Are We Pre-Programmed To Be Productive?

Toiling away at our daily grind, we dream of running away to
Hawaii or the South Pacific where we can lie on the beach
and do absolutely nothing.

Some of us are lucky enough to take a vacation there and
temporarily cut ourselves off from the world of
responsibilities and demands and worries. We breathe easier,
sleep deeper, eat more heartily. It is truly paradise.

It's wonderful because we have a life waiting to be
reclaimed when we step off the plane. Our job is waiting for
us and we go back to work with renewed energy and zest from
our long overdue break.

It is like the first few days of unemployment, that
honeymoon period when we find ourselves with extra time on
our hands and no reason to get up early or fight the rush
hour traffic. But honeymoons are not designed to last
forever and it is only when they are over, that reality and
the hard work of building a marriage starts.

The obvious stressors of unemployment are widely recognized:
financial strains, the drudgery and frequent humiliation of
job search, the family disruption, the loss of self-
confidence and self-esteem. While none of these can be
lightly dismissed, we are going to concentrate for a moment
on an area that is often overlooked. It can cause inner
turmoil, pain, significantly increase the emotional fallout
of layoff, and exacerbate the depression, anxiety, and
negative self-view that so often follow.

To feel productive seems to be an inherent human need. We
feel good about ourselves when we are contributing -- to our
own independence, to our family, to our community. Many of
the great discoveries, inventions, and explorations of
history were made by individuals born to family wealth who
had no need to ever lift a finger to ensure adequate self-
support. Yet these individuals wanted to contribute to the
world in some way and left their homes, worked through the
night, and even died trying to be part of some enterprise.

Those who sat back on their laurels, and never found any
venture to engage them, lead empty lives, drifting through
their days without personal value or commitment. Today we
see their empty faces in the society pages and read the
tabloids to hear about their drug problems and their tawdry
efforts to find excitement and meaning.

Those of us - most of us - who have no choice but to work,
dream of having enough money to have a choice. Few of us
really want to drift around the world without goals or
ambition. We simply want to do something meaningful to us
rather than the career we fell into which has long since
lost its charm and excitement.

It is when that career, boring and humdrum though it may be,
is suddenly taken away, that we realize how much of
ourselves is invested in the role we have worn for so long.
Our belief in our own value is tied up and interdependent
with our productivity. We feel a vital part of our marital
partnership, someone our children respect and follow, an
important person in our community who has earned the right
to voice an opinion or vote for a principle. We bear
ourselves with a certain pride in that we are bonafide
members of the working class and clearly differentiate
ourselves from those who fail to contribute: the welfare
class, the criminals, the idle rich, the various parasites
who dot the fringes of our society.

When we lose our job, the lines start to blur. Our sense of
personal importance starts slowly to fracture. We see the
reflection of ourselves in the eyes of our friends and
family start to change. While we concentrate on finding
other work and jumping through the multiple hoops required
by any job search campaign, we also withdraw more and more
into ourselves, seeking to escape the new image of ourselves
emerging in the minds of those around us.

As a vocational counselor, I heard a repeated litany of
concerns from spouses and family: "Since this happened,
she's totally changed . . . He's not the man I knew . . . I
don't know who she is anymore . . . he won't talk to me
about what's bothering him . . . I want my husband back. I
don't care if he's working or not . . ."

Have you, or someone you love, fallen into this trap?

Address the problem now, before a situation not of your
choice and for which you bear no blame, mushrooms into the
too frequent personal devastation of the unemployed - broken
marriages, family dispersion, substance abuse, shattered
lives.

The discomfort and emotional pain of losing your job also
provides an opportunity to cement bonds and build strength
if you take action to address problems head on. Above all,
communication must not lapse. In fact, it needs to be
expanded and enriched. Reach out to family and friends,
those who love you as you are, "warts and all" as the saying
goes.

Express your fears and your worries. Let them know how
uncomfortable you are and how disappointed you feel that you
cannot contribute to the family in the way you always
managed in the past. Seek out ways to be a productive, even
if non-working, member of the team. Take on new chores and
responsibilities around the house and with the kids. Pay
extra attention to your spouse. You may not be able to
afford presents or a night on the town, but you can give of
your time and your appreciation, gifts more valuable than
anything you could buy at a store.

Share the rigors and discouragement of your job hunting
efforts. Those who love you want to share in your failures
as well as your successes. Encourage them to share their own
feelings and fears about your plight, and express their
anxieties about the future. Not only do we tend not to
express our deepest fears, we also tend not to consciously
formulate and define them. They just sit at the back of our
minds as a faceless, nagging worry. When we fail to bring
them out into the open, where they can be clearly defined
and therefore contained, we live in a constant state of
unease. To comfort ourselves, we look for something or
someone to blame: "Everything was fine until she lost her
job . . . if he hadn't got laid off, I'd be registering for
college this year . . ." It is an easy slide from such vague
thoughts to full-fledged blame and you become the scapegoat
on which all problems can be hung.

If you are newly unemployed, take steps now to ensure that
such a direction is avoided. If you have been out of work
for a considerable period of time, and may have already seen
this pattern develop, take the time to stop it in its
tracks. Redirect your energies into developing a positive
team spirit in which all can have a voice and a
contribution. It can turn the destructive nature of
unemployment into a lightning rod of family cohesion,
strength, and deepened affection.

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