Unemployment seems to me an oddly modern concept.
People fret that they are out of '
work' they've got no '
job'; the complaint itself is a peek into the
expectations set upon them by society. What they really mean is, they've no regular source of the
income needed to pay
bills, which they would expect to be provided by some
other person in
contractual exchange for work being performed
for that other person, on a continuing basis.
To worry over being unemployed is to believe one has not been put into a sort of slot for which society has generated a sense of belonging, to be without something we are led to believe we are
supposed to have. But the idea that every man's lot is to be a wage worker or salaried employee of somebody else is simply a construct -- a highly unnatural one. For by this standard, every caveman, every ancient hunter-gatherer or medieval hermit in the hills was 'unemployed.' Deeming oneself unemployed is part of the mindset of interlocking social dependency; akin to declare oneself incapable of growing one's own food and making one's own clothes, reliant on somebody else to validate one's existence by providing other tasks as a means to obtain these things. But most any person able to 'get a job' ought to be able to supply their own necessaries of
subsistence --
comfort, even -- by the sweat of their brow, requiring no other
soul to 'hire' them and give orders in exchange for
colorful rectangles of paper symbolizing bank transactions.
It's been claimed that '
the things we own end up owning us' -- and it seems that so long as men are unable to make the things they need for themselves, those things end up putting them to work for somebody else.
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