation may be based on what we can understand as trial by circumstance that the strong characters are usually hurt and harmed in relationship due to conservatory alternative to life, and with emotions missed with a sense of moral right, they try to fight back and end up being entrapped in the exercise than quit the process.

This irrationality of human psychology is not cured with lengthy reason, you have to try to dissuade the patient – the estranged male or female – from feeling that time cures all, or that she or he may have been injured or involved in abusive relationship.  The patient need to be reminded of their own possible replacement, for instance the possibility that the younger generation are looking to replace him or her, and must therefore be weary of their own lapses from lack of utility which is altogether worth little.

It is only then can the so called estranged and entrapped partner force him or her to ameliorate from the advice the whole essence of relationship and attempt to parallel their won inevitable decline to the demise of the object of their affection or trap.

For unemployed people, we should disabuse our minds sharing their need to part of the group or their need to get a new job, but the relevancy of being such and such a person is reducible to the next and capable generation. In reality this unemployed patient is not doing anything wrong, and the rest of them are not guilty of some problem and it is not probably their fault or could well be.

As such preaching “get a job” is not a solution, but interesting questions such as what areas of work are you interest in?, it may send the patient from day 1 to the interesting gates of understanding what is lacking. In fact such a statement ‘get a job’ or ‘why don’t you get a job’ gives the preacher reasons to believe they are doing better when they may just be struggling like the unemployed.

The patient must not resist this rebuking but must convert it for a better purpose, for if they try to add additional material to resume, edit and do something for work. Some Cities have programs of achieving this process but most of time; Jobs are gifted to you, where you grew up its more important. Such effort usually land you the job when taken in good faith but above all, it discourages further teasing and rebuking which people get off with.

We are yet to consider the scar of public disrepute, perhaps the odor of those seeking help through Welfare or Social Security or those diseased by circumstances of their age; leprosy, HIV, so dismembered limb by limb in Society that they are left with no locomotives to continue. Their job situation is no more demanding than those struggling from immigration papers, and no less meaningful than qualified workers in their threshold of labor sandwiched in their specialist industries with very little pay and job security.

Pause for a moment and find yourself removed from human dialectic and place yourself in a kidnapped territory with increases opulence to danger with more than fair chance of not being heard and the Judge that has the wherewithal to toss and play with your complaint.

Perhaps you are recognized in the first day on recognition and come early and eager, early to understand that the you have a longer case awaiting the small and glossary dismissal of your allegations – meanwhile you are unemployed since criminal charges are still dangling and you are facing a split in the family over other allegations and for nearly half of your life you have been a business manager and in U.S self-employed with no compensation. 

The first man or woman might make it out of the jail after years on incarceration which still happens in US only to be confined to….

For people with some income from the state unemployment, it was possible to survive these stages but during a depression like 2008, with the confiscation of one’s sources of living, or a situation where you have your legs and private property decapitated during a Boston Marathon, only those whose legs were saved during the explosion may understand the irony of legal pursuit of wages with or without attorney, attorney’s for even the least benefit of law, especially for those who are lingering and staggering to the Court house seeking the Court to intervene. Their unemployment cases for all it intent of purposes are within the perishing of more academic exercises…..

What is the opportunity cost of protecting and promoting a healing process in later stages of life, that a healing process that is likely occur at the beginning…..The highest efforts it seems to the rest of us should be placed on the earliest cases of unemployment, when for instance an indigene, or private, has lost his or her jobs. Perhaps not through the long and tedious job hunting exercises or the exercises or the exercises this is leading somewhere.

What bothers the minds is how the conditions of unemployment end up changing the lives of those who pursue it differently, perhaps for good and perhaps for ill, yet in all, the effort and the support which it’s necessary beside the patronage situation that fetched half the jobs are vested with different interest, the Patient is gradually his or her inner cycles and lack a domino, the cards gradually unpack. 

Perhaps we may see the stars lined into existence for these folks but then the question of perception being unemployed and not having something to do leads to new levels of reality in a society of ownership where men and women divide and conquer for the rights to exist and the jobs however burnish and promising it’s not readily the whole reality.

With time, the few of them who couldn't redefine their images end up doing odd jobs for what is worth. The temptation to do away with this theme of generous bargaining ends elsewhere, the theme continues elsewhere. How well Craigslist, Indeed, Careerbulider, Employment Guide, Snagajob, newspapers; daily newspapers, Green Sheet, can provide.

It does happen that it will take a community and perhaps a while for any such expectations to be met at a shortest possible level. It will be impossible to ignore that we cannot under circumstance expect this miniature sense of goodwill to continue day after day without sinking into abuses. With the desires to draw their lines enduring distinction and begin the circle of descent by making up their own time or being in perpetual obeisance of other’s peoples rules.

Such rules builds as much as it destroys, opens as much as it bars, and when Felonies are added to the process, the outcomes are suppressed phantoms of despair which cast lurid interest in many saving those who have been there.