Doleism? Fuck the spongers, right?

[Dartz]

8,000 have welfare pay slashed over their failure to look for work - Independent.ie

Took all of five minutes for the smarmy gits to show up and start cheering. Probably never even been stuck on the dole.

I've done it. For four years.

For the first few months it's easy. You fire out the job applications, convinced that it'll be over and done with and that soon you'll get some sort of gainful work.

Silence replies.

Maybe the odd one or two dangling strings will come back, rubber stamp rejections and one single interview that ends in a we'll call you.

That never comes.

But you still try.

Tailing off over the months as things start to drag and it gets harder and harder to motivate yourself. The silent treatment cripples. The rejections pile up, eroding your sense of self worth. Constantly being told you're just not good enough to do anything steadily beats you down.

After about 8 months you're starting to wonder if it's worth it, if you're worth it.... You're life's lost it's rhythm - you're sleeping later and staying up longer, making the time pass.

It's harder and harder to bring yourself to bother to even apply. You start second guessing if it's worth the effort, since you know you're just going to get another bloody rejection anyway. Opportunities sail by. Shit piles up. Your sense of ability burns off.

It's harder and harder to keep trying and easier and easier to just burn the day and get it over with, scrabbling for morsels of self worth that comes from actually being sucessful at something.

Even if it is just Counter Strike.

Making it worse are the smarmy fucks who take pride in looking down their noses, like getting lucky makes them some sort of Jesus. I dealt with those fuckers alright. Borrowed a brand new car and wore a suit to a job interview. Got home, signed on, and some oul cow went out of her way to sneer at me. Or how about the time when I finally did get a job? - I drove to the dole office to sign-off in my new car - and another prick took time out of his day to sneer at the taxpayers money paying for such a sports car. I trolled the fuck out of that cunt alright. I hate cunts like that.

Otherwise, you're powerless, helpless. You might just about get an application in once a month or so, just bairly managing to struggle, limping on, but finally, you just run out of steam and drop where you are.

And then some smarmy fuck comes along and decides that because you're unable to try hard enough, they're just going to fuck you over.

That isn't going to motivate anyone. It's just going to make it worse. The spiral deepens further and further. It's just beating them back down into the hole and they're going to get to the point where they're never coming out. It makes the underlying problem worse, rather than helping.

Once someone goes down that hole, beating them over the head about it isn't going to make them come out, it just makes the beater feel better about themselves.

Eventually, I managed to find a job. But 4 years squatting on me hole has has made it very, very hard for me to believe I'll ever suceed at anything. And that's still having a negative effect on my work to this day because I know I'm dropping important tasks because I'm afraid of fucking them up and it's so much easier to just leave them undone. It's not even conscious, it just happens. I'm a ball of nerves afraid to fuck up, say or do the wrong thing and end up right back where I started because I'm terrified I'll never get moving again.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[ordnance11]

I hear you on that one. I took me the better part of a year when I got laid off in the great recession to get another job.
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Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[robkelk]

I have nothing to offer other than moral support.

I know you are capable of good work. I've read it in the Fenspace forum. Don't let anybody - including yourself - tell you that you're worthless.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Rajvik]

And i have no moral support to really offer. Alright, first thing is first, i admit i am an asshole. i have spent months on end with no work, and no prospects of the same, but at the same time to one degree or another i did have two things, my family and my pride. The first big window of unemployment for me was when i had just been medically discharged from the Marine Corps, and by five months later when i had found no work, and had few if any prospects i promised myself i would return to my parents house if by Christmas i hadn't found a job. Then at the beginning of December that year i received a call back, and then a job offer to start with the new year. I lasted 6 weeks before i was laid off for lack of performance. I had been hired as a diesel and hydraulics mechanic and they had me manually assembling oversized bicycle chains for mobile drill rigs. then i spent a couple of weeks job hunting and practically stole a job from a fleet maintenance group to do maintenance on airfield equipment, after 6 weeks there i had everything lined out and scheduled to where a monkey could do the daily maintenance and then they let me go as unneeded. As of Mother's day that year i came home and was handed a job by a friend of my father's driving a shuttle bus at the airport. Then came a little legal trouble that cost me that job and almost a year and a half of my freedom, plus probation. Once i was free of prison it was back to the parents and looking for ANY work i could find, no matter how nasty. i only had one requirement, that i not have to work with my father, because we would have either killed each other or his boss. A year and a half of temp agency placements, 2 weeks here, 6 weeks out of work, two weeks there, another six weeks out of work before finally i found someplace that i stayed at for about six years. This last march they fired me while i was in the process of dealing with my mother's death. A month later i had found another job through the temp agency and am there now. Americans cannot say there is no work, there is just work they are not willing to "lower" themselves to do.
edit: my point being is that i have no sympathy for people who are kicked off their dole simply because they cannot even be bothered to make the false pretense of looking for work by calling companies and seeing if they are hiring, boo bloody whoo
 

[Dartz]

You're missing an important point. The people who can't be bothered to keep up the false pretence of searching for work have gotten so deep into the hole that they've basically given up and gotten to the psychological point where they can't even bring themselves to engage. . Hitting them over the head with sanctions isn't going to help.

The lifelong dole claimerswho make a living gaming the system will never be hit with a sanction because they know how to game the system and keep from getting caught in the net.

This doesn't actually punish anyone who needs punishment, it just makes the punisher feel better about themselves, so they can say See, We did a Thing and it Had an Effect. Look, that's a number.

Everything else, I know it's in my head. It's just the attitude of some people that bugs the hell out of me.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Rajvik]

Thing is dartz, what's going to knock them out of their apathy, it's not letting them sit there and be apathetic that's for damn sure.
 

[robkelk]

Reading dartz's original post, the issue is that people are being pushed into apathy. They wouldn't need to be pulled out of it if they hadn't been put there in the first place.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Rajvik]

But his argument is that the time spent on the welfare and not finding "any work" is what is causing the apathy, mine is that the blatant do or die, (ie there is no more help) mentality forces people to accept jobs they wouldn't otherwise accept because they are down to having nothing
 

[Dartz]

It isn't welfare that causes apathy,it's the constant rejection. Constantly being told you're not worth employing. It's not even apathy, it's a sense of helplessness, or worthlessness - that nothing you try will work, so it's not even worth trying because you can't bare to fail again. Or even applying for the jobs you wouldn't otherwise accept and getting the same response as everywhere else....

Given the amount of people who choose die over do is fairly epidemic here anyway, making it an even starker choice will just lead to starker results. An increase in crime? Or more sudden unexpected single-person drownings late at night?

The right welfare program has the opposite affect, by at least making people feel like they're worth employing and can actually achieve something. Hey, you built that, you learned that, you did that..... keep moving. People need to be treated like human beings or they'll eventually shut down. Psychological survival is just as important as being fed and not homeless.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[nocarename]

And honestly, even if they do choose 'do'. What benefit to society is there from forcing people to do terrible jobs for terrible pay? (If the job or the pay were better they should have hired someone by now. Right?)
Benefits to corporations, sure, but to actual breathing people? That I'm less sold on.

[LynnInDenver]

Rajvik wrote:

---

But his argument is that the time spent on the welfare and not finding "any work" is what is causing the apathy, mine is that the blatant do or die, (ie there is no more help) mentality forces people to accept jobs they wouldn't otherwise accept because they are down to having nothing

This assumes those jobs will have you. You got lucky with the right set of circumstances to get another job after you got out of jail, even if it wasn't something you wanted to be doing. There are people who are told all the time "you're overqualified" when they apply for those jobs that were once beneath them. There are people being told all the time "we hired someone else." And those are the ones getting responses. That's the part that Dartz is getting on about, it's not being on welfare, it's not being allowed off of it because of the whole stint of trying any job out there and not getting anything more than rejection, active or passive, slapped into one's face anyway, and then being shoved off into limbo because some bean counter thinks it will be good motivation to take away even that much. And here in the U.S., it's even worse when some of those "beneath" jobs (assuming they don't discount you as overqualified) don't even pay a decent fucking wage to live on. We're not talking "having money for some luxuries", we're talking "I have to decide between trying to pay for the bus or enough groceries to last 3 of the next 7 days" levels of not enough money, even with public assistance.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor

[Black Aeronaut]

And then it doesn't help matters at all that there's people here that know how to game the system and they wind up being the ones that cause everyone else trouble because someone sees one of these people with a nice looking smart phone in their ghetto-blaster/sound-system-on-wheels.

God forbid I get any help. Single student, never married, vehicle needs constant work, trying to put himself through school but has to work two jobs to get by? Oh no. No help needed here at all. >

[Labster]

Well, Dartz, I'm sorry for what you had to go through -- and to everyone else who has been out of work.  It probably doesn't mean much coming from me: I flunked out of grad school, and spent 4 years sponging off my parents before seriously looking for a job.  I got a remote programming job at California wages in about a week's worth of searching.  I am such a lucky... guy.
It was painful for me upon first leaving grad school after falling out of love with my field, and having no idea what to do with my life.  It's a thing that, in retrospect, seems silly given that some of the characters I wrote were living my dream life and yet I didn't know what I wanted to do.  Still not the same kind of experience though, of being insulted for being on the dole.  Of having people tell you how worthless you are on the television every day.
To any of those still unemployed: If you can, set goals to keep yourself sane in unemployment.  During my time off I remodeled a house; I wrote open-source programs and contributed to a compiler.  I started watching anime and learning Japanese.  Eventually I started a wiki.  The one weird trick is to find something that gives your life meaning which no one can ever take away.  But depression is hard to break, and joblessness definitely causes depression -- especially in men.  And for some reason, you can't tell someone to stop being depressed.
I support Universal Basic Income (UBI) in large part because it takes away the stigma of being on the dole if everyone is on the dole.  And thus I also stand for elimination of food stamps, unemployment benefits, and the minimum wage in order to support a new economy based on UBI.  We need to move to an economy where no one gets left behind when technology brings production increases -- where getting work always means that your earn more -- and where you can't game a bureaucracy that doesn't exist.  I want an economy where people can choose to give their lives to creative or humanitarian work can do so, while the vast majority of us who want to have more things can get jobs.  And I want an economy that doesn't drive increasing numbers of rural Americans to heroin addiction and suicide.  UBI would help.
-- ∇×V

[Norgarth]

I spent a decade bouncing from temp job to temp job before finding one that actually carried thru on the 'Temp to Perm' idea so many claimed to use. Some of the jobs were 6 month positions, and sometimes there were multi-month dry spells.

I was actually surprised to be offered an actual job with the company (rather than thru the various temp agencies), and incredibly relieved to have actual benefits.
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"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin