Ugliness of Unemployment
After graduating college in 1999 I progressed to university, dabbled in a small graphic design business and then moved into long term employment. A recent discussion with a classmate revealed how my transition through life is an uncommon narrative for many Australians. I felt compelled to share his story which describes chronic unemployment, in the hope that readers may glimpse a sense of this invisible world. As we discuss the latest unemployment figures, it is tempting to reduce the experience of thousands of people to a mere percentage value. However, the stark reality of how unemployment affects the lives of people is much harder to gloss over. I hope the following account moves you to share truth, beauty and goodness with those caught in the despair and ugliness of unemployment.
“I don't feel crappy about the decisions I made in life anymore, because I am now used to all those silly decisions I made. If I knew, when I was younger, what I know today, I would have made much different decisions”
My world was full of bums, dregs, dropkicks (like me), hoons, hooligans, drugos, ugly people, obscene people, disgusting people, people with sicknesses and people who look diseased, troubled youth, violent delinquents, people whose brains have died from drugs and they no longer have capable minds or functioning thoughts. The whole world looked like a concrete jungle (you are always only in places that look like the yard of a jail), graffiti absolutely everywhere, dingy places, evil looking places, smelly places, ugly hellholes that look like Skid Row in the US or Claymore in Campbell Town. Everywhere, in this sort of world, there are ditched shopping trolleys, bongs made of soft drink bottles with garden-hose mouth-pieces, burnt car hulls and filthy litter everywhere. Because I had no transport I had to catch buses, I had to mope around places like Centrelink (always located in the most ugliest places of town centres), Woden Interchange, Civic Bus Interchange (Canberra's homeless capital), always having to go to an employment agency office which liases with Centrelink for appointments, always having to go to Centrelink for appointments.
When you are on the dole for 6mths, you have to work for the dole for the next 6mths (it's always 6mths on, 6mths off). Working for the dole involves going to ugly places in Narrabundah, and various ugly joints around Civic to go for your work for the dole appointments. Working for the dole took place at ugly PCYC holes, one at Erindale, and another one near Northbourne Avenue (now a closed deserted derelict building that looks darkened and haunted today), working 2 days a week. The name, Work For The Dole, is a sugar-coat for Australian slave labour which unemployed people must do, or otherwise have their dole cut. Having your dole payment cut is called a "breech". "You have been breeched!" With 3 breeches, your dole payment is 100% cut and suspended for 6mths. Financially, you only have just enough money to catch buses, and to be able to eat about one big meal a day, or two small meals a day. You are always hungry. You do not have enough money to do anything else.
“When you are unemployed, your life is very limited to only the very most ugliest of locations of places. Without any money, there is no purpose to be anywhere else except the Hells on earth - human rubbish bin locations for all people who are the rubbish of society”
You can't get anything you want. You can't spend any money at all because this money doesn't exist - you only have enough money for a little bit of food and bus fares. You are always in debt because adverse, unavoidable financial situations accost you like an ambush, so you have to starve, and go without bus fares in order to gradually pay off your debts. This can take most of a year. The unemployed world is the pit of Hell without the burning and all the demons are the weirdos who share the same boat with you in life - your life is swamped with them. Even your language becomes disfigured with evil from the influence of living in this dark environment.
By far the most important highlight about knowing how it feels to live in the unemployed world, is that you begin to view yourself as the type of element that you are surrounded by. This gives you an extremely low self-esteem. With the types of low elements who are malnourished, angry, always seen wearing hoodies and tracksuits, hobos who are ugly and disfigured from poverty, and their language, foul vulgar uncouth behaviour, and low intellect to match; you become influenced by that ugly world that you live in, and you begin to physically view yourself as an element who is just one of them. Ultimately you become one of them inside and out, within a year or two. This is extremely damaging to your self-esteem, and it is very hard to snap-out of this damaged perception of yourself long after you have become employed with a fulltime job, and have left the Centrelink lifestyle far behind.
“You lose all your friends because they are all busy soaring above the city sky-scrapers like Superman in a sharp suit, in their upward corporate ventures and money-spinning mountain climbs.”
Living in this world is a demoralising, humiliating experience. [Your friends] just don't have time for you anymore. They no longer have anything in common with you anymore. It's just so sad to lose great friends in such an epic way. They don't see you anymore because they don't have time to see you; and if they ever talk to you, you both just don't have anything to talk about anymore. While the only conversations you, yourself, are capable of having with people are things that relate to Centrelink, looking for a job, and being a dropkick; your friend's lives are full of great things, ambitious innovative life events, upbeat fast paced social lives, glamorous wonders of their jetset lifestyles; these are the things your friends talk about - nothing of which you can relate to at all. Your friendships with your friends do not work anymore. These are all friendships you would have otherwise kept and maintained because of continued shared common-grounds, if you, yourself, had also chased your own career path, conquered your own place in the angry, dazzling corporate world, and made a mover-and-shaker image for yourself, then you and your friends would have had a lot in common with each other and you would have kept all your great inspiring friendships from school and your neighbourhood where you grew up.
“The Hell On Earth is invisible to the naked eye when you are employed.”
When you become unemployed, the Hell On Earth suddenly emerges, and it's visibility is in fact the most realest thing that exists on earth: That's when you realise how glamourous the employed world is. This is when you become homesick about the employed world. The employed world is really just an illusion, it's just a dream that vanishes from your sleeping eyelids when you suddenly become unemployed, because Hell On Earth is true reality. Glamour of employment is just a dream. It's just an illusion. It's only as real as long as the employment exists. After that, it's back to reality - Hell On Earth.
“Make sure you embrace this "glamour" which you are completely blinded from seeing, because it is just as fragile as the beauty of life.”
A person who has been employed for their whole life cannot possibly see the glamour of the employed world. It's like having been blind your whole life - they don't know what it's like to "see". And they are happy and content being blind, because they do not even know what eyesight is, no matter how well people explain it to them. If you become unemployed your eyes will be opened for the first time in your life. And the glamour which you can now see, of employment, is so beautiful it will bring you to tears. What hurts so painfully about this beauty is that it is all gone, everything that came with it is gone like a candle flame - you did not appreciate it when you had it. There is nothing so devastatingly tragic as unemployment.
How does beauty find its way into the lives of the unemployed?
