4 ms·

I worked serving fast food for three weeks before I found a job more in line with my previous employment. Ah, and for those three weeks, what did you do about

I worked serving fast food for three weeks before I found a job more in line with my previous employment. Ah, and for those three weeks, what did you do about the crushing, crippling depression and feelings of doom as you wondered if you'd ever again find anything better than fast food? What's that? You didn't feel that way? Some of us do. This was such a powerful effect for me, personally, that when the company I was working for folded in December 2008, I borrowed money for two months to pay rent rather than getting a "just for now" job that couldn't pay my bills anyway, but which certainly would suck up all my energy and send me immediately into depression (presumably not clinical depression; I'm using the word to mean just being depressed), in which state virtually anything I do would be hampered, including effectiveness at looking for a job.

SHOwnsYou 16y ago
It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greatest thing you can achieve. I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression? This is eye opening and like a field course in psychology to me. EDIT I'm not going to baby anyone. It's pathetic to skate by on loans rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. My goal in life is to be the rock of stability that people can cling to when times are difficult. If that means ignoring my fears like they aren't there, then that is what I will do. If that means serving french fries to people that are more rude than you can imagine - saying horrible things about you just because you work at mcdonalds - then that is what I will do. But please do answer my above question. I learn more with every comment that is made. EDIT
- randallsquared 16y ago
  It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. Wow. This is exactly the opposite of what I meant to convey. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. What's pride got to do with this? It's not about pride, or self-respect, or honor, or any of that. It's about a pervasive feeling of helplessness, of feeling unable to crawl out of the hole that you've slipped back into, after struggling out once before with lots of hard work and luck, and noticing that all the people you knew back in the day are still there, even though they're working about as hard as you did. It's about fear. Once the fear has set in, that fear that you'll never succeed again, that it was all a fluke, that last year was the high point of your life rather than the latest step up on a generally progressing journey, everything becomes harder. It's harder to look for a job. It's harder to care about keeping up the non-job things you were doing. Coding for an open source project, playing a game or socializing with your friends, exercising, making reasonable-effort meals instead of nuking a frozen pizza, taking online courses -- these things start to seem pointless. Sending out resumes and calling recruiters becomes something you're doing because it's just what people do, rather than because you think that you'll actually get a new job that's better than the last one. Eventually you may stop doing that, because what's the point? You're exhausted, and you have to get up early to go to work and perform mindless activity with people you despise, because your fear and depression has poisoned your interactions with every new person you meet. I've been down this road once before, in 2003, and I really didn't need to do that again. Instead, I looked for a job that could actually pay my lease (which was too high for a single minimum wage job, and I had 7 months to go) and other bills, and kept my spirits up by continuing to live life as though I were about to get a new job and therefore didn't need to shift into a lower gear (as it were), and that worked out much better. I did have to borrow for a coupla months rent (one after I already had a job, since I hadn't gotten a paycheck, yet), and I was out of work for 3-4 months, counting the months I didn't get paid for, but it all worked out. In my life, every time I've shifted my aim lower because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do better, I've been right. Every time. What I've learned from this is that I should avoid spending my time and energy when it literally isn't worth it. It's better to keep my head up and my attitude cheerful, because without those things, I'll need a lot of luck to get back out of the rut again. I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression? It's not just life not going my way. That did happen in 2008, more than once (divorce, my business failed, then the company I started at when my wife and I split up also failed), but while I was very, very upset over some of those things, they didn't drive me into the depression and ennui that I used to feel all the time in the early and mid 90s, when it seemed that there was no way out of my current situation. In situations like that, the solution has always been to quit my job, rather than get a new one. In late 1997, I quit my refrigerator manufacturing job and bought a Novell Certification guide with the money I would otherwise have spent on gas to get to work that week, and by early 1998 I had a Novell network job (no previous tech jobs). In 2008, I left Alabama and came to the DC metro, and had a good job within a coupla weeks. Only a few months before that, it had felt like I was trapped in Alabama with no future but working at $10/hr. This experience reminded me exactly what feeling to avoid, so that when that company failed in December (after not paying since mid-October), I knew exactly what I needed to do: I did all the job search stuff I could easily do for another programming job, and I avoided doing anything that I would do if I were planning to be out of a job for months. I played games. I watched a lot of TV. I did some Erlang and played with Java on my new G1. I invited a friend to come up to stay with me and look for a job here because the economy and job situation was so great around DC (!). This sustained burst of optimism did the trick; I got a nice contract gig that turned into a permanent position, where I still am. If I had gone to get a gone to get a job at McDonald's, even assuming I'd immediately gotten a $10/hr, full time position, I would have been making less than my rent per month, after taxes. So, still borrowing money, but without the energy and optimism. After reflecting on this and writing about it, I realize that part of the problem is that I'm very introverted and somewhat antisocial. Virtually every low-paying job is a service job, which means dealing with people all day. Much of the drained, depressed feeling I had for much of the 90s could probably be traced back to feeling forced to interact with people I would rather have avoided or ignored. Extroverts might well have the opposite reaction; I dunno.
- ShardPhoenix 16y ago
  Your brand of macho bullshit is pretty tiresome.
  - SHOwnsYou 16y ago
    I can assure you there is no macho bullshit here, it is just confidence in myself. If you'd like to have more of a discussion rather than some name calling, I'd love to talk about it.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. That's always worked for me, but it's never been something I could do by settling for less, as you were initially advocating. I always had to shoot for more. Another thing that worries me, however, is that I know a lot of people who worked at least as hard as I did, and are still stuck in that $10/hr job. Who've made the leap, and fallen hard, and had to work their way back up to having a car and new clothes and a steady job again. Why has it been different for me? It doesn't seem like I've worked a lot harder. It doesn't seem like I'm vastly more intelligent. Basically, it seems like I was lucky to be intrinsically interested in things that turned out to have market value (programming, system admin, etc). None of my childhood friends were interested in those things until recently, and none of them have made it to the middle class, financially.
  - SHOwnsYou 16y ago
    It's not settling for less. Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept. That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager that I am the person that will benefit them the most. The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. As I stated before. You obviously have a mountain of heart. THAT IS WHY IT'S YOU AND NOT THEM.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. There's certainly something to that. For me, though, it was psychologically difficult, to say the least, to hold the confidence and drive to make something of myself, while doing a good job at manufacturing refrigerators or operating a cash register. Given the large number of folk who never seem to get out of those dead-end service jobs, I think there may well be a lot of people like me. :)
matwood 16y ago
Depression? Grow up. It would depress me to sit at my house all day for 2 months while borrowing money from my friends to pay the rent. How would some side work suck up all your energy? It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself. It sounds like you've never done it. You have to think to do all of that stuff -- not enough to keep you from being bored out of your skull, but enough that you can't actively think about something else and still do it well enough to keep your job. Stocking shelves might get that way after a while, but those others involve talking to people, which isn't interesting, but does require a lot of processing to figure out what the expected responses and questions are. I have enough trouble making pro forma conversation passing someone in the hall: "Hey, how was your weekend?" "I'm fine; and you?" (Oh, wait, what was the question? Dammit, that should have been 'Pretty quiet; how was your weekend?'). Thinking about something else during conversation doesn't really work, you know?
  - matwood 16y ago
    Never done it? I've had a job of some sort since I was 15. I worked overnights while in HS stocking shelves in addition to landscaping during the days in the summer. I put myself through college waiting tables so when I graduated I had < $10k in school loan debt. I also worked the entire time I was in graduate school. Come up with all the excuses you want, but at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult. Well, these days, I'm the moochee, in your terms. But that's fine, because helping each other is what friends do. I don't think it's childish behavior to accept proffered help when you need it; succeeding is hard enough without insisting that every little gain must be solely due to your own hard work.

SHOwnsYou 16y ago

It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. It is interesting to me the different notions of pride people have. I would lose all my pride if I had to take out loans to survive. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. It has been impressed upon me my entire life that self sufficiency is the greatest thing you can achieve. I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression? This is eye opening and like a field course in psychology to me. EDIT I'm not going to baby anyone. It's pathetic to skate by on loans rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. My goal in life is to be the rock of stability that people can cling to when times are difficult. If that means ignoring my fears like they aren't there, then that is what I will do. If that means serving french fries to people that are more rude than you can imagine - saying horrible things about you just because you work at mcdonalds - then that is what I will do. But please do answer my above question. I learn more with every comment that is made. EDIT

randallsquared 16y ago
It must be nice to have a life so luxurious you can't stomach working a dead end job for 2 months. Wow. This is exactly the opposite of what I meant to convey. It seems you would lose your pride if you ever had to take something less than you thought you were worth. What's pride got to do with this? It's not about pride, or self-respect, or honor, or any of that. It's about a pervasive feeling of helplessness, of feeling unable to crawl out of the hole that you've slipped back into, after struggling out once before with lots of hard work and luck, and noticing that all the people you knew back in the day are still there, even though they're working about as hard as you did. It's about fear. Once the fear has set in, that fear that you'll never succeed again, that it was all a fluke, that last year was the high point of your life rather than the latest step up on a generally progressing journey, everything becomes harder. It's harder to look for a job. It's harder to care about keeping up the non-job things you were doing. Coding for an open source project, playing a game or socializing with your friends, exercising, making reasonable-effort meals instead of nuking a frozen pizza, taking online courses -- these things start to seem pointless. Sending out resumes and calling recruiters becomes something you're doing because it's just what people do, rather than because you think that you'll actually get a new job that's better than the last one. Eventually you may stop doing that, because what's the point? You're exhausted, and you have to get up early to go to work and perform mindless activity with people you despise, because your fear and depression has poisoned your interactions with every new person you meet. I've been down this road once before, in 2003, and I really didn't need to do that again. Instead, I looked for a job that could actually pay my lease (which was too high for a single minimum wage job, and I had 7 months to go) and other bills, and kept my spirits up by continuing to live life as though I were about to get a new job and therefore didn't need to shift into a lower gear (as it were), and that worked out much better. I did have to borrow for a coupla months rent (one after I already had a job, since I hadn't gotten a paycheck, yet), and I was out of work for 3-4 months, counting the months I didn't get paid for, but it all worked out. In my life, every time I've shifted my aim lower because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do better, I've been right. Every time. What I've learned from this is that I should avoid spending my time and energy when it literally isn't worth it. It's better to keep my head up and my attitude cheerful, because without those things, I'll need a lot of luck to get back out of the rut again. I am genuinely curious to know (you and the others that are cripplingly depressed when life doesnt go their way) -- Why would you be in a crippling state of depression? It's not just life not going my way. That did happen in 2008, more than once (divorce, my business failed, then the company I started at when my wife and I split up also failed), but while I was very, very upset over some of those things, they didn't drive me into the depression and ennui that I used to feel all the time in the early and mid 90s, when it seemed that there was no way out of my current situation. In situations like that, the solution has always been to quit my job, rather than get a new one. In late 1997, I quit my refrigerator manufacturing job and bought a Novell Certification guide with the money I would otherwise have spent on gas to get to work that week, and by early 1998 I had a Novell network job (no previous tech jobs). In 2008, I left Alabama and came to the DC metro, and had a good job within a coupla weeks. Only a few months before that, it had felt like I was trapped in Alabama with no future but working at $10/hr. This experience reminded me exactly what feeling to avoid, so that when that company failed in December (after not paying since mid-October), I knew exactly what I needed to do: I did all the job search stuff I could easily do for another programming job, and I avoided doing anything that I would do if I were planning to be out of a job for months. I played games. I watched a lot of TV. I did some Erlang and played with Java on my new G1. I invited a friend to come up to stay with me and look for a job here because the economy and job situation was so great around DC (!). This sustained burst of optimism did the trick; I got a nice contract gig that turned into a permanent position, where I still am. If I had gone to get a gone to get a job at McDonald's, even assuming I'd immediately gotten a $10/hr, full time position, I would have been making less than my rent per month, after taxes. So, still borrowing money, but without the energy and optimism. After reflecting on this and writing about it, I realize that part of the problem is that I'm very introverted and somewhat antisocial. Virtually every low-paying job is a service job, which means dealing with people all day. Much of the drained, depressed feeling I had for much of the 90s could probably be traced back to feeling forced to interact with people I would rather have avoided or ignored. Extroverts might well have the opposite reaction; I dunno.
ShardPhoenix 16y ago
Your brand of macho bullshit is pretty tiresome.
- SHOwnsYou 16y ago
  I can assure you there is no macho bullshit here, it is just confidence in myself. If you'd like to have more of a discussion rather than some name calling, I'd love to talk about it.
randallsquared 16y ago
rather than your own hard work. Grow some balls, stomach your problems, and power through it. That's always worked for me, but it's never been something I could do by settling for less, as you were initially advocating. I always had to shoot for more. Another thing that worries me, however, is that I know a lot of people who worked at least as hard as I did, and are still stuck in that $10/hr job. Who've made the leap, and fallen hard, and had to work their way back up to having a car and new clothes and a steady job again. Why has it been different for me? It doesn't seem like I've worked a lot harder. It doesn't seem like I'm vastly more intelligent. Basically, it seems like I was lucky to be intrinsically interested in things that turned out to have market value (programming, system admin, etc). None of my childhood friends were interested in those things until recently, and none of them have made it to the middle class, financially.
- SHOwnsYou 16y ago
  It's not settling for less. Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept. That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager that I am the person that will benefit them the most. The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. As I stated before. You obviously have a mountain of heart. THAT IS WHY IT'S YOU AND NOT THEM.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. There's certainly something to that. For me, though, it was psychologically difficult, to say the least, to hold the confidence and drive to make something of myself, while doing a good job at manufacturing refrigerators or operating a cash register. Given the large number of folk who never seem to get out of those dead-end service jobs, I think there may well be a lot of people like me. :)

matwood 16y ago

Depression? Grow up. It would depress me to sit at my house all day for 2 months while borrowing money from my friends to pay the rent. How would some side work suck up all your energy? It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself.

randallsquared 16y ago
It's not like you have to think to serve fries, stock shelves or wait tables. Working crap jobs is the best motivator I've ever had to do better for myself. It sounds like you've never done it. You have to think to do all of that stuff -- not enough to keep you from being bored out of your skull, but enough that you can't actively think about something else and still do it well enough to keep your job. Stocking shelves might get that way after a while, but those others involve talking to people, which isn't interesting, but does require a lot of processing to figure out what the expected responses and questions are. I have enough trouble making pro forma conversation passing someone in the hall: "Hey, how was your weekend?" "I'm fine; and you?" (Oh, wait, what was the question? Dammit, that should have been 'Pretty quiet; how was your weekend?'). Thinking about something else during conversation doesn't really work, you know?
- matwood 16y ago
  Never done it? I've had a job of some sort since I was 15. I worked overnights while in HS stocking shelves in addition to landscaping during the days in the summer. I put myself through college waiting tables so when I graduated I had < $10k in school loan debt. I also worked the entire time I was in graduate school. Come up with all the excuses you want, but at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    at the end of the day you're still mooching off your friends when you're perfectly capable of doing some job while you look for more work. IMHO, that's not acting like an adult. Well, these days, I'm the moochee, in your terms. But that's fine, because helping each other is what friends do. I don't think it's childish behavior to accept proffered help when you need it; succeeding is hard enough without insisting that every little gain must be solely due to your own hard work.