We really need to break our conditioning that employment is the highest priority in our lives.
It’s not really conditioning when it’s actually the case. Without my job I’m likely homeless or dead within weeks. If Iose my job then I can no longer pay my bills, within a few months I’ll be homeless. More urgently though I lose access to my health insurance which means I lose access to the medications keeping my mental illness in check. Finding a new job normally is a pain; finding one when you’re so depressed that you really don’t even care if you live or die is next to impossible. Also once it flares up you tend to stop caring about even seeking treatment for it making it a self perpetuating issue. If I got fired I would have only a few weeks to find a new job before I wound up in a position I likely wouldn’t recover from. Sure there are things like unemployment but that doesn’t even come close to paying my bills let alone affording my own health insurance.
So it would take a lot for me to risk walking away from my job and risk getting fired. I could easily see myself in the same position as these people, waiting until it’s too late to run out of fear of losing my job. If we want people to be able to walk away from situations like this then we need to make survival possible without employment. We need healthcare to not be tied to employment and we need real unemployment pay to keep people afloat while they find a new job.
It’s not really conditioning when it’s actually the case. Without my job I’m likely homeless or dead within weeks. If Iose my job then I can no longer pay my bills, within a few months I’ll be homeless. More urgently though I lose access to my health insurance which means I lose access to the medications keeping my mental illness in check. Finding a new job normally is a pain; finding one when you’re so depressed that you really don’t even care if you live or die is next to impossible. Also once it flares up you tend to stop caring about even seeking treatment for it making it a self perpetuating issue. If I got fired I would have only a few weeks to find a new job before I wound up in a position I likely wouldn’t recover from. Sure there are things like unemployment but that doesn’t even come close to paying my bills let alone affording my own health insurance.
So it would take a lot for me to risk walking away from my job and risk getting fired. I could easily see myself in the same position as these people, waiting until it’s too late to run out of fear of losing my job. If we want people to be able to walk away from situations like this then we need to make survival possible without employment. We need healthcare to not be tied to employment and we need real unemployment pay to keep people afloat while they find a new job.