How I found wisdom in unemployment
As of this writing, I have been unemployed for nearly five months. Initially, it felt like an extended vacation from my holiday in Asia, but after the second month, I began to worry. I never planned or expected to be unemployed this long: I’m an software developer with skills for an in-demand industry, and yet here I am. The unemployment benefits, although generous in any standard, is not enough to cover my expenses since I’m also supporting my parents back home. I actually started to borrow money from friends because I began to chip away from the meagre savings left after my holiday.
Some days I get anxious about the future’s uncertainty: when will I get a job? When will this be over? And on these days I’d have trouble sleeping and sometimes lose my appetite, too. One time, having gracefully passed several interviews for a certain company, I thought I was finally on my way to signing a contract, so I started to plan my life as a new employee for the coming month. A week later the company wrote to me that they have just decided to stop hiring new people, and therefore won’t continue the hiring process with me. I fell into a state of disbelief that I thought the email came from another company I wasn’t betting on. And then the worrying started anew, as if it never occurred to me before, the thought of “What now?”
So it’s quite fortunate and quite timely that I get to read a book I’ve been meaning to read all along:
It is a memoir of the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl describing his time in Nazi prison camps, how he made sense of all his suffering, and how logotherapy — the school of psychotherapy he developed — helps in these dire situations.
Funnily enough, he compared someone who is in a prison camp as similar to an unemployed person, in that both are living a life of “provisional existence of unknown limit”, i.e. “it was impossible to see whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end”, although obviously, being unemployed is not as deadly and difficult as being in a concentration camp.
A man who could not see the end of his “provisional existence” was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life… The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. Research work done… has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time — inner time — which is a result of their unemployed state.
Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.
We unemployeds also start thinking about the past, which explains why I often have involuntary flashbacks of the neighborhood I grew up in and scenes from when I was a kid with my grandma.
A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. [They have] the tendency… to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real… They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
So what can be done? Frankl advises one to look forward to the future.
[By] pointing out to him a future goal which he could look forward… It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future — sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.
Keyword is “force”. What did Frankl do himself when he was in the prison camps?
I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past.
This echoes Kierkegaard’s ideas about the antidote to despair — faith in what is possible:
When someone faints the cry is for Water, Eau de Cologne, Hoffman’s drops; and when someone is on the verge of despair it is: get me possibility, get me possibility, possibility is the only thing that can save me. A possibility, and the despairing one starts breathing again, he starts living again. Because, without possibility, it is as though a person cannot breathe. (The Sickness unto Death, 1849)
Faith in the future where everything is possible.
Some days I also tend to blame myself for my situation. If only I had started to look for jobs while I was still holidaying in Asia, if only I hadn’t been picky about the location or the role, if only I had saved enough, I wouldn’t be in this situation. Luckily, I stumbled upon Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati:
The person of amor fati doesn’t seek to erase anything of their past, but rather accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken and the wise, with strength and an all-embracing gratitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic affection… At the height of the mood of amor fati, we recognise that things really could not have been otherwise, because everything we are and have done is bound closely together in a web of consequences that began with our birth — and which we are powerless to alter at will. We see that what went right and what went horribly wrong are as one, and we commit ourselves to accepting both, to no longer destructively hoping that things could have been otherwise.
Certainly, I could have encountered the lessons of Frankl and Nietzsche earlier if I had chanced upon them before. But if I had not been uncomfortably unemployed, would I have been receptive to their ideas? Probably not. Like what Proust said, we learn by suffering:
It is only during suffering that our thoughts, in a sense shaken up by endless and shifting impulses, elevate, as in a storm, to a level at which it becomes visible, all that regulated immensity, which we, stationed at a badly placed window, do not normally see, because the calm of happiness leaves it smooth and at too low a level. (Finding Time Again, 1927)
I had been suffering because of uncertainty and stress, and I don’t know how to process my discomfort; I don’t know how to self-soothe because I’ve never been in this situation before. My suffering has lead me to have an open mind and to seek answers.
A man who drops into his bed each evening like a dead weight and lives again only at the moment of coming awake and getting up, will that man ever dream of making, if not great discoveries, then at least some minor observations, concerning sleep? He hardly knows whether he sleeps. A spot of insomnia is not without its uses for appreciating sleep, for projecting a certain light into that darkness. An unfailing memory is no very powerful stimulus for studying the phenomena of memory. (Sodom and Gomorrah, 1922)
In other words,
Wisdom cannot be inherited — one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven’t been laid down by their fathers or their tutors — they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whether it was good , bad, or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory. (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 1919)
and,
Happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. (Finding Time Again, 1927)
