New realizations about unemployment

Count another side effect of extended joblessness: realizations. Charles de Gaulle famously said that "cemeteries are full of indispensable men." In this market, everyone is dispensable. A job market that makes applications as futile as lottery tickets also forces job seekers to face reality. The reality is that this situation could drag on forever. Employers can afford to be especially picky. They can require all sorts of credentials, education and certification that, during better employment, could be picked up on the job. Being able to do the job is not as important as ideally fitting the description of the desired candidate.

And it's not just the job market. Friends and acquaintances will assure you that you won't have any trouble finding work, but those assurances fade after a few frustrating and futile months.

Eventually, you begin to question all your assumptions as they bump into hard-earned realizations. The assumptions that all those hours, all those nights, even an extra job that you worked, were worth it to provide for your family no longer seems safe. The assumption that your children would forgive a demanding work schedule and not interpret it as lack of involvement in their upbringing seems less certain. Skills and capabilities earned over a lifetime are worthless if they can't bring you employment. The confidence that love would be sufficient to sustain you founders like all of the confidence you once had. Your role as a "good provider" collapses when you're laid off. And then what are you? A dependent, the same role you had as an infant? It is at least a job for which you qualify.

That's the ugly reality of an unemployment rate in excess of 10 percent. Millions of people are facing an ugly reality.