this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
17 points (100.0% liked)

Chat

7964 readers
4 users here now

Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.


Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A couple of years ago, I joined a local Discord server with a core group of five who'd get together to see a movie or do a cheese tasting.

(Dune 2 in 5D was a low point, but the homemade cheese was good.)

After some weird Discord bullshit, we rebuilt the server. It's not particularly active, which is surprising given that as of today, four of us are unemployed (after recreating the server, we chose not to advertise it).

I'm the only one idiotic enough to have gone into journalism. One other guy (the only one still working) drives around town for the city hanging utility-cutoff notices on people's doors.

Everyone else was in coding, devops or defense contracting.

And yet, here we all are. When there's this level of unemployment in the span of just 2025 across wildly divergent fields, something has gone wrong.

I'm by far the eldest at 46, so this isn't an age problem, either. It seems unclear how the economy survives when capable people are unable to find work.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe there aren't enough jobs because we don't all need to be doing paid work 40+ hours a day. We do need to eat though and we can't do that unless we work.

My last job was a temp gig at a corporate headquarters of a publicly traded company where no one but the administrative assistants, cleaning staff, cafe staff, and other support staff really did anything. I thought it was just me not understanding a shared corporate language or something. But the people I interacted with spent the majority of their days talking about how busy they were, chatting with coworkers about their weekend, and walking around the building to talk to different coworkers about their weekend.

It's hard to quantify how much "work" got done in my year there, especially on teams I didn't interact with. But in my section of the company, I saw projects that would be a homework assignment for a college student start before I got there and still be going when I left with a dozen people directly working on it.

All that ramble is to give background to my gut reaction, that we're unemployed because the economy doesn't need us, there's too many workers already. If we had universal basic income, I'd be doing a couple things I enjoy like baking bread for friends or making wooden furniture, and I would be working some at the library. I think a lot of those pointless jobs would just disappear too, as people had the opportunity to do something meaningful or more real. At minimum, then we wouldn't need to find paid work to eat.

[–] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Problem being, the pointless jobs are the high-paying ones. Managers will look anywhere but inward for blame.

[–] The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

It's so bizarre right? It seems almost like an inverse relationship, the more vital the job, the less you get paid