Basic Personality Changes Linked to Unemployment

Being picked last in playground kickball hurts. That doesn&#x27;t change when you trade a playground for an office.<p>Social acceptance is a human need, like thirst, hunger, and safety. People will kill for acceptance.

The first time I got made redundant was devastating. I&#x27;d only been in the job two or so years but it was a place i really loved working at. It greatly affected me and was an intense three months. I hadn&#x27;t been jobless involuntarily before that.<p>The second redundancy, after nearly 8 years, was surprisingly different. I guess it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m older and wiser.... maybe. &quot;You are not your job&quot; is an easy thing to say to yourself but I think you have to go through the experience of being jobless to really internalize that. I think that&#x27;s what made my second redundancy different.<p>i&#x27;d come out of that job having learned a lot and had gained a lot of confidence as an engineer. Losing the job didn&#x27;t feel like losing a part of myself so much as the first time.<p>One of the most helpful things for me came from a &#x27;career transition&#x27; course that my employer paid for me to go to as part of my redundancy. The instructor&#x2F;presenter was talking about people they&#x27;d worked with previously who had spent months engrossed in their job search to the neglect of other things. When asked what their biggest regrets were, one had given an answer along the lines of &quot;I&#x27;ve spent the last six months totally immersed in my job search when I could have spent this time with my kids&quot;. The point they were getting that is that in a way, the time you get from a well-paid redundancy might be a rare opportunity and you should take advantage of it to do the things you want to do but never had the time. Certainly look for a job, but don&#x27;t make job seeking your existence. Ofcourse you have to have the luxury to be able to do that, but I think it&#x27;s a good philosophy even just to remind yourself that your life always involves more than just a job.

I&#x27;d really appreciate it if people would stop phrasing headlines like that. As far as I can tell, &quot;linked to Unemployment&quot; in this context means unemployment is an example of external forces influencing our personality. Did I get that right?

From my experience, I just agree with the title. I&#x27;ve never held a job, I am 29, I live on welfare in france (thanks for that), and I already have the mindset of somebody who is a marginal. I already thought about living in the streets.<p>I am currently an intern, thanks to some schooling program for the unemployed, and god do I want to go back being unemployed. I can&#x27;t even bail out because I would need to reimburse the schooling program, which is 5500 euros. I was so excited of having the opportunity of trying again to be part of society, to have some reason to get up in the morning, to see people, but I was very naive about myself and about the schooling program I was offered. I would have better contributed by picking up trash, but in this country, even those jobs are difficult to get for some reason (I guess the government would not like having all the education which was given to me, go to waste because of the economic context).<p>I still have this desire to make my own video game in my basement though, but I barely have the mental resources to do it. My girlfriend hates me for being unemployed, so it makes things even worse for my self esteem. I feel pushed and sometimes I&#x27;d want to kill people who still argues that civilization need some form of class system. To me, civilization only meant getting welfare, getting porn and online video games. Not a system I have utter confidence in.<p>The schooling program I&#x27;m in aims to teach people web programming in 1 year. I already had programming skills before that (from a public school program where I failed my exam), so I learned nothing, and I hate php&#x2F;java&#x2F;mysql with passion.

Being let go and thus unemployed for a month or so really messed me up. I really didn&#x27;t know why it affected me so badly until I read this article. It makes sense but also shows that there is a lack of support for people that have been laid off.

<i>&quot;With respect to conscientiousness, the longer men spent without jobs, the larger their reduction in this trait, which is also tied to enjoying one’s income, according to the researchers. [...] The researchers theorized that women may have regained some conscientiousness by pursuing non-work-related activities traditionally associated with their gender, such as caregiving.&quot;</i><p>Just wondering if voluntary work would help with these indicators? Anyone got any idea about why conscientiousness is linked to enjoying income for men in the study?

Having been unemployed on a few occasions for non-trivial lengths of time I think it&#x27;s unlikely that my personality changed significantly as a result. However, those experiences were &quot;character building&quot; and changed my political outlook. When you&#x27;re in that position much of the corruption, waste and false beliefs within society become far more obvious.

I could easily be a statistic in this report. Unemployed for a long period of time and living with people who would rather ignore me than watch a show together or share cooked meals. The madness grows slowly stronger and does not relent.

Who has paid for these studies? They have a distinctly corporate&#x2F;HR air to them (as does the OCEAN personality trait model).<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#cite_note-11" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Big_Five_personality_traits#cit...</a><p>UPDATE: The OCEAN personality model was created by two guys working in the personnel dept. of an Air Force Base in 1961. So, take this with a grain of salt -- this model is optimized to rate folks working together in a miliary organization.

Would be interesting to see the same study performed on graduate students at various stages (pre-Masters to Masters, Masters to Candidacy, Candidacy to Doctorate, Doctorate to Post-Doctorate vs Doctorate to Industry).

I think you&#x27;d be pretty agreeable if you were strapped for cash for more than 2 years