Unemployed Feeling Quotes

Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.

...my body has become another country and I feel like an unemployed illegal alien how will I survive where I do not belong I belong with you

So now I'm getting my gown made by an exclusive seamstress, and all thos anorexic whores on Michigan Avenue and Oak Street who made me feel like the Goodyear blimp can kiss the very fattest part of my ass.

No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning...

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.

‎"I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution.

My whole life I wanted to be normal. Everybody knows there's no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only messy, inconsistant, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our own lives. But when I think about what I have, what I strived to reach my whole life, it's not the biggest or best or easiest or prettiest or most anything. It's not the Manor or the laundry closet. Not the multi-million dollar inheritance or the poorhouse. It's not superstardom or unemployment. It's family and love and safety. It's bravery and hope. It's work and laughter and imperfection. It's my normal.

You have tremendous gifts to give; God sent them with you when you came to this earth. And while you might forget them, or doubt they exist, God does not forget and He will show them to you. As soon as your gifts are dedicated to His work, they will blossom. Chains that might have held you back for years will dissolve. And you will feel free. You will learn that your spirit is bigger than your circumstances, as soon as you put your spirit first.

When I was on unemployment I was not ashamed of being a social outcast. Just furious. It’s the same thing for being a woman: I am not remotely ashamed of not being a hot sexy number but I am livid that—as a girl who doesn’t attract men—I am constantly made to feel as if I shouldn’t even be around.

THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.

Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent. But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work.

I can only conclude that worse than hunger or thirst, worse than being unemployed, unhappy in love or defeated and in despair, far worse than any of all those things, is feeling that no one, absolutely no one, cares about us.

Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist when you don't know where you are?

In a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.

I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

We sometimes feel sorry for someone because of a situation or an event for which they have prayed.

When someone close to you is dying, you can begin to feel wary of their everyday belongings. You've heard horror stories about sorting through 'their things' in the weeks afterwards. You look with mounting unease at your mother's dressing gown, her slippers, her purse hanging, uncharacteristically unemployed, on the bathroom hook...

Working in the fields is not in itself a degrading job. It’s hard, but if you’re given regular hours, better pay, decent housing, unemployment and medical compensation, pension plans—we have a very relaxed way of living. But the growers don’t recognize us as persons. That’s the worst thing, the way they treat you. Like we have no brains. Now we see they have no brains. They have only a wallet in their head. The more you squeeze it, the more they cry out.

Your Script Here’s what to tell someone or yourself while you’re feeling hopelessly fucked-up. Dear [Me/Family Member/Fuckup I Can’t Help But Care About], I know you feel like [the royal “we”/you/our fuckup son] is on the verge of [insert mistake or potential tragic experience], and life feels like an unholy disaster. The truth is, however, that life often sucks and sometimes I can’t expect to feel other than [insert classier, more dire synonym for “shitty”], especially given issues in the past regarding [bad luck/anxiety/your many addictions and world-record unemployment]. So don’t take it personally and do take credit for whatever good things you were doing, even if they were totally ineffective at fending off this mess. Take pride in doing a good job, regardless of bad [luck/genes/associates/mental pain] and don’t stop.

The employment figures released by federal government agencies are fraudulent. Real unemployment in the United States is not under 7 percent; it’s closer to 37 percent, despite what the White House, the Fed, and the U.S. Treasury try to tell you. The Misery Index, a measure of how Americans feel about the economy, is over 14 percent, not at the 8 percent level the government claims.

Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody . . . There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable.

Only those who have been on the receiving end of poverty, unemployment, homelessess, mental illness, domestic violence, racism, sexism or ageism can fully identify with others' reactions to those distressing experiences. Only those who have been members of marginalised minority can fully appreciate how that feels. [p50]

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

Does anyone actually love their job?” “You’re too young to be that cynical.” He chuckles. “Did you at least like the people you worked with?” “Not really,” I admit. To be honest, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed, or didn’t watch the hours pass. I loved the feeling that came as I switched off my computer and grabbed my coat each night. “Maybe being forced out is a good thing, then.” He grins at me. “Yeah. Maybe.

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twenty-somethings feeling naïve, even devastated.Twenty-somethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas, making it more difficult for twenty-somethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twenty-somethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twenty-somethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.

The students who feel alienated by current systems of standardization and testing may walk out the door, and it’s left to them and others to pay the price in unemployment benefits and other social programs. These problems are not accidental by-products of standardized education; they are a structural feature of these systems. They were designed to process people according to particular conceptions of talent and economic need and were bound to produce winners and losers in just those terms. And they do. Many of these “externalities” could be avoided if education genuinely gave all students the same opportunities to explore their real capabilities and create their best lives.

Was being seen the cost of the right to see? No, the worst of it was that my fate was too personal, too special. Unlike hunger, unrequited love, unemployment, sickness, bankruptcy, natural calamity, criminal exposure, my suffering was nothing I endured in common with other men. My misfortune was forever mine alone. Anyone at all could disregard me completely without feeling the slightest twinge of conscience. And I was not even permitted to protest that disregard.

they also strengthen the ego in another way by giving it a feeling of superiority on which it thrives. It may not be immediately apparent how complaining, say, about a traffic jam, about politicians, about the “greedy wealthy” or the “lazy unemployed,” or your colleagues or ex-spouse, men or women, can give you a sense of superiority. Here is why. When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.

Given what the stigmatized individual may well face upon entering a mixed social situation, he may anticipatorily respond by defensive cowering. This may be illustrated from an early study of some German unemployed during the Depression, the words being those of a 43-year-old mason:   How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an unemployed man. When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly inferior. When I go along the street, it seems to me that I can’t be compared with an average citizen, that everybody is pointing at me with his finger. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone. Former acquaintances and friends of better times are no longer so cordial. They greet me indifferently when we meet. They no longer offer me a cigarette and their eyes seem to say, “You are not worth it, you don’t work.”37

In order to identify himself with the capitalist system, the unemployed of today would have completely to forget his personal fate and the politician of today his personal ambition. The long-run interests of society are so entirely lodged with the upper strata of bourgeois society that it is perfectly natural for people to look upon them as the interests of that class only. For the masses, it is the short-run view that counts. Like Louis XV, they feel après nous le deluge, and from the standpoint of individualist utilitarianism they are of course being perfectly rational if they feel like that.

In order to transform the world about us, with its misery, wars, unemployment, starvation, class divisions and utter confusion, there must be a transformation in ourselves. The revolution must begin within oneself – but not according to any belief or ideology, because revolution based on an idea, or in conformity to a particular pattern, is obviously no revolution at all. To bring about a fundamental revolution in oneself, one must understand the whole process of one’s thought and feeling in relationship. That is the only solution to all our problems – not to have more disciplines, more beliefs, more ideologies and more teachers. If we can understand ourselves as we are from moment to moment without the process of accumulation, then we shall see how there comes a tranquillity that is not a product of the mind, a tranquillity that is neither imagined nor cultivated; and only in that state of tranquillity can there be creativeness.

. . . I bet I'm beginning to make some parents nervous - here I am, bragging of being a dropout, and unemployable, and about to make a pitch for you to follow your creative dreams, when what parents want is for their children to do well in their field, to make them look good, and maybe also to assemble a tasteful fortune . . . But that is not your problem. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to live it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are . . . I do know you are not what you look like, or how much you weigh, or how you did in school, or whether you start a job next Monday or not. Spirit isn't what you do, it's . . . well, again, I don't actually know. They probably taught this junior year at Goucher; I should've stuck around. But I know that you feel best when you're not doing much - when you're in nature, when you're very quiet or, paradoxically, listening to music . . . We can see Spirit made visible when people are kind to one another, especially when it's a really busy person, like you, taking care of the needy, annoying, neurotic person, like you. In fact, that's often when we see Spirit most brightly . . . In my twenties I devised a school of relaxation that has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the ensuing years - it was called Prone Yoga. You just lay around as much as possible. You could read, listen to music, you could space out or sleep. But you had to be lying down. Maintaining the prone. You've graduated. You have nothing left to prove, and besides, it's a fool's game. If you agree to play, you've already lost. It's Charlie Brown and Lucy, with the football. If you keep getting back on the field, they win. There are so many great things to do right now. Write. Sing. Rest. Eat cherries. Register voters. And - oh my God - I nearly forgot the most important thing: refuse to wear uncomfortable pants, even if they make you look really thin. Promise me you'll never wear pants that bind or tug or hurt, pants that have an opinion about how much you've just eaten. The pants may be lying! There is way too much lying and scolding going on politically right now without having your pants get in on the act, too. So bless you. You've done an amazing thing. And you are loved; you're capable of lives of great joy and meaning. It's what you are made of. And it's what you're here for. Take care of yourselves; take care of one another. And give thanks, like this: Thank you.

Despite the intervening six decades of scientific inquiry since Selye’s groundbreaking work, the physiological impact of the emotions is still far from fully appreciated. The medical approach to health and illness continues to suppose that body and mind are separable from each other and from the milieu in which they exist. Compounding that mistake is a definition of stress that is narrow and simplistic. Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people’s lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary. For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided. When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands — most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress — nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence. “Stress is not simply nervous tension,” Selye pointed out. “Stress reactions do occur in lower animals, and even in plants, that have no nervous systems…. Indeed, stress can be produced under deep anaesthesia in patients who are unconscious, and even in cell cultures grown outside the body.” Similarly, stress effects can be highly active in persons who are fully awake, but who are in the grip of unconscious emotions or cut off from their body responses. The physiology of stress may be triggered without observable effects on behaviour and without subjective awareness, as has been shown in animal experiments and in human studies.

I decide to scope out craigslist to see all the vibrant economic employment opportunities available to me in this depression. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean “recession.” No matter how many millions of jobs are lost, how much debt our country accrues, or how many years the stagnation drags on, it’s not a depression until the dogmatic media officially declares it to be a depression. It’s as if they believe by repeatedly printing or saying economists are afraid the economy will slip back into a recession, they’ll fool the masses of unemployed or underemployed into believing that not only are we not in a depression, but we aren’t even in a recession. I’m sure the millions of unemployed, freshly graduated college kids who have thousands of dollars of unshakable debt to pay off feel comforted by the empty repetition.

Today’s Affirmations: Blessings follow me wherever I go. In all things, I am blessed and I make it a point to take notice of all the good in my life. Even if I experience challenging events, I always remember how blessed I am. I always have plenty of whatever I need. And often, I have more than enough. I am loved abundantly and I have plentiful love to give in return. Infinite resources are at my fingertips. In the realm of money, I always have enough to cover my basic needs and to meet many of my desires, too. If I experience times when I feel a lack of abundance, I remind myself that, in truth, I have all that I require. Whether I am employed or unemployed, partnered or single, with lots of kids or no kids at all, I feel blessed in a multitude of ways. Nothing I can do can destroy or wash away the many blessings that come my way. And to be fully satisfied with life, all I have to do is remember the abundance that is available to me. My universe is plentiful and my heart is abundant. Blessings come to me freely, and I cultivate gratitude for it. Today, I make time to contemplate the ways in which I am a blessed. I regularly experience gratitude for all of the wonderful things in my life. And I seek out opportunities to demonstrate this gratitude by living with a sense of abundance.

The Job Application Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. Wenzel

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air — raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

No death, no suffering. No funeral homes, abortion clinics, or psychiatric wards. No rape, missing children, or drug rehabilitation centers. No bigotry, no muggings or killings. No worry or depression or economic downturns. No wars, no unemployment. No anguish over failure and miscommunication. No con men. No locks. No death. No mourning. No pain. No boredom. No arthritis, no handicaps, no cancer, no taxes, no bills, no computer crashes, no weeds, no bombs, no drunkenness, no traffic jams and accidents, no septic-tank backups. No mental illness. No unwanted e-mails. Close friendships but no cliques, laughter but no put-downs. Intimacy, but no temptation to immorality. No hidden agendas, no backroom deals, no betrayals. Imagine mealtimes full of stories, laughter, and joy, without fear of insensitivity, inappropriate behavior, anger, gossip, lust, jealousy, hurt feelings, or anything that eclipses joy. That will be Heaven.

Whenever you're taking advantage of all those rules you make in your favor, you're turning me inside out and when that happens, you’re not white and I'm not black, or poor, or one bad mood on the part of some racist asshole away from being unemployed. In your garden, I'm Eve, and when you take me shoe shopping, I'm Cinderella. On top of your mountain, I feel like Mother Earth. In your house, I'm a lady. You dress me like one and you insist others treat me like one.

Along with unemployment neurosis, which is triggered by an individual's socioeconomic situation, there are other types of depression which are traceable back to psychodynamic or biochemical conditions, whichever the case may be. Accordingly, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are indicated respectively. Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se, it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome - depression, aggression, addiction - are due to what is called in logotherapy "the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.

most people tend to accept, at least outwardly, this system of the moral code and thus feel quite safe from any terrible event or problem such as homelessness or AIDS or nonexistent medical care or rampant crime or hunger or unemployment or racism or sexism simply because they go to sleep every night in a house or apartment or dormitory whose clean rooms or smooth walls or regular structures of repeated daily routines provide them with a feeling of safety that never gets intruded upon by the events outside.

A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent.

It did not take National Socialism long to rally workers, most of whom were either unemployed or still very young, into the SA [Sturmangriff, Stormtroopers, "brown shirts"]. To a large extent, however, these workers were revolutionary in a dull sort of way and still maintained an authoritarian attitude. For this reason National Socialist propaganda was contradictory; it's content was determined by the class for which it was intended. Only in its manipulation of the mystical feelings of the masses was it clear and consistent. In talks with followers of the National Socialist party and especially with members of the SA, it was clearly brought out that the revolutionary phraseology of National Socialism was the decisive factor in the winning over of these masses. One heard National Socialists deny that Hitler represented capital. One heard SA men warn Hitler that he must not betray the cause of the "revolution." One heard SA men say that Hitler was the German Lenin. Those who went over to National Socialism from Social Democracy and the liberal central parties were, without exception, revolutionary minded masses who were either nonpolitical or politically undecided prior to this. Those who went over from the Communist party were often revolutionary elements who simply could not make any sense of many of the German Communist party's contradictory political slogans. In part they were men upon whom the external features of Hitler's party, it's military character, its assertiveness, etc., made a big impression. To begin with, it is the symbol of the flag that stands out among the symbols used for purposes of propaganda.

Youth. Particularly hard hit is the younger generation that faces an economic situation for which it has been inadequately prepared. Imbued with the unrealistic expectation of continuing economic prosperity, of having things better than their parents did, they grapple, often unsuccessfully, with underdeveloped self-sufficiency, unemployment, and underemployment in all but a few circumscribed areas. But this sense of entitlement creates a resentment of the compromises necessary to effectively survive. As a result, young adults may tend to feel more disillusioned and alienated.

Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, 'Lady of the Lake strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise, but prices rise faster. Financial crash occurs on Van Buren's 36th day in office. Nation begins first great depression. Bank failures and closings spread like plague. 200,000 are unemployed. Business bankrupt; only pawnbrokers prosper. Van Buren declares ten-hour days on all federal jobs. There. Does that make you feel any better?

In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation… The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid.

The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twentysomethings feeling naïve, even devastated. Twentysomethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas making it more difficult for twentysomethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twentysomethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twentysomethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.

Another person posted this to the group Hashimoto’s 411: I can’t do this any more, I am beside myself and can’t stop crying. Today, I received a disability denial letter from Social Security stating that my condition is not severe enough to qualify. . . . I don’t know what to do, I feel like I am no longer living but just existing and miserable because I feel so sick. My unemployment extended benefits are going to run out and then we’ll be in big trouble if we can’t pay our bills, which include lots of medical bills because I don’t have insurance. I just don’t want to be here any more, and think my husband would be better off not having to deal with me, and with my life insurance he would be much better off financially.

I was on the dole for a very short time, for about two weeks. I didn’t want to be lining up in the dole office. I hated that place, didn’t want nothing to do with it. I didn’t feel I belonged there. The two times I turned up, I bitterly resented it and I swore I’d never go back there. I really didn’t like the whole format of it, or the institutionalization it entailed, or the way they make you feel somehow guilty about it all. That’s your right – you’ve worked, or your parents have worked. If the state can’t provide jobs, then what the fuck are you supposed to do? In many ways I completely understand people taking to illegal activities, because frankly there’s no other way to make any kind of money at all, or get yourself out of the dumps. For me, personally, I could never get involved with theft, I can’t do it.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

Large houses are still occupied, while spinners’ and weavers’ cottages stand empty, because the families that once filled them are obliged to live in rooms or cellars. Carriages still roll along the streets, concerts are still crowded by subscribers, the shops for expensive luxuries still find daily customers, while the workman loiters away his unemployed time in watching these things, and thinking of the pale, uncomplaining wife at home, and the wailing children asking in vain for enough of food — of the sinking health, of the dying life of those near and dear to him. The contrast is too great. Why should he alone suffer from bad times? I know that this is not really the case; and I know what is the truth in such matters; but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks. True, that with child-like improvidence, good times will often dissipate his grumbling, and make him forget all prudence and foresight. But there are earnest men among these people, men who have endured wrongs without complaining, but without ever forgetting or forgiving those whom (they believe) have caused all this woe. Among

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dan- gerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief. Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can can change over time to meet changing social circumstances--for example, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or kept under the surface—but the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, painkiller, and threat.

The only word these corporations know is more,” wrote Chris Hedges, former correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal.

Fascism feeds on social and economic grievances, including the belief that the people over there are receiving better treatment than they deserve while I’m not getting what I’m owed. It seems today that almost everyone has a grievance: the unemployed steelworker, the low-wage fast-food employee, the student up to her ears in debt, the businessperson who feels harassed by government regulations, the veteran waiting too long for a doctor’s appointment, the fundamentalist who thinks war is being waged against Christmas, the professional with her head brushing against a glass ceiling, the Wall Street broker who feels unfairly maligned, the tycoon who still thinks he is being overtaxed. Obviously, personal gripes—legitimate or not—have been part of the human condition ever since Cain decided to work out his jealousy on his brother. What is an added concern now is the lack of effective mechanisms for assuaging anger. As described above, we all tend to live in media and information bubbles that reinforce our grievances instead of causing us to look at difficult questions from many sides. Rather than think critically, we seek out people who share our opinions and who encourage us to ridicule the ideas of those whose convictions and perspectives clash with our own. At many levels, contempt has become a defining characteristic of American politics. It makes us unwilling to listen to what others say—unwilling, in some cases, even to allow them to speak. This stops the learning process cold and creates a ready-made audience for demagogues who know how to bring diverse groups of the aggrieved together in righteous opposition to everyone else.

The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle’s statement are alive and well. Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43 What has come down to us is a set of pervasive ideas. One is that work is a necessary evil. The only good work, in this view, is work that helps make us money so that we can support our families and pay others to do menial work. Second, we believe that lower-status or lower-paying work is an assault on our dignity. One result of this belief is that many people take jobs that they are not suited for at all, choosing to aim for careers that do not fit their gifts but promise higher wages and prestige. Western societies are increasingly divided between the highly remunerated “knowledge classes” and the more poorly remunerated “service sector,” and most of us accept and perpetuate the value judgments that attach to these categories. Another result is that many people will choose to be unemployed rather than do work that they feel is beneath them, and most service and manual labor falls into this category. Often people who have made it into the knowledge classes show great disdain for the concierges, handymen, dry cleaners, cooks, gardeners, and others who hold service jobs.

Externally Hitler sill appears a drifting character: he has failed at school, has no employment, has been rejected by the Academy, is in Vienna for no clearly stated purpose, lives on a pittance eked out by painting postcards. But behind this shiftless exterior Kubizek constructs what must have been there, although it was not apparent to casual acquaintances: the character of the man who, from these beginnings, without any other natural advantages besides his own personality, became the most powerful and terrible tyrant and conqueror of modern history. Here we see - along with the incipient monomania, the repetitive cliches, and the Wagnerian romanticism of his later years - the early evidence of that unbreakable will power, that extraordinary self-confidence. We see the penniless, unemployed, unemployable young Hitler, at sixteen, confidently rebuilding in his imagination the city of Linz, as he was afterwards to rebuild it in fact, and never for a moment doubting that he would one day carry out these improbable plans; we see him exercising over an elderly Austrian upholsterer that irresistible hypnotic power with which he was afterwards to seduce a whole nation; we see him, in Vienna, fortifying himself against a corrupt and purposeless society by adopting an iron asceticism, like some ancient crusader guarding himself against corruption in a pagan world. And then turning to detail, we see in Vienna, when Kubizek was closest to him, the working of Hitler's mind as it feels its way towards the beginnings of national socialism: his crude, voracious but systematic reading; his sudden discovery of politics; his hatred of the social injustice of urban life represented to him, the architect, by squalid slum buildings; his fear -- the fear which he was afterwards to exploit among millions of lower-middle-class Germans - of sinking into proletarian status. Behind the outward meaninglessness of his hand-to-mouth existence we see the inner purposefulness of his studies, his experiences, his reasoning.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

THIS IS MY ABC BOOK of people God loves. We’ll start with . . .           A: God loves Adorable people. God loves those who are Affable and Affectionate. God loves Ambulance drivers, Artists, Accordion players, Astronauts, Airplane pilots, and Acrobats. God loves African Americans, the Amish, Anglicans, and Animal husbandry workers. God loves Animal-rights Activists, Astrologers, Adulterers, Addicts, Atheists, and Abortionists.           B: God loves Babies. God loves Bible readers. God loves Baptists and Barbershop quartets . . . Boys and Boy Band members . . . Blondes, Brunettes, and old ladies with Blue hair. He loves the Bedraggled, the Beat up, and the Burnt out . . . the Bullied and the Bullies . . . people who are Brave, Busy, Bossy, Bitter, Boastful, Bored, and Boorish. God loves all the Blue men in the Blue Man Group.           C: God loves Crystal meth junkies,           D: Drag queens,           E: and Elvis impersonators.           F: God loves the Faithful and the Faithless, the Fearful and the Fearless. He loves people from Fiji, Finland, and France; people who Fight for Freedom, their Friends, and their right to party; and God loves people who sound like Fat Albert . . . “Hey, hey, hey!”           G: God loves Greedy Guatemalan Gynecologists.           H: God loves Homosexuals, and people who are Homophobic, and all the Homo sapiens in between.           I: God loves IRS auditors.           J: God loves late-night talk-show hosts named Jimmy (Fallon or Kimmel), people who eat Jim sausages (Dean or Slim), people who love Jams (hip-hop or strawberry), singers named Justin (Timberlake or Bieber), and people who aren’t ready for this Jelly (Beyoncé’s or grape).           K: God loves Khloe Kardashian, Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye Kardashian. (Please don’t tell him I said that.)           L: God loves people in Laos and people who are feeling Lousy. God loves people who are Ludicrous, and God loves Ludacris. God loves Ladies, and God loves Lady Gaga.           M: God loves Ministers, Missionaries, and Meter maids; people who are Malicious, Meticulous, Mischievous, and Mysterious; people who collect Marbles and people who have lost their Marbles . . . and Miley Cyrus.           N: God loves Ninjas, Nudists, and Nose pickers,           O: Obstetricians, Orthodontists, Optometrists, Ophthalmologists, and Overweight Obituary writers,           P: Pimps, Pornographers, and Pedophiles,           Q: the Queen of England, the members of the band Queen, and Queen Latifah.           R: God loves the people of Rwanda and the Rebels who committed genocide against them.           S: God loves Strippers in Stilettos working on the Strip in Sin City;           T: it’s not unusual that God loves Tom Jones.           U: God loves people from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates; Ukrainians and Uruguayans, the Unemployed and Unemployment inspectors; blind baseball Umpires and shady Used-car salesmen. God loves Ushers, and God loves Usher.           V: God loves Vegetarians in Virginia Beach, Vegans in Vietnam, and people who eat lots of Vanilla bean ice cream in Las Vegas.           W: The great I AM loves will.i.am. He loves Waitresses who work at Waffle Houses, Weirdos who have gotten lots of Wet Willies, and Weight Watchers who hide Whatchamacallits in their Windbreakers.           X: God loves X-ray technicians.           Y: God loves You.           Z: God loves Zoologists who are preparing for the Zombie apocalypse. God . . . is for the rest of us. And we have the responsibility, the honor, of letting the world know that God is for them, and he’s inviting them into a life-changing relationship with him. So let ’em know.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Describing the plight of the unemployed, the historian William Manchester wrote: “Although millions were trapped in a great tragedy for which there could plainly be no individual responsibility, social workers repeatedly observed that the jobless were suffering from feelings of guilt. ‘I haven’t had a steady job in more than two years,’ a man facing eviction told a New York Daily News reporter in February 1932. ‘Sometimes I feel like a murderer. What’s wrong with me, that I can’t protect my children?

Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion. The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing—all the things that sexual harassment feels like to those who’ve experienced it. Frequently, in those months, I was asked about how to address men’s confusion and again, their discomfort: How were they supposed to flirt? What if their respectful and professional gestures of affiliation had been misunderstood? Mothers told me of sons worried about being misinterpreted, that expression of their affections might be heard as coercion, their words or intentions read incorrectly, that they would face unjust consequences that would damage their prospects. The amazing thing was the lack of acknowledgment that these anxieties are the normal state for just about everyone who is not a white man: that black mothers reasonably worry every day that a toy or a phone or a pack of Skittles might be seen as a gun, that their children’s very presence—sleeping in a dorm room, sitting at a Starbucks, barbecuing by a river, selling lemonade on the street—might be understood as a threat, and that the repercussions might extend far beyond a dismissal from a high-paying job or expulsion from a high-profile university, and instead might result in arrest, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of police or a concerned neighbor. Women enter young adulthood constantly aware that their inebriation might be taken for consent, or their consent for sluttiness, or that an understanding of them as having been either drunk or slutty might one day undercut any claim they might make about having been violently aggressed upon. Women enter the workforce understanding from the start the need to work around and accommodate the leering advances and bad jokes of their colleagues, aware that the wrong response might change the course of their professional lives. We had been told that our failures to extend sympathy to the white working class—their well-being diminished by unemployment and drug addictions—had cost us an election; now we were being told that a failure to feel for the men whose lives were being ruined by harassment charges would provoke an angry antifeminist backlash. But with these calls came no acknowledgment of sympathies that we have never before been asked to extend: to black men who have always lived with higher rates of unemployment and who have faced systemically higher prison sentences and social disapprobation for their drug use; to the women whose careers and lives had been ruined by ubiquitous and often violent harassment. Now the call was to consider the underlying pain of those facing repercussions. Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”34 Suddenly, men were living with the fear of consequences, and it turned out that it was not fun. And they very badly wanted it to stop. One of the lessons many men would take from #metoo was not about the threat they had posed to women, but about the threat that women pose to them.

Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? So you burn cars, ecause when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.

Listed below are three basic rules that will help you become a successful candidate. Remember, however, that you need not be offered a job in every case to consider yourself successful. Rather, you are successful if you keep the job search process going in a professional manner. In working with countless people in the process of looking for a job, I have concluded that, for those who are currently unemployed, the full-time job should be just that: looking for a job. For those who currently have a job, but are openly seeking a better position with new challenges or a higher salary, take comfort in knowing you are working from a position of strength; use that knowledge to add to your self-esteem. In all cases, see yourself from the employer’s point of view. In their eyes, you are a more likely candidate if you behave professionally before and after the interview (with appropriate inquiry and follow-up—more on that later) and if you interact appropriately during the interview itself. As you continue to look for a job, remember the following tips for success: 1. When you call about a job prospect, get as much information as you can about the position and the company—including the name of the person doing the interviewing. Don’t be put off by feelings of anxiety—you have a right to “interview” them too. If possible, go to the library and research the company. By the time of your interview, you will feel more confident—and less anxious—because you will have resources from which to draw during your conversation. 2. If you have time to mail your resume before your scheduled interview, do so. But be sure to include a cover letter as well. While the resume gives background information about you, the cover letter explains why you are writing and briefly describes what makes you a good candidate for the job. Don’t allow low self-esteem to make you afraid to “sell yourself!” Only you can say why you would be an asset to the company. And one more thing—write the letter to a particular person, not “To Whom It May Concern” or “Dear Sir or Madam.” Most of the time, a prospective employer’s receptionist is willing to tell you exactly whom to contact. Use courtesy titles (“Dear Mrs. Smith”), unless the person is someone you already know on a first-name basis. 3. Do follow up. An appropriate measure of assertiveness goes a long way. Most employers appreciate someone who is diligent and communicates a genuine interest in the position. But don’t be aggressive. Limit your contact to a follow-up note, a phone call two weeks later, and perhaps a third one a few weeks after that. Be sure to let them know that if another, more appropriate, position comes along, you would be interested to learn about it. Again, by communicating properly and creating your own opportunities, you can achieve some control over your own destiny.

A dreary void, The leafless desert of the mind, The waste of feelings unemployed.'" "But why not employ them?" said Rose, who was not learned in Byron; "you have a home." "Such as it is." "And relations.

The disruption of those social ties disproportionately affects girls and women.11 What happens when you feel less connected to your neighborhood, less trusting of the people who live next door or down the street? If you’re a guy, then maybe you just stay home and spend a few extra hours playing your video games or put some extra time into your fantasy football league. Girls and women seem to need that network of human connection more, so they miss it more when it’s not there. Professor Twenge examined the correlation between 16 different indicators and the likelihood that a woman is feeling anxious. She found that lack of social trust is the highest predictor of anxiety—higher than the divorce rate, higher than the unemployment rate, and more important than economic conditions generally.12

Despite feeling intense internal pressure to become more practical in order to survive, she could not fully tear herself away from the creative life. She felt caught between worlds and wholly unemployable.

At any rate, Greta would've taken a turn or two, but the only ones who showed interest were either too broken, not broken enough, ge-riatric, unemployable, or overly dependent on little blue pills, cocaine, their own feelings and biographies, or the words "toxic, "binary, "identity," and "intersectionality.

Be prepared to experience extreme mood swings as long as you're unemployed. Your feelings may be exaggerated.

But the myth of job stability may be the least of our concerns. A 2011 study conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of Canberra in Australia concluded that having a job we hate is as bad for our health and sometimes worse than not having a job at all. Levels of depression and anxiety among people who are unhappy at work were the same or greater than those who were unemployed. Stress and anxiety at work have less to do with the work we do and more to do with weak management and leadership. When we know that there are people at work who care about how we feel, our stress levels decrease. But when we feel like someone is looking out for themselves or that the leaders of the company care more about the numbers than they do us, our stress and anxiety go up. This is why we are willing to change jobs in the first place; we feel no loyalty to a company whose leaders offer us no sense of belonging or reason to stay beyond money and benefits.

Then suddenly I said to myself, Théo might want to burn cars some day. Because it’s a gesture of frustration and anger, and maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you’ve been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don’t know where you are? What do you do if your culture will always be that of a Thai fishing village and of Parisian grands bourgeois at the same time? Or if you’re the son of immigrants but also the citizen of an old, conservative nation? So you burn cars, because when you have no culture, you’re no longer a civilized animal, you’re a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages. I

But you can’t forget how easy it is to seduce people,” Ben said. “You see that everywhere, be it politics or religion. Even here in Europe, populists have been wildly successful despite the fact that this continent has a lot of experience with fanatical right- and left-wing ideology.” “Most people yearn for guidance,” Fritz said. “They want others to determine their lives for them, at least when all is said and done. In politics, the only people who are respected are so-called ‘strong’ leaders or politicians who show the way. It’s hardly surprising these people don’t have a basic understanding of democracy.” “That’s the problem,” said Ben. “People love to be told what they should do. And the worse they have it, the more grateful they are for a strong hand to push them.” “That said, we don’t exactly have it that bad here in Europe,” Hannes added. “Sure, there’s always some economic crisis and unemployment is rising, but still most people have it good enough that they can’t be enthralled by some dictator.” “Economic crises aren’t the only reason people turn to extremism,” Fritz said. “It’s also about personal crises. Look at the faces on the bus. How many people look happy?” “They’re probably just tired,” Ben joked. “But it’s true. There are plenty of studies which suggest that people in poorer countries are happier than we are. But when did you last hear politicians discuss the question of how we actually want to live? Emotional needs are basically irrelevant. It’s all about growth, recovery, optimization, and efficiency. If you work day after day in some office like a robot, there’s an inner emptiness that reality shows and dramas on television can no longer fill. Take a look at the nonsense the masses tune into night after night. You can’t consume real feelings, you have to live them.” “But that’s exactly what our society has forgotten how to do,” Fritz said. “You need someone to advise you on how to be ‘happy.’ At some schools, students can now choose Happiness as an elective. How sad is that? Have we become so far removed from real life that we have to introduce happiness as a school subject? How can society not understand something so fundamental?” “Now some charismatic, eloquent politician appears who knows exactly how to appeal to people,” Ben said. “Do you really think we would be completely immune to a politician’s temptations and promises today?” “Okay, okay!” Hannes laughed and raised his hands. “I give up. At the next neo-Nazi march, I’ll be standing in the front line of the counterdemonstration, I promise. But speaking of robots—I spent way too long spinning on the hamster wheel today. And Fritz has already given me a list of things to do tomorrow. It’s been lovely chatting, but I have to hit the hay.” “Man! But we’ve only just started planning the revolution,” Ben joked. “No, my young colleague’s right.” Fritz rose from his chair. “I just have to use the bathroom and then I’ll be on my way.” “It’s straight ahead.” Ben showed him the way and handed Hannes another beer. “Come on, you Goody Two-Shoes. Let’s have a

Ricardo’s other necessary condition for comparative advantage is that a country’s capital seeks its comparative advantage in its home country and does not seek more productive use abroad. Ricardo confronts the possibility that English capital might migrate to Portugal to take advantage of the lower costs of production, thus leaving the English workforce unemployed, or employed in less productive ways. He is able to dismiss this undermining of comparative advantage because of “the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another” and because capital is insecure “when not under the immediate control of its owner.” This insecurity, “fancied or real,” together “with the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connections, and entrust himself, with all his habits fixed, to a strange government and new laws, check the emigration of capital. These feelings, which I should be sorry to see weakened, induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign lands.

Ricardo’s other necessary condition for comparative advantage is that a country’s capital seeks its comparative advantage in its home country and does not seek more productive use abroad. Ricardo confronts the possibility that English capital might migrate to Portugal to take advantage of the lower costs of production, thus leaving the English workforce unemployed, or employed in less productive ways. He is able to dismiss this undermining of comparative advantage because of “the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another” and because capital is insecure “when not under the immediate control of its owner.” This insecurity, “fancied or real,” together “with the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connections, and entrust himself, with all his habits fixed, to a strange government and new laws, check the emigration of capital. These feelings, which I should be sorry to see weakened, induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign lands.”   Today, these feelings have been weakened. Men of property have been replaced by corporations. Once the large excess supplies of Asian labor were available to American corporations, once Congress limited the tax deductibility of CEO pay that was not “performance related,” once Wall Street pressured corporations for higher shareholder returns, once Wal-Mart ordered its suppliers to meet “the Chinese price,” once hostile takeovers could be justified as improving shareholder returns by offshoring production, capital and jobs departed the country.   Capital has become as mobile as traded goods.

April 25 Instant in Season Be instant in season, out of season. 2 Timothy 4:2 Many of us suffer from the morbid tendency to be instant “out of season.” The season does not refer to time, but to us. “Be instant in season, out of season,” whether we feel like it or not. If we do only what we feel inclined to do, some of us would do nothing for ever and ever. There are unemployables in the spiritual domain, spiritually decrepit people, who refuse to do anything unless they are supernaturally inspired. The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not. One of the great snares of the Christian worker is to make a fetish of his rare moments. When the spirit of God gives you a time of inspiration and insight, you say—“Now I will always be like this for God.” No, you will not, God will take care you are not. Those times are the gift of God entirely. You cannot give them to yourself when you choose. If you say you will only be at your best, you become an intolerable drag on God; you will never do anything unless God keeps you consciously inspired. If you make a god of your best moments, you will find that God will fade out of your life and never come back until you do the duty that lies nearest, and have learned not to make a fetish of your rare moments.

I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb -- a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn't thought as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than you were rudely shocked in to consciousness by the alarm. That you might missed the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them.

[Those two Kurdish women soldiers] made me feel guilty towards the goodness I had not seen because pettiness had blinded me to it. How had I failed to register the many people who did accept me as I was, veiled and alien in their world, just because there were some who stared, or muttered—or shouted, like that crazy woman on the bus? How had I failed to see the decency of vibrant parks with children, care for the weak and unemployed—for what can one call it but decency? How, I sometimes wondered with shock and pain, how had I failed to register this basic decency, simply because there were also idiots in the world who excluded me and mine?

All unemployed Jews are sent to labour camps in the countryside. A survivor remembered that “It was like a Russian winter. The snow lay metres deep on the tracks and froze over. To be there made one feel as though one was overwintering in Nova Zemlya.”27

Barra believes she has good reason for optimism. “The U.S. economy and vehicle sales have been rebounding since 2009,” she said of the year industry sales sank to 10.4 million units, prompting plants to be closed and workers to be laid off permanently. But that dramatic cost cutting resulted in the industry being able to reach profitability at a break-even point of only 13 million in vehicle sales, which it has done the last three years and hopes to four-peat in 2015. Barra insists there's plenty of room for the auto industry to grow. “The strength of the labor market, better job security and the recovery in home prices have consumers feeling pretty good about the future, so we expect people will continue to replace their older cars and trucks,” she said, referring to pent-up demand for new vehicles to replace an older fleet on the road now that averages about 11 years of age. Analysts agree, saying employment is up and unemployment down, the economy is doing well, and consumer confidence is up.

I am aware, from my earliest recollections, that we lived with the feeling that the life of the individual or of the entire Jewish community was always in danger. Being born Jewish implied a way of life, a set of beliefs and traditions and a feeling of belonging to a community, a group, that faced the same uncertainties, was potentially the victim of persecution from any possible group or from the government, depending on political or social circumstances. When financial difficulties arose in the country, international crises, war, unemployment, a failed harvest - in short - any natural or social or political disasters that occurred, were often turned into antisemitic outbursts. That was the safety valve, they let off steam and we took the heat, bore the brunt of their anger.

The Bad Old Way of job hunting breeds a negative, self-fulfilling cycle of disappointment and disillusionment because it is designed to keep you unemployed and feeling miserable about yourself.

Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctively human. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Jeopardy!’s best-ever contestant, Ken Jennings, succumbed to IBM’s Watson in 2011. And Google’s self-driving cars are already on California roads today. Dale Earnhardt Jr. needn’t feel threatened by them, but the Guardian worries (on behalf of the millions of chauffeurs and cabbies in the world) that self-driving cars “could drive the next wave of unemployment.

The Fed is responsible for the financial markets. Financial markets hate inflation. Particularly bond markets. If the inflation rises, the Fed has to answer to them. If the unemployment rate is 6% and you could be down at 4% so that means there are 5 million people out of work unnecessarily, they might feel bad about it but they don’t have to answer to them. Alan Greenspan will not get called on the carpet because of that but he will get called on it if inflation goes to 4%. What are you doing! How come you are not jacking up interest rates? There is a huge asymmetry. This is the politics of the Fed. The Fed is very well isolated from democratic political pressures but it is not hard for the financial markets to influence the Fed. We have this NAIRU doctrine that if we let the unemployment rate get below 6% we have inflation and therefore we are going to deliberately raise the interest rate to slow the economy to keep people from getting jobs. No one knows that.

Unlike most alternatives, a basic income is a way of reducing poverty without stigmatizing the recipients and making them supplicants. As numerous studies have shown, the stigma attached to means-tested targeted welfare means that many people in real need do not apply for assistance, from pride, fear or ignorance. It is shameful that politicians persist in supporting such schemes when the inherent defects are well known. The contrast with a universalistic scheme was brought out in the Canadian Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba (see Chapter 11).5 Many people on low incomes, including the unemployed, did not apply for standard ‘welfare’ because of stigma, but gladly took the unconditional minimum income payments that blurred distinctions between low-wage workers, the unemployed and recipients of social assistance. Respondents to questions about the experiment said they welcomed the Mincome payments because they made them feel independent and enabled them to work while avoiding the invasive and degrading procedures associated with means-tested welfare. As one man said, these gave ‘a bad image to the family’. Another

At the fag-end of the twenty-first century, immortality was the only thing worth dying for. The only celebrity worth striving for was for the whole human race to become world famous. The only utopia worth dreaming of was for everyone in the world to have First World problems. And the only way to get there was to burn through capitalism, to get through that unavoidable stage as fast as possible. Let it rip, let it run wild until full automation created full unemployment and confronted everybody with the choice to get on with the real work, and off the treadmill of fake work and make-work to pay the debt to buy the goods to make the make-work feel worthwhile and the exhausted, empty time tagged as leisure pass painlessly enough …

In The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine N. Aron, PhD, writes that finding the right vocation for the HSP is the hottest topic in her seminars. This makes perfect sense since a large group of chronic pain sufferers are either unemployed, working part time, hate their jobs, or have recently been forced to leave their jobs, or retired. They don’t know how to move forward—in career-coma—feeling unproductive and empty. Aron explains that HSPs “don’t thrive on long hours, stress, and overstimulating work environments.” Their difficulty in finding a satisfying endeavor stems from “their not appreciating their role, style, and potential contribution.” These people are often gifted artists or writers, teachers, consultants, counselors—people of great intuitive talents stuck in mundane and externally draining environments. They only find true satisfaction when matched with the right career—only truly happy when they are “liberated” from the first half of their lives and finally begin listening to their own voices. Aron continues, “Being so eager to please, we’re not easy to liberate. We’re too aware of what others need…. Often their intuition gives them a clearer picture of what needs to be done. Thus, many HSPs choose vocations of service.

Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him “to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

Because you have nothing, it doesn't mean you are useless. Because we don't know you. It doesn't mean you are not important. Because some ill treat you or abuse you. It doesn't mean you are not special. Because others hurt you, it doesn't mean you are not loved. You mean a lot to other people, even thou ,you don’t know it . Choose to live and choose life. We are all fighting demons, depression, poverty, rejection, failure, hate, unemployment, and a lost of loved ones. We just choose to focus on positive things in life, rather than negative things. Choose to focus on good things happening than on bad things happening.

Nobody would doubt for one moment that my husband is a rich foreigner - why in the world would I marry a poor one? My marriage also means that I have escaped the common destiny of my people: the war, poverty, insecurity, unemployment, disappointment, political confusion, low wages, and the feeling that time is running out fast and you can't be certain if the future will bring anything better.

When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is a part of the order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back-streets of Newcastle, should be out of work. But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure.

Choice of profession also no longer guarantees a high social status. This is bound up, among other things, with fragmented processes of downward mobility within occupational groups. A senior teacher earns a relatively comfortable income and need not worry about the future; they may even be able to retire early. In the same school and in the same class, however, there is possibly also a younger teacher on a temporary contract who has to claim unemployment benefit during the summer vacation and has no prospects for permanent employment. (Many German states now rely on a growing number of flexible teachers who are no longer guaranteed permanent positions.) In the postal service, too, although there are still many permanent employees, newly hired staff generally are not offered any job security (cf. Chapter 5). Among certain occupational groups the differences can be tremendous, as with journalists, for example. Those who began working at major German publications like Stern, Spiegel or Die Zeit ten or twenty years ago could expect a secure future. In the big publishing houses today, on the other hand, not only have precarious jobs and poorly paid groups of online writers proliferated, but not even the established staff can feel secure any more. A growing share belong to the ‘media precariat’ and earn less than €30,000 per year.99 Another example is that of lawyers, formerly the very model of status and prosperity. This professional group now divides into those who continue to earn good money and enjoy a high social prestige while employed in large offices or working for corporations, and a growing flock of precarious self-employed legal professionals, who fail to gain a steady footing in an over-filled market.

Everywhere I landed, I didn't really feel like I belonged. Doing postgrad stuff, I felt like I didn't have any skills. Just felt unaccomplished. I was just there to ride out the downturn, and I felt like everybody knew it. Then there's the shame of unemployment. because I wasn't really unemployed. There were plenty of people who were actually looking for jobs. Auntie had lost her job as a tax analyst, turned around and became a nurse. Felt like I was ducking and dodging responsibility. I was just overeducated and useless, taking a job from someone who needed it and deserved it more than me. Got put in a psych ward after a suicide attempt, and when I was in that place, I didn't even feel like I was really depressed or really going through it. Felt like I was faking it to get out of something. Like I was avoiding work. Felt like there was no place for me, because I wasn't capable of working. All my friends who studied econ got jobs overseas, and I was just walking around taking up space.

In the world of structural unemployment no one can feel truly secure. Secure jobs in secure companies seem to be the yarn of grandfathers’ nostalgia;

Yes, of course, the U-shaped curve—she’d been mentioning that a lot lately, whenever Jack prodded her in this way. It was a phenomenon well known among certain economists and behavioral psychologists, that happiness, in general, over a lifetime, tended to follow a familiar pattern: people were most happy when they were young and when they were old, and least happy in the middle. It seemed that happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction. This was, Elizabeth insisted, a universal constant: the U-shaped curve pertained to both men and women, both the married and unmarried, the rich and poor, the employed and unemployed, the educated and uneducated, the parents and the child-free, in every country, every culture, every ethnicity, for all the decades that researchers had done this work—the science showed that people in midlife were carrying around with them, all the time, a feeling that was, statistically speaking, the equivalent of someone close to them having recently died. That’s how it felt, she said, that’s how far you were from your early-twenties peak, according to objective measures of well-being. Elizabeth suspected it had something to do with biology, natural selection, evolutionary pressures millions of years ago, as it had been recently shown by primatologists that great apes also experienced the exact same happiness curve, which suggested that this particular midlife sadness must have provided some kind of prehistoric advantage, must have helped our ancient primate ancestors survive. Perhaps, Elizabeth hypothesized, it was because the most vulnerable members of any troop were the young and the old, and so it was important

Spending all your waking hours doing only what feels good is a viable life plan if you’re a Labrador retriever, but for humans it’s a blueprint for unemployment, divorce and irrelevance.

If there is a small silver lining to my continued unemployment, it is that I have increased my hours at the farmers' market, where I am surrounded by people who love growing and making food as much as I love eating, reading, and writing about it. Every market brings with it a new sensory adventure: the toothsome crunch of Rick's millet muffins, the brazen tang of his sourdough, the sharp and herbaceous scent of his cheddar dill scones. Instead of trying to force a food connection like I did at The Morning Show, I now live and breathe an agricultural smorgasbord on an almost daily basis, poring over luscious apples and lumpy, bumpy squash and fat loaves of buttery brioche. In a strange way, despite the meager pay, I finally feel as if I'm where I belong.

I returned to Denmark in 1975 and was part of a group trying to set up an international lesbian front. To my surprise all kinds of new lesbians were “coming out” of the women’s movement. Although we had wanted this to happen it was surprising when it did, and difficult to adjust to. I had known some of the women as heterosexual feminists and it was hard to accept them as the new experts on lesbian political theory. They seemed in some way to lack what I felt was a lesbian identity, though I was unable to analyse quite why. I went to a lesbian conference in Amsterdam, with women who didn’t know and couldn’t have cared that there had been one there ten years before, and how important it had been. I sought out some of the 1965 lesbians and found them now quite anti-political. “We can’t stand all these new lesbians,” they said, “they’re so negative.” I disagreed, of course, on principle, but somehow there was less joy in the air. Unemployment was starting to happen in Europe, political discussions seemed different, we talked more about rape and violence, about men and what they were doing to the world. We talked less and less about sisterhood until finally we didn’t talk about it at all, because none of us could really believe in it quite the way we had when the sun shone and it was always summer, and the whole world was poised on the brink of change. I asked one of the new lesbians to dance at a social after a meeting. Then I tried to kiss her, gently, as we had been doing for the previous five years. She pushed me away roughly and said I was behaving like a man. I felt hurt and didn’t understand. I got drunk in a corner with some twenty-year-olds, crying into the schnapps bottle and trying to explain to them that there was something happening now that wasn’t what I thought I’d fought to achieve. Something uptight, critical, rejecting. Something not quite— lesbian. I was only 35, but I was beginning to feel like an old woman of the movement. Most of the lesbians my age were not to be found in the lesbian movement. Many were back working in the mixed homophile organizations, now changing their names to associations of gay men and women. Or they were branching out to start women’s refuges, getting involved in the peace movement, active in the political women’s movement. I had moved to Norway and found that the only lesbian group I wanted to work in was called The Panthers, involved in social and cultural activites of lesbian poetry, discussions, and sing-alongs. I got involved with the Norwegian F48 and a huge split over Marxist-Leninist politics, which resulted in the formation of the Worker’s Homophile Association (AHF)— which turned out to be not at all marxist anyway. It all made for interesting political intrigues, but I grew tired and began working very hard so that I could spend part of each year back in Aotearoa/New Zealand. My work as a tour guide made saving money easy, especially doing lots of trips through the USSR, where there were few consumer temptations. I did, of course, and dangerously, search for Soviet lesbians whenever I could.

Today, in the United States, government spending, federal, state, and local, amounts to almost half of the monetary incomes of the portion of the citizenry that does not work for the government. Fifteen federal cabinet departments, and a much larger number of federal regulatory agencies, together in most instances with counterparts at the state and local level, routinely intrude into virtually every area of the individual citizen’s life. In countless ways he is taxed, compelled, and prohibited. The effect of such massive government interference is unemployment, rising prices, falling real wages, a need to work longer and harder, and growing economic insecurity. The further effect is growing anger and resentment. Though the government’s policy of interventionism is their logical target, the anger and resentment people feel are typically directed at businessmen and the rich instead. This is a mistake which is fueled for the most part by an ignorant and envious intellectual establishment and media.

age of computers and programming, and he couldn’t understand either. Sure, he could send emails, had even mastered Word and Excel, but apart from that, the complexities of the machine left him baffled. There was unemployment, but he had never taken the dole, or he could go overseas, try his luck on an oil rig. Even if that were possible, he didn’t want to go, but these were desperate times, and now, to add confusion, there was a solution. Betty Galton, his former sister-in-law, had in her possession a million pounds in gold. He opened his laptop and switched it on. How does one melt gold? How does one dispose of it? he thought. He entered the search terms, fingering one key at a time, and pressed enter. If a criminal act was committed during the planning stage, then he was guilty as charged. And for once, he did not care. He hummed a tune to himself. It had been some time since he had been contented. For that night, he would forget what would be required and envisage what his life could be like with money in his pocket. Maybe a small place in the country, a dog, possibly a woman. How long had it been since he had enjoyed the closeness of another’s skin? He picked up his phone and made a call. It was a special treat for himself and for once the budget was going to be blown. He knew she’d look after him, the way she looked after so many others. Chapter 11 Clare woke early the next day; her phone was ringing. She leant over and picked it up. ‘Yarwood, I’m at the hospital,’ Tremayne said. She could tell by his voice that something was amiss. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen.’ ‘Thanks, and don’t tell anyone.’ A quick shower, some food for her cat, and Clare was out of her cottage. A murder enquiry was serious; her boss being ill, more so. Parking at the hospital, she soon found her way to outpatients, meeting someone she knew. ‘It’s Tremayne, he’s not well,’ Clare said. ‘And please, not a word to anyone.’ The woman, a friend, understood. Inside, behind some screens, Tremayne was lying flat on his back. His shoes had been removed, and his tie had been loosened. ‘How long have you been here?’ Clare said. She knew Tremayne would not appreciate lashings of sympathy, although he looked dreadful. ‘Since last night. I’d had a few drinks, a few cigarettes, and all of a sudden I’m in the back of an ambulance.’ ‘Does Jean know?’ ‘Not yet. Maybe you can phone her. She went to see her son for a few days, left me on my own.’ ‘Off the leash and into trouble, that’s you, guv.’ ‘Not today, Yarwood. Maybe Moulton’s right about me retiring.’ ‘Having you feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help, is it?’ The nurse, standing on the other side of the bed, looked over at Clare disapprovingly. ‘It’s how we work,’ Clare said. ‘That may be the case, but Mr Tremayne has had a bit of a scare. He needs to be here for a few days while we conduct a few checks.’ ‘What’s the problem?’ ‘It’s not for me to say. That’s for the doctor.’ ‘He told me to cut down on the beer, quit smoking, and take it easy.’ ‘Retire, is that it?’ Clare said. ‘They don’t get it, do they?’ Tremayne looked over at the nurse who was monitoring his condition. ‘Sorry. We’ve got a murder to deal with, nothing personal.’ ‘Don’t worry about me. We get our fair share of people, men mainly, who think they’re invincible. You’re not the first, not the last, who thinks they know more