Article 43
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Preying On The Job Seeker 16
Watch out for stuff like this. It never stops.
What I (should have) LEARNED FROM LETTING MY GUARD DOWN and CONTACTING one of these people, is my resume was pushed all over town by someone claiming to be my agent.
It may seem good at first - more exposure means more possibilities of landing a job - but it’s not.
One guy called and begged to stop bothering him - there’s no job openings.
In cases like this I don’t think the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
If if were, I wouldn’t still be looking for work.
Dear ElvisMy name is Shreya and i represent Genesys Infotech (
https://goo.gl/deleted1).I saw your profile online and felt that you might be interested in a few jobs that I am helping my Direct Client fill. All the positions full time, in Gaithersburg, MD.
You can learn more about the company and the job by clicking the job title above or visiting our website (
https://goo.gl/deleted2).- Systems Administrator
- Java Developer
- IT Sales Manager
- Implementation LeadPlease apply online at (
https://goo.gl/deleted3). The client needs all submissions with specific information. I will call you as soon as I get your online application form. I will share the client name with you, and will only submit your resume to the client, after we have spoken and I have your approval to submit your profile. This will expedite the application process and save us all time.I realize that you might not be looking for a change at this time, and I apologize if this message was intrusive. However, if you do know anyone who might be looking, please feel free to forward this message to them. (
https://goo.gl/deleted4), We offer a $1000 bonus for anybody you refer who is selected for the job.I Also hope you will accept this connection request so that I can continue to stay in touch with you on a professional level.
Thank you for taking the time to read my email. I hope to speak to you soon.
I will also send you a LinkedIn connection invite shortly so that we can continue to stay in touch professionally.
Regards
More Preying on the job seeker articles:
[1] - [2] - [3] - [4] - [5] - [6] - [7] - [8] - [9] - [10] - [11] - [12] - [13] - [14] - [15] - [16] - [17] - [18] - [19]
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Monday, January 15, 2018
Finlands Universal Basic Income Trial
What We Can Learn From Finlands Basic Income Experiment
By Tim Ward
Futurism
July 26, 2017
Finland’s Failed Experiment?
Universal basic income (UBI) is a hot topic in the world today. So far, however, very few experiments have been conducted to ascertain precisely how best to implement such a system. For that reason, a small-scale UBI experiment in Finland has drawn much attention as one of the few real-world examples we have of how UBI could work.
The trial BEGAN earlier this year and is being managed by Kela, the national social-insurance institute. Kela selected 2,000 Finns between the ages of 25 and 58, each of whom was receiving some form of unemployment benefits, to receive 560 (about $645) per month.
In theory, this project would give the world new insights into the logistics and consequences of introducing a UBI system. However, the trial has been riddled with issues and mistakes from the start due to improper planning and a troubled political environment, and now, it is little more than a lesson of how not to run a UBI experiment.
Among the most serious errors was a slashing of the sample size to just one-fifth the number suggested in the original proposition. This extremely small dataset is not enough to be scientifically viable.
Additionally, the trial kicked off during a period of economic turmoil in Finland. The country’s economy had suffered three recessions since 2008, and this state-sponsored UBI project was launched in a time of economic austerity.
Although the results of the project, which will be announced in 2019, may give us some insights into the viability of future UBI programs, even those who designed the Finnish experiment are skeptical of its validity. Olli Kangas, Kelas coordinator for the program, TOLD THE ECONOMIST that it was currently in a state of neglect, comparing politicians’ actions to “small boys with toy cars who become bored and move on.”
A Worldwide Question
Universal basic income has been proposed as a solution to two issues that are currently shaking society: poverty and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the jobs sector. In an INTERVIEW WITH THE GUARDIAN, Stephen Hawking warned that the latter will cause “job destruction deep into the middle classes,” and ELON MUSK HAS ASSERTED that there will be fewer and fewer jobs that “a robot cannot do better” as the technology develops.
The idea of a UBI system is to automatically award every citizen with a state-sponsored wage, which could then be augmented by further work. This would provide those displaced by robotic systems with a way to support themselves on the most basic level.
Although Finland’s lackluster experiment remains the largest state-sponsored experiment to date, various governments are considering conducting their own UBI trials.
India, the world’s largest democratic country, has endorsed the system claiming in a report that it is “basically the way forward” - and is now considering the best way to introduce it to its populous. The state of Hawaii, which also recently accepted the terms of the Paris Agreement despite Donald Trump’s federal withdrawal, has also announced on Reddit that they will “begin evaluating universal basic income.”
The system is not without its skeptics, however. Experts question who would provide the money to fund such projects, asserting that a universal basic income of $10,000 a year per person could add approximately $3 trillion to national spending in the U.S.
Individuals such as Mark Cuban and Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, have suggested that we should optimize existing benefits systems. Gordon told the MIT Technology Review that his idea is to make ԓbenefits more generous to reach a reasonable minimum, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, and greatly expand preschool care for children who grow up in poverty.
We won’t know for sure how effective a UBI could be until someone actually implements an experiment large enough to provide meaningful data, and right now, Finland doesnt appear to be that entity.
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Money for nothing: is Finland’s universal basic income trial too good to be true?
Europe’s first national experiment in giving citizens free cash has attracted huge media attention. But one year in, what does this project really hope to prove?
By Jon Henley in Helsinki
January 12, 2018
One year on from its launch, the world remains fascinated by Finland’s groundbreaking universal basic income trial: Europe’s first national, government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash.
In January 2017, the Nordic nation began paying a random but mandatory sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 a monthly L560 (475). There is no obligation either to seek or accept employment during the two years the trial lasts, and any who do take a job will continue to receive the same amount.
With the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders all proponents of a universal basic income (UBI) model, Finnish officials and participants have been inundated with media requests from around the globe. One participant who hoped to start his own business with the help of the unconditional monthly payment complained that, after speaking to 140 TV crews and reporters from as far afield as Japan and Korea, he has simply not been able to find the time.
But amid this unprecedented media attention, the experts who devised the scheme are concerned it is being misrepresented. “It’s not really what people are portraying it as,” said Markus Kanerva, an applied social and behavioural sciences specialist working in the prime ministers office in Helsinki.
“A full-scale universal income trial would need to study different target groups, not just the unemployed. It would have to test different basic income levels, look at local factors. This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people.”
While UBI tends often to be associated with progressive politics, Finland’s trial was launched - at a cost of around 20m ($17.7m) - by a centre-right, austerity-focused government interested primarily in spending less on social security and bringing down Finland’s stubborn 8%-plus unemployment rate. It has a very clear purpose: to see whether an unconditional income might incentivise people to take up paid work.
Authorities believe it will shed light on whether unemployed Finns, as experts believe, are put off taking up a job by the fear that a higher marginal tax rate may leave them worse off. Many are also deterred by having to reapply for benefits after every casual or short-term contract.
“It’s partly about removing disincentives,” explained Marjukka Turunen, who heads the legal unit at Finland’s social security agency, Kela, which is running the experiment. Kanerva describes the trial as an experiment in “smoothing out the system.”
To maintain privacy and avoid bias, Kela is not contacting any of the 2,000 participants for the duration of the two-year trial. A handful have given interviews to journalists (several have said they feel less stressed thanks to the scheme), but no official conclusions are yet being drawn from these anecdotal experiences.
According to Kanerva, however, the core data the government is seeking on whether, and how, the job take-up of the 2,000 unemployed people in the trial differs from a 175,000-strong control group - will be robust, and usable in future economic modelling when it is published in 2019.
Unintended benefits
The idea of UBI had been circulating in left-of-centre political circles in Finland since the 1980s, mainly as a way to combat the economic and social consequences of falling industrial employment by freeing all from students to the elderly; stay-at-home parents to the unemployed - to make meaningful contributions to society by, for example, volunteering.
Appealing both to the left (who believe it can cut poverty and inequality) and, more recently, to the right (as a possible way to a leaner, less bureaucratic welfare system), UBI looks all the more attractive amid warnings that automation could threaten up to a third of current jobs in the west within 20 years. Other basic income schemes are now being tested from Ontario to rural Kenya, and Glasgow to Barcelona.
But there is little consensus so far on what UBI should look like in practice, or even on the questions that need to be answered first: which model to adopt, what level of payment, how to combine UBI fairly with other social security benefits, and how the tax and pension system should treat it.
For UBI purists, the fact that the monthly Finnish payment roughly equivalent to basic unemployment benefit - is going to a strictly limited group, and is not enough to live on, disqualifies the Finnish scheme. But while it may not reveal as much as a broader trial would have, the schemes designers are confident it will shed new light on several key social policy issues.
For example, Kela hopes additional data that is being collected as part of the trial from healthcare records will provide useful information on whether the security of a guaranteed unconditional income, paid in advance so beneficiaries can budget for it, might have a positive impact on anxiety, prescription drug consumption or doctor’s visits.
One participant has said she is less anxious because she no longer has to worry over calls from the job centre offering a job she can’t accept because she is caring for her elderly parents, Turunen said. “We may be able to see from the trial data whether it has had unintended benefits - such as reduced medical costs.”
The trial data may also allow the government to spend less on bureaucracy by simplifying Finland’s complex social security system - currently, it offers more than 40 different means-tested benefits - which is struggling to cope with a 21st-century labour market of part timers, short-term contracts and start-ups.
The benefit system is simply “not suited to modern working patterns,” Turunen said. “We have too many benefits. People don’t understand what they’re entitled to or how they can get it. Even experts don’t understand. For example, it’s very hard to be in the benefit system in Finland if you are self-employed - you have to prove your income time and time and time again.”
Perhaps most significantly, “the trial marks a real breakthrough for field experiments,” according to Kanerva. Rolled out in record time and after a brief, one-line pledge in the governments platform, it had to function alongside all existing social security laws and clear numerous legal obstacles - including Finland’s constitution, which requires all citizens to be treated equally.
“It was a huge effort to get it over the line,” Turunen said. “The government was determined it must be based on specific legislation - most experiments are not and that it had to launch in January last year ... It was quite a task.”
The Finnish experiment’s design and objectives mean it should perhaps not really be seen as a full-blown UBI trial at all, cautioned Kanerva: People think we’re launching universal basic income. Were not. W’֒re just trialling one kind of model, with one income level and one target group.
But as experts around the world increasingly debate how a bold but ill-defined concept might actually work in practice, the Finnish experiment will at least “produce meaningful results - albeit in a limited field,” according to Kanerva. In an area where convictions are often more abundant than facts, It has forced people to talk specifics.
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Session Replay Scripts
This is the first post in our “No Boundaries” series, in which we reveal how third-party scripts on websites have been extracting personal information in increasingly intrusive ways. [0]
By Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan
Freedom To Tinker
November 15, 1017
Update: we’ve released our data the list of sites with session-replay scripts, and the sites where we’ve confirmed recording by third parties.
You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use “session replay” scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder.
The stated purpose of this data collection includes gathering insights into how users interact with websites and discovering broken or confusing pages. However the extent of data collected by these services far exceeds user expectations [1]; text typed into forms is collected before the user submits the form, and precise mouse movements are saved, all without any visual indication to the user. This data can’t reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous. In fact, some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a users real identity.
For this study we analyzed seven of the top session replay companies (based on their relative popularity in our measurements [2]). The services studied are Yandex, FullStory, Hotjar, UserReplay, Smartlook, Clicktale, and SessionCam. We found these services in use on 482 of the Alexa top 50,000 sites.
What can go wrong? In short, a lot.
Collection of page content by third-party replay scripts may cause sensitive information such as medical conditions, credit card details and other personal information displayed on a page to leak to the third-party as part of the recording. This may expose users to identity theft, online scams, and other unwanted behavior. The same is true for the collection of user inputs during checkout and registration processes.
The replay services offer a combination of manual and automatic redaction tools that allow publishers to exclude sensitive information from recordings. However, in order for leaks to be avoided, publishers would need to diligently check and scrub all pages which display or accept user information. For dynamically generated sites, this process would involve inspecting the underlying web applications server-side code. Further, this process would need to be repeated every time a site is updated or the web application that powers the site is changed.
A thorough redaction process is actually a requirement for several of the recording services, which explicitly forbid the collection of user data. This negates the core premise of these session replay scripts, who market themselves as plug and play. For example, Hotjar’s homepage advertises: Set up Hotjar with one scriptin a matter of seconds and Smartlooks sign-up procedure features their scripttag next to a timer with the tagline every minute you lose is a lot of video.
To better understand the effectiveness of these redaction practices, we set up test pages and installed replay scripts from six of the seven companies [3]. From the results of these tests, as well as an analysis of a number of live sites, we highlight four types of vulnerabilities below:
1. Passwords are included in session recordings. All of the services studied attempt to prevent password leaks by automatically excluding password input fields from recordings. However, mobile-friendly login boxes that use text inputs to store unmasked passwords are not redacted by this rule, unless the publisher manually adds redaction tags to exclude them. We found at least one website where the password entered into a registration form leaked to SessionCam, even if the form is never submitted.
2. Sensitive user inputs are redacted in a partial and imperfect way. As users interact with a site they will provide sensitive data during account creation, while making a purchase, or while searching the site. Session recording scripts can use keystroke or input element loggers to collect this data.
All of the companies studied offer some mitigation through automated redaction, but the coverage offered varies greatly by provider. UserReplay and SessionCam replace all user input with an equivalent length masking text, while FullStory, Hotjar, and Smartlook exclude specific input fields by type. We summarize the redaction of other fields in the table below.
Automated redaction is imperfect; fields are redacted by input element type or heuristics, which may not always match the implementation used by publishers. For example, FullStory redacts credit card fields with the `autocomplete` attribute set to `cc-number`, but will collect any credit card numbers included in forms without this attribute.
To supplement automated redaction, several of the session recording companies, including Smartlook, Yandex, FullStory, SessionCam, and Hotjar allow sites to further specify inputs elements to be excluded from the recording. To effectively deploy these mitigations a publisher will need to actively audit every input element to determine if it contains personal data. This is complicated, error prone and costly, especially as a site or the underlying web application code changes over time. For instance, the financial service site fidelity.com has several redaction rules for Clicktale that involve nested tables and child elements referenced by their index. In the next section we further explore these challenges.
A safer approach would be to mask or redact all inputs by default, as is done by UserReplay and SessionCam, and allow whitelisting of known-safe values. Even fully masked inputs provide imperfect protection. For example, the masking used by UserReplay and Smartlook leaks the length of the user’s password
3. Manual redaction of personally identifying information displayed on a page is a fundamentally insecure model. In addition to collecting user inputs, the session recording companies also collect rendered page content. Unlike user input recording, none of the companies appear to provide automated redaction of displayed content by default; all displayed content in our tests ended up leaking.
Instead, session recording companies expect sites to manually label all personally identifying information included in a rendered page. Sensitive user data has a number of avenues to end up in recordings, and small leaks over several pages can lead to a large accumulation of personal data in a single session recording.
For recordings to be completely free of personal information, a sites web application developers would need to work with the site’s marketing and analytics teams to iteratively scrub personally identifying information from recordings as its discovered. Any change to the site design, such as a change in the class attribute of an element containing sensitive information or a decision to load private data into a different type of element requires a review of the redaction rules.
As a case study, we examine the pharmacy section of Walgreens.com, which embeds FullStory. Walgreens makes extensive use of manual redaction for both displayed and input data. Despite this, we find that sensitive information including medical conditions and prescriptions are leaked to FullStory alongside the names of users.
We do not present the above examples to point fingers at a certain website. Instead, we aim to show that the redaction process can fail even for a large publisher with a strong, legal incentive to protect user data. We observed similar personal information leaks on other websites, including on the checkout pages of Lenovo [5]. Sites with less resources or less expertise are even more likely to fail.
4. Recording services may fail to protect user data. Recording services increase the exposure to data breaches, as personal data will inevitably end up in recordings. These services must handle recording data with the same security practices with which a publisher would be expected to handle user data.
We provide a specific example of how recording services can fail to do so. Once a session recording is complete, publishers can review it using a dashboard provided by the recording service. The publisher dashboards for Yandex, Hotjar, and Smartlook all deliver playbacks within an HTTP page, even for recordings which take place on HTTPS pages. This allows an active man-in-the-middle to injecting a scriptinto the playback page and extract all of the recording data. Worse yet, Yandex and Hotjar deliver the publisher page content over HTTP - data that was previously protected by HTTPS is now vulnerable to passive network surveillance.
The vulnerabilities we highlight above are inherent to full-page session recording. That’s not to say the specific examples can’t be fixed indeed, the publishers we examined can patch their leaks of user data and passwords. The recording services can all use HTTPS during playbacks. But as long as the security of user data relies on publishers fully redacting their sites, these underlying vulnerabilities will continue to exist.
Does tracking protection help?
Two commonly used ad-blocking lists EasyList and EasyPrivacy do not block FullStory, Smartlook, or UserReplay scripts. EasyPrivacy has filter rules that block Yandex, Hotjar, ClickTale and SessionCam.
At least one of the five companies we studied (UserReplay) allows publishers to disable data collection from users who have Do Not Track (DNT) set in their browsers. We scanned the configuration settings of the Alexa top 1 million publishers using UserReplay on their homepages, and found that none of them chose to honor the DNT signal.
Improving user experience is a critical task for publishers. However it shouldn’t come at the expense of user privacy.
End notes:
[0] We use the term exfiltrate in this series to refer to the third-party data collection that we study. The term leakageђ is sometimes used, but we eschew it, because it suggests an accidental collection resulting from a bug. Rather, our research suggests that while not necessarily malicious, the collection of sensitive personal data by the third parties that we study is inherent in their operation and is well known to most if not all of these entities. Further, there is an element of furtiveness; these data flows are not public knowledge and neither publishers nor third parties are transparent about them.
[1] A recent analysis of the company Navistone, completed by Hill and Mattu for Gizmodo, explores how data collection prior to form submission exceeds user expectations. In this study, we show how analytics companies collect far more user data with minimal disclosure to the user. In fact, some services suggest the first party sites simply include a disclaimer in their sites privacy policy or terms of service.
[2] We used OpenWPM to crawl the Alexa top 50,000 sites, visiting the homepage and 5 additional internal pages on each site. We use a two-step approach to detect analytics services which collect page content.
First, we inject a unique value into the HTML of the page and search for evidence of that value being sent to a third party in the page traffic. To detect values that may be encoded or hashed we use a detection methodology similar to previous work on email tracking. After filtering out leak recipients, we isolate pages on which at least one third party receives a large amount of data during the visit, but for which we do not detect a unique ID. On these sites, we perform a follow-up crawl which injects a 200KB chunk of data into the page and check if we observe a corresponding bump in the size of the data sent to the third party.
We found 482 sites on which either the unique marker was leaked to a collection endpoint from one of the services or on which we observed a data collection increase roughly equivalent to the compressed length of the injected chunk. We believe this value is a lower bound since many of the recording services offer the ability to sample page visits, which is compounded by our two-step methodology.
[3] One company (Clicktale) was excluded because we were unable to make the practical arrangements to analyze script’s functionality at scale.
[4] FullStory’s terms and conditions explicitly classify health or medical information, or any other information covered by HIPAA as sensitive data and asks customers to not provide any Sensitive Data to FullStory.
[5] Lenovo.com is another example of a site which leaks user data in session recordings.
[6] We used the default scripts available to new accounts for 5 of the 6 providers. For UserReplay, we used a scripttaken from a live site and verified that the configuration options match the most common options found on the web.
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Website operators are in the dark about privacy violations by third-party scripts
By Arvind Narayanan
Freedom To Tinker
January 12, 2018
Recently we revealed that session replayӔ scripts on websites record everything you do, like someone looking over your shoulder, and send it to third-party servers. This en-masse data exfiltration inevitably scoops up sensitive, personal information in real time, as you type it. We released the data behind our findings, including a list of 8,000 sites on which we observed session-replay scripts recording user data.
As one case study of these 8,000 sites, we found health conditions and prescription data being exfiltrated from walgreens.com. These are considered Protected Health Information under HIPAA. The number of affected sites is immense; contacting all of them and quantifying the severity of the privacy problems is beyond our means. We encourage you to check out our data release and hold your favorite websites accountable.
Student data exfiltration on Gradescope
As one example, a pair of researchers at UC San Diego read our study and then noticed that Gradescope, a website they used for grading assignments, embeds FullStory, one of the session replay scripts we analyzed. We investigated, and sure enough, we found that student names and emails, student grades, and instructor comments on students were being sent to FullStoryגs servers. This is considered Student Data under FERPA (US educational privacy law). Ironically, Princetons own Information Security course was also affected. We notified Gradescope of our findings, and they removed FullStory from their website within a few hours.
You might wonder how the companiesҒ privacy policies square with our finding. As best as we can tell, Gradescopes Terms of Service actually permit this data exfiltration [1], which is a telling comment about the ineffectiveness of Terms of Service as a way of regulating privacy.
FullStoryҒs Terms are a different matter, and include a clause stating: Customer agrees that it will not provide any Sensitive Data to FullStory.Ӕ We argued previously that this repudiation of responsibility by session-replay scripts puts website operators in an impossible position, because preventing data leaks might require re-engineering the site substantially, negating the core value proposition of these services, which is drag-and-drop deployment. Interestingly, Gradescopes CEO told us that they were not aware of this requirement in FullStoryҒs Terms, that the clause had not existed when they first signed up for FullStory, and that they (Gradescope) had not been notified when the Terms changed. [2]
Web publishers kept in the dark
Of the four websites we highlighted in our previous post and this one (Bonobos, Walgreens, Lenovo, and Gradescope), three have removed the third-party scripts in question (all except Lenovo). As far as we can tell, no publisher (website operator) was aware of the exfiltration of sensitive data on their own sites until our study. Further, as mentioned above, Gradescope was unaware of key provisions in FullStorys Terms of Service. This is a pattern weҒve noticed over and over again in our six years of doing web privacy research.
Worse, in many cases the publisher has no direct relationship with the offending third-party script. In Part 2 of our study we examined two third-party scripts which exploit a vulnerability in browsers built-in password managers to exfiltrate user identities. One web developer was unable to determine how the scriptwas loaded and asked us for help. We pointed out that their site loaded an ad network (media-clic.com), which in turn loaded themoneytizer.com, which finally loaded the offending scriptfrom Audience Insights. These chains of redirects are ubiquitous on the web, and might involve half a dozen third parties. On some websites the majority of third parties have no direct relationship with the publisher.
Most of the advertising and analytics industry is premised on keeping not just users but also website operators in the dark about privacy violations. Indeed, the effort required by website operators to fully audit third parties would negate much of the benefit of offloading tasks to them. The ad tech industry creates a tremendous negative externality in terms of the privacy cost to users.
Can we turn the tables?
The silver lining is that if we can explain to web developers what third parties are doing on their sites, and empower them to take control, that might be one of the most effective ways to improve web privacy. But any such endeavor should keep in mind that web publishers everywhere are on tight budgets and may not have much privacy expertise.
To make things concrete, here’s a proposal for how to achieve this kind of impact:
Create a 1-pager summarizing the bare minimum that website operators need to know about web security, privacy, and third parties, with pointers to more information.
Create a tailored privacy report for each website based on data that is already publicly available through various sources including our own data releases.
Build open-source tools for website operators to scan their own sites [3]. Ideally, the tool should make recommendations for privacy-protecting changes based on the known behavior of third parties.
Reach out to website operators to provide information and help make changes. This step doesn’t scale, but is crucial.
If you’re interested in working with us on this, wed love to hear from you!
Endnotes
We are grateful to UCSD researchers Dimitar Bounov and Sorin Lerner for bringing the vulnerabilities on Gradescope.com to our attention.
[1] Gradescope’s terms of use state: “By submitting Student Data to Gradescope, you consent to allow Gradescope to provide access to Student Data to its employees and to certain third party service providers which have a legitimate need to access such information in connection with their responsibilities in providing the Service.”
[2] The Wayback Machine does not archive FullStory’s Terms page far enough back in time for us to independently verify Gradescope’s statement, nor does FullStory appear in ToSBack, the EFFs terms-of-service tracker.
[3] Privacyscore.org is one example of a nascent attempt at such a tool.
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Friday, January 05, 2018
Drugs Du Jour
LSD in the 60s; ecstasy in the 80s; smart drugs today: how we get high reflects the desires and fears of our times
By Cody Delistraty
January 4, 2018
Few peoples VIEWS ON DRUGS have changed so starkly as those of Aldous Huxley. Born in 1894 to a high-society English family, Huxley witnessed the early 20th-century “war on drugs,” when two extremely popular narcotics were banned within years of one another: cocaine, which had been sold by the German pharmaceutical company Merck as a treatment for morphine addiction; and heroin, which had been sold for the same purpose by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer.
The timing of these twin bans was not coincidental. Ahead of the First World War, politicians and newspapers had created a hysteria surrounding the “dope fiends” whose use of cocaine, heroin and certain amphetamines allegedly showed that they had been “enslaved” by the German invention, as noted in Thom Metzer’s book “The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend (1998).”
As the rhetoric of eugenics flourished during the interwar years both from the mouth of Adolf Hitler and from Huxley’s older brother, Julian, the first director of the Paris-based UNESCO and a notorious eugenicist, Aldous Huxley imagined the use of drugs by government entities as a nefarious means of dictatorial control. In Brave New World (1932), the fictitious drug soma is doled out to the populace as a means to keep them dumbly happy and sated (All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects, Huxley wrote), and the book makes multiple mentions of mescaline (which at that point he had not tried but clearly did not approve of), which renders his character Linda stupid and prone to vomiting.
“The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced,” Huxley later wrote in The Saturday Evening Post. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights - liberty. Hard drugs were inherently tied up with politics in Huxley’s early years, and to be a proponent of cocaine or heroin was, in many ways, to be aligned with Nazi Germany in the eyes of politicians and leading newspapers.
But then, on Christmas Eve 1955 - 23 years after the publication of Brave New World - Huxley took his first dose of LSD and everything changed. He loved it. It inspired him to writeHeaven and Hell (1956), and he introduced the drug to Timothy Leary, a vocal political advocate for the therapeutic benefits of mind-altering drugs. Eventually, Huxley would align himself with Leary’s hippie politics - in ideological opposition to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign and the Vietnam War - in large part = due to his now-positive experience with such drugs.
In his novel Island (1962), Huxley֒s characters inhabit a utopia (rather than Brave New Worlds dystopia) and gain serenity and understanding by taking psychoactive drugs. Whereas in Brave New World drugs are a means of political control, in Island, they are ґmedicine.
What explains Huxley’s changed perspective from seeing drugs as an instrument of dictatorial control to a way to escape from political-cultural repression? Indeed, in the grander picture, why are drugs universally despised at one time, then embraced by intellectuals and cultural influencers at another? Why do we have an almost decadal vogue for one drug or another, with popular drugs such as cocaine all but disappearing only to pop up again decades later? Above all, how are drugs used to affirm or tear down cultural boundaries? The answers colour nearly every aspect of modern history.
Drug use offers a starkly efficient windowinto the cultures in which we live. Over the past century, popularity has shifted between certain drugs - from cocaine and heroin in the 1920s and 30s, to LSD and barbiturates in the 1950s and 60s, to ecstasy and (more) cocaine in the 1980s, to today’s cognitive - and productivity-enhancing drugs, such as Adderall, Modafinil and their more serious kin. If Huxley’s progression is to be followed, the drugs we take at a given time can largely be ascribed to an eras culture. We use - and invent - the drugs that suit our culture’s needs.
The drugs chosen to pattern our culture over the past century have simultaneously helped to define what each generation has most desired and found most lacking in itself. The drugs du jour thus point towards a cultural question that needs an answer, whether that’s a thirst for SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE, or for productivity, fun, exceptionalism or freedom. In this way, the drugs we take act as a reflection of our deepest desires and our inadequacies, the very feelings that create the cultures in which we live.
To be clear, this historical investigation predominately concerns psychoactive drugs. It accounts for a large family of drugs embracing LSD, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, barbiturates, anti-anxiety medications, opiates, Adderall and the like, but not anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen (Advil) or pain relievers such as acetaminophen (Tylenol). These pharmaceuticals are not drugs that alter one’s state of mind and are consequently of little use when making sociocultural analyses.
The drugs up for discussion also cut across boundaries of law (just because a drug is illegal does not preclude it from being central to a cultural moment) and class (a drug used by the lower class is no less culturally relevant than drugs favoured by the upper class, although the latter tend to be better recorded and retrospectively viewed as of greater cultural importance). Finally, the category of drugs under scrutiny cuts across therapeutic, medical and recreational usage.
To understand the way we create and popularise drugs to match the culture we have, consider cocaine. Readily available at the turn of the 20th century, cocaine was outlawed in 1920 with the passing of The Dangerous Drugs Act in the United Kingdom (and in 1922 in the United States under the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act). Cocaine’s initial popularity in the late-19th-century was in large part due to “its potent euphoric effects,” according to Stuart Walton, an intoxication theorist and author of Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication (2001). Cocaine, Walton told me, “helped potentiate a culture of resistance to Victorian norms, the abandonment of rigorous civility in favour of an emergent “anything goes” social libertarianism in the era of the Jugendstil, and the rise of social-democratic politics.”
Once Victorian moralism had been overcome, social libertarianism had vogued, and secularism had its sharp uptick in the period after the Second World War, cocaine generally fell out of style with white European-American culture. Until, that is, the 1980s, when cocaine had new cultural questions to answer. As Walton explained to me: Its return in the 1980s was predicated on precisely the opposite social tendency: iron conformism to the dictates of finance capital and stock-trading, which underscored the resurgence of entrepreneurial selfishness in the Reagan and Thatcher period.
Another instance of drugs answering cultural questions (or problems) concerns women who became addicted to barbiturates in 1950s suburban America. This was a population that faced a bleak, oppressive culture, now infamous through the works of Richard Yates and Betty Friedan. As Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique (1963), such women were expected to have no commitment outside the home and to find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love. Frustrated, depressed, neurotic, they numbed themselves with barbiturates so as to fulfil norms there was as yet no licence to buck against. In Jacqueline Susann’s novel Valley of the Dolls (1966), the three female protagonists dangerously come to rely on stimulants, depressants and sleeping pills -their dolls - in order to cope with personal decisions and, especially, sociocultural boundaries.
But the solution provided by prescription drugs was not the hoped-for solve-all. When drugs are unable to fully answer the cultural questions at hand in this case, how suburban American women might escape the crippling dullness that so often characterised their lives - alternative drugs, often seemingly irrelevant to the situation at hand, tend to present themselves as potential solutions.
Judy Balaban began taking LSD in the 1950s when she was still in her 20s, under the supervision of a medical doctor. She had a seemingly perfect life: the daughter of the affluent and respected president of Paramount Pictures, Barney Balaban, she had two daughters, a sprawling home in Los Angeles, and a successful film-agent husband who represented and befriended Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck and Marilyn Monroe. She counted Grace Kelly as a close friend, and became a bridesmaid at her royal wedding in Monaco. It would have seemed crazy for her to admit it but, beneath it all, Balaban felt deeply dissatisfied with her life. Her equally privileged friends felt the same. Polly Bergen, Linda Lawson, Marion Marshall all actresses married to famous film agents or directors - complained of a similar, underlying dissatisfaction with life.
With limited options for fulfilment, clear cultural expectations, and the dreary outlook of living life on antidepressants, Balaban, Bergen, Lawson and Marshall all began regimens of LSD therapy. Bergen told Balaban in Vanity Fair in 2010: “I wanted to be the person, not the persona.” LSD, Balaban wrote, afforded the possibility of a magic wand. It was a more effective answer drug -to the problems at hand than antidepressants had been. Many of Balabans culturally disenfranchised peers felt the same way: between 1950 and 1965, a reported 40,000 people were treated with LSD therapies. It was legal, but unregulated, and nearly everyone who tried it swore to its efficacy.
LSD spoke to unmet needs that affected not only suburban housewives, but also gay or sexually confused men too. The actor Cary Grant, who was housemates with the handsome Randolph Scott for several years and was married to five different women for an average of five years each (often while living with Scott), likewise found release through therapeutic LSD. Grant’s film career would have been destroyed had he been seen publicly as homosexual; like many of the suburban women of his time, he found that LSD afforded a much-needed escape valve, a way of sublimating sexual anguish. “I wanted to rid myself of all my hypocrisies” he said, somewhat subtly, in an interview in 1959. After going to more than a dozen LSD therapy sessions administered by his psychiatrist, Grant admitted, at last, “I am close to happiness.”
But sometimes, instead of people finding drugs to answer their cultural questions, cultural problems are manufactured to sell pre-existing drugs.
In the case of todays most popular drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Ritalin and Adderall, their wide availability has led to a significant increase in ADHD diagnoses: between 2003 and 2011, there was a 43 per cent rise in the number of schoolchildren in the US diagnosed with ADHD. It’s unlikely that those eight years coincided with a massive spike in US schoolchildren manifesting ADHD: it is much more plausible that the presence of Ritalin and Adderall and their savvy marketing - grew in that period, leading to greater diagnosing.
[I]n the 21st century, diagnoses of depression have risen dramatically, as have those of post-traumatic stress disorder and attention hyperactivity disorder, writes Lauren Slater in Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century (2004). [I]ncidences of certain diagnoses rise and fall depending on public perception, but also the doctors who are giving these labels are still doing so with perhaps too little regard for the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criteria the field dictates.
That is to say, today’s drug-makers have helped to create a culture in which people are perceived to be less attentive and more depressed in order to sell drugs that might answer the very problems they’ve manufactured.
Similarly, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), deployed to ease discomfort during the menopause, and in which oestrogens and, sometimes, progesterone used to be injected to artificially boost a womans hormone levels, has since been expanded to include therapies for transgender people and also as an androgen replacement, in which male ageing can theoretically be delayed via hormone treatment. This desire to constantly expand the uses and necessity of drugs speaks to the way in which culture is created (and bolstered) by the drugs at hand.
Clearly, the causal motion swings both ways. Cultural questions can popularise certain drugs; but sometimes popular drugs end up creating our culture. From rav culture booming on the back of ecstasy to a culture of hyper-productivity piggybacking on drugs initially meant to help with cognitive and attention deficits, the symbiosis between chemical and culture is evident.
But while drugs can both answer cultural questions and create entirely new cultures, there is no simple explanation for why one happens rather than the other. If rave culture is created by ecstasy, does that mean ecstasy is also Ғanswering a cultural question; or was ecstasy simply there and rave culture blossomed around it? The line of causality is easily blurred.
A corollary can be found in the human sciences where it is extraordinarily difficult to categorise different types of people because, as soon as one starts ascribing properties to groups, people change and spill out of the parameters to which they were first assigned. The philosopher of science Ian Hacking coined the term for this: “the looping effect.” People
are moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them, Hacking wrote in the London Review of Books. ёAnd since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before.
This holds true for the relationship between drugs and culture as well. ґEvery time a drug is invented that interacts with the brains and minds of users, it changes the very object of the study: the people who are using, says Henry Cowles, assistant professor of the history of medicine at Yale. On this reading, the idea that drugs create culture is true, to an extent, but it is likewise true that cultures can shift and leave a vacuum of unresolved desires and questions that drugs are often able to fill.
Take the example of American housewives addicted to barbiturates and other drugs. The standard and aforementioned causal argument is that they were culturally repressed, had few freedoms, and so sought out the drugs as a way to overcome their anomie: LSD and later antidepressants were ґanswer drugs to the strict cultural codes, as well as a means to self-medicate emotional pain. But, Cowles argues, one might just as easily say that ґthese drugs were created with various sub-populations in mind and they end up making available a new kind of housewife or a new kind of working woman, who is medicated in order to enable this kind of lifestyle. In short, Cowles says: ґThe very image of the depressed housewife emerges only as a result of the possibility of medicating that.
Such an explanation puts drugs at the centre of the past century of cultural history for a simple reason: if drugs can create and underscore cultural limitations, then drugs and their makers can tailor-make entire socio-cultural demographics (eg, “the depressed housewife” or “the hedonistic, cocaine-snorting Wall Street trader). Crucially, this creation of cultural categories applies to everyone, meaning that even those not using the popularised drugs of a given era are beholden to their cultural effects. The causality is muddy, but what is clear is that it swings back and forth: drugs both ґanswer cultural questions and allow for cultures to be created around themselves.
“Looking at the culture of today, perhaps the biggest question answered by drugs are issues of focus and productivity - a consequence of the modern attention economy,”, as termed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Alexander Simon.
The use of Modafinil intended for treating narcolepsy and misused to stay awake and work longer - and the abuse of other prolific, attention-deficit drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin for similar reasons reflects an attempt to answer these cultural questions. They’re widely used, too. In a Nature magazine survey in 2008, one in five people said theyґd tried cognitive-enhancing drugs at some stage in their lifetime. And according to an informal poll in The Tab in 2015, the highest rates of abuse occur at the most academic institutions: students at Oxford University abuse cognitive-enhancing drugs more than students at any other university in the United Kingdom.
“These cognitive-enhancing drugs help disguise the banality of work in a double sense,” says Walton. “They goad the user into a distractive state of high excitement, and simultaneously persuade him that it must be his success at work that allows him to feel so elated.”
In this way, modern drugs of choice not only keep people at work and make them more productive, they also permit them to stake more of their emotional worth and happiness on work, thereby reifying its importance and justifying the time and effort spent. These drugs answer the cultural prescription of more work and more productivity not just by allowing users to focus better and stay awake longer, but also by making them less miserable.
The flip side of the cultural productivity imperative is a demand for heightened convenience and ease of leisure in daily life (think of Uber, Deliveroo, etc) a desire that is sated by dubiously efficacious drug-like experiences such as Ғbinaural beats and other cognitive-altering sounds and ֑drugs that can be accessed easily via the internet. (In the case of binaural beats, one can listen to melodies that allegedly put the listener in ґnon-ordinary states of consciousness.) But if todayґs drugs mostly answer the cultural needs of the attention economy focus, productivity; leisure, convenience Ғ they also alter what it means to be oneself.
Critically, it is the way in which we now take drugs that shows the shift in the notion of the self. So-called magic-bullet drugs - one-off, limited-course drugs designed to treat highly targeted problems - have given way to maintenance drugs֖ eg, antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills that must be taken in perpetuity.
To be oneself is to be drugged. The future of drugs is likely an extension of this
“This is a big shift from the old model,” says Cowles. “It used to be: I am Henry. I am ill in some way. A pill can help me get back to being Henry, and then ‘ђm off it. Whereas now: “I am only Henry when I’m on my meds.” Between 1980, 2000, and now, the proportion of people on that kind of maintenance pill with no end in sight is just going to keep going up and up.
Might maintenance drugs then be the first step in drug use that permits a post-human state? Although they don’t necessarily fundamentally change who we are as anyone who is on daily antidepressants or other neurological medications knows Җ there is a certain cloudy feeling or dullness that begins to redefine ones most basic experiences. To be oneself is to be drugged. The future of drugs is likely to be an extension of this.
Here, it is worth stepping back. Over the past century there has been an intimate interaction between culture and drugs, each informing the other, exemplifying the cultural directions in which humans have wanted to go - be it rebelling, submitting or moving entirely outside of all systems and constraints. Taking a good look at what we want today’s drugs and the drugs of tomorrow to do provides an idea of the cultural questions we are looking to solve. “The traditional model of drugs that do something active to a passive user,” says Walton, “will very possibly be superseded by substances that empower the user to be something else entirely.”
Surely, this possibility will come to pass in some form or another in a relatively short time - drugs allowing a total escape from the self - and with it we will see the new crop of cultural questions that are being raised, and potentially answered, by drugs.
Patterns of drug use over the past century gives us a surprisingly accurate insight into wide swaths of cultural history, with everyone from Wall Street bankers and depressed housewives to college students and literary scions taking drugs that reflect their desires and answer their culture’s issues. But the drugs have always reflected a simpler, consistent truism. Sometimes we have wanted out of ourselves, sometimes we’ve wanted out of society, sometimes out of boredom or out of poverty; but always, whatever the case, we have wanted out. In the past, this desire was always temporary - to recharge our batteries, to find a space away from our experiences and the demands of living pressed upon us. However, more recently, drug use has become about finding a durable, lengthier, existential escape - a desire that is awfully close to self-obliteration.
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Monday, January 01, 2018
Personality and Unemployment
Long-Term Unemployment Changes Personality Traits
Mental Health Daily
February 25, 2015
In the United States, there are an estimated 18 million people that are unemployed. Much of this is due to economic changes that have occurred within the past decade. In the year 1996, there were an estimated 750,000 households living on less than $2 per day (prior to receiving government benefits). As of the year 2011, this figure had doubled to a whopping 1.5 million households, as a result of many people getting laid off or being unable to find work.
From 1991 to the year 2001, the United States was in its longest ever period of economic expansion. Even from 2001 to 2007, the economy continued to expand with the “Dot Com” boom and technological advancements with the computer. In the year 2007, a period known as the “Great Moderation” came to an end as the ripple effects of the subprime mortgage crisis took hold. This “recession” eventually ended, but unemployment rates are still fairly high.
One problem is that there is significant competition for low-level jobs, and many people simply lack the skills to perform higher level functions. Additionally some people chose to remain unemployed due to the fact that they feel it is below their dignity to take a low paying job [after getting laid off from a better paying one]. Although being unemployed for a short duration may not be a huge setback, a new study highlights that long-term unemployment can not only be DETRIMENTAL to your psychological health, it can cause your personality to change for the worse.
Long-Term Unemployment Changes Personality Traits: The Research
Research at the University of Stirling headed by Christopher Boyce decided to investigate the psychological impact of being unemployed by determining how personality traits are affected with prolonged unemployment. What he found was that your core personality traits can change (usually for the worse) the longer you’re unemployed.
How the study worked
Sample: Boyce and his team of researchers examined a sample size of 6,769 German adults over a period of 4 years. Throughout this 4-year period, 210 people were unemployed for between 1 and 4 years, and 251 people were unemployed less than 1 year before getting a new job.
3,733 men
3,036 women
Methods: Throughout the 4 year period, personality tests were administered to all of the participants. These personality tests assessed the “Big Five” personality traits (in psychology) including: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The personality tests were given at different time points. It should also be noted that all participants were EMPLOYED AT THE TIME of the first test. By the second test, the participant was either: still employed, unemployed for 1-4 years, or re-employed after being unemployed.
Results: Unemployment resulted in significant change to personality traits such as: agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Those that were unemployed for a short-duration and then re-employed experienced minor change.
Agreeableness
Men: Men were found to experience an increase in agreeableness during their first 2 years of unemployment. However, after the initial couple years, agreeableness levels dropped, and went on to become lower than men who were employed.
Women: For women, agreeableness was a trait that declined with each year of unemployment. Throughout the 4 year period, levels of agreeableness continued to drop with the passing of another year.
Lead researcher, Boyce, speculated that in the earlier stages of unemployment, agreeableness may be a favorable trait to find another job. Certain incentives may make people behave more agreeable to improve their current situation. However, he also believes that after a 2 year period, those without jobs may be significantly less agreeable simply because their bleak outlook and unemployment has become psychologically solidified.
Conscientiousness
Men: It was also discovered that the longer men were without a job, the more their level of conscientiousness dropped. Conscientiousness is characterized by the desire to perform a task TO THE BEST OF ONE’S ABILITY, with thoroughness, organization, and vigilance. This is a trait that is specifically associated with enjoying your income. Since you have no income to enjoy, this may be partly why conscientiousness plummets.
Women: It seemed as though women actually gained conscientiousness in the early and late stages of being unemployed. Researchers believe that this may be due to the fact that women often assist in “caregiving” activities.
Openness
Men: After just 1 year of being unemployed, the trait of openness decreased among men. This means that their curiosity for the world around them experienced a significant drop.
Women: Although women didnt experience a sharp drop in levels of openness after just 1 year of being unemployed, they did experience a major drop by the second and third years of unemployment. Oddly enough, this trait significantly improved during their 4th year of unemployment.
Personality trait changes make it tougher to get hired
When you become unemployed, particularly for a long period of time, three of the “Big Five” personality traits take a turn for the worst. This often makes it even tougher for an individual to find work. If you all of a sudden become less agreeable with others, your conscientiousness plummets, and you have a less open personality, prospective employers may be more likely to turn you down for a job.
Agreeableness: This is a personality trait associated with sympathy for others, kindness, and cooperation. A drop in agreeableness may be associated with lack of a work routine, particularly one that involves social interaction. When you don’t have to work with others (or are alone a lot), there’s no need for the concept of teamwork to finish a particular task. At most jobs, you often have to do (at least a little bit of) work with someone else, bolstering your trait of agreeableness.
Conscientiousness: This trait is not only associated with performing a particular job well, its associated with motivation and ability to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. If you aren’t conscientious, you probably don’t experience much motivation to get off your butt for work, let alone perform to the peak of your ability. When you’re unemployed, you have fewer opportunities to express this particular trait, leading to it becoming “dulled” in the process.
Openness: This is another social trait that allows you to allow (or try) new experiences. Those that have high levels of openness tend to try new things a lot. When you’re unemployed, you may not have the opportunity to engage in new experiences, particularly those that are often induced via socialization. This may also be related to the fact that when youre unemployed, you have less funds to partake in new, novel experiences (e.g. vacation). The lack of new stimuli for a prolonged period of time may make you less likely to engage in new experiences when finally given the opportunity.
Toll of unemployment more than just economic loss
The leader of the study (Boyce) believes that the effect of unemployment is more than just a financial loss. Unemployment creates a ripple effect that affects a person’s core personality traits often detrimentally. Therefore, he believes that the government should make their best effort to reduce unemployment rates to increase well being.
Boyce was quoted as stating, “Public policy therefore has a key role to play in preventing adverse personality change in society through both lower unemployment rates and offering greater support for the unemployed. Policies to reduce unemployment are therefore vital not only to protect the economy but also to enable positive personality growth in individuals.”
Additionally, he implied that our personalities are not “fixed” and that external factors (e.g. unemployment) can have a huge impact on personality traits. This means that there are other areas of your life such as relationships, friendships, hobbies, etc. that may impact the way your brain works and personality development.
Being unemployed creates neuroplastic changes in the brain
This research further supports the concept of self-directed neuroplasticity. Your entire brain functioning can change in response to wherever you focus your attention and put forth effort. If you become unemployed, you are now AWARE THAT YOU’RE UNEMPLOYED, aren’t contributing to anything meaningful, and your entire demeanor can change. If you continue to focus on the new way you’re FEELING and don’t find work, you’ll give more power to the new neural-pathways that develop.
Personality was long thought to remain stable over the lifetime, but researchers clearly demonstrate that something as simple as unemployment produces significant change for 3 of the “Big Five” personality traits. People that were previously conscientious, agreeable, and open, experienced major drops in expressions of these traits. Furthermore the changes (for the worse) were more significant based on duration of unemployment.
The longer the duration of being unemployed, the more severe the effects The personality changes undergo amplification the longer you remain unemployed. To decrease the likelihood that you’ll endure a debilitating personality change while you’re unemployed, it is recommended to find some sort of work (even if its volunteer work) to keep your favorable personality traits strong.
Suggestions for preventing unemployment-induced personality change
Below is a list of suggestions that you may want to keep in mind for mitigating the effects associated with unemployment.
Find a new job (ASAP): If you were working, but got laid off, fired, or quit your old job, the first thing you should do is find a new job as soon as possible. DonҒt wait for yourself to feel better before you start applying for something new, just do it right away. Getting a new job as soon as possible will result in the least amount of personality change. Some would argue that your personality wont change at all if you find work right away.
Health: While unemployed, make sure you are taking care of your personal health. Eating an optimal diet for mental health and getting plenty of exercise will provide significant benefit (Read: Psychological benefits of exercise). Do not neglect your health by taking up drinking and/or drugs to cope with your unemployment, this may lead to more detrimental outcomes.
Learn new skills: If you feel as though your current employment skills are outdated, take the time to learn new ones. Really put in the effort to find a mentor, teacher, and/or program that will help you learn what you need to know. Many people shy away from learning new skills when they are necessary in order to stay afloat in this economy.
Practice current skills: In order to keep your current skill-set as sharp as possible, you need to practice them. If you are a writer, keep writing everyday so that you donҒt lose your ability to perform well. If your skill involves designing, keep designing daily to improve upon your existing technique. Practicing your skills will ensure that there is no rustӔ or decline associated with your ability throughout a period of temporary unemployment.
Relentless pursuit: Those that get jobs quickly after becoming unemployed are relentless in their pursuit. Some are so relentless that they dont really care where they have to work, theyҒre going to work. If it means working at McDonalds or even Wal-Mart, they’re going to take the work because not only will it keep them busy, they will get social interaction, and will still earn some money. The goal is to continuously pursue work (particularly the career that you want), while not being overly picky. Remember, you can always leave a job you accept, but you cant leave a job offer you turn down.
Social connections: Stay as socially involved and connected with the community as possible. Not only can socialization help you maintain beneficial personality traits, someone you talk to may help you get a job. Having favorable social connections is a powerful tool that you can leverage to get work.
Stay busy: Avoid becoming lackadaisical as a result of newfound unemployment. Keep yourself busy so that you aren’t dwelling on the fact that youre unemployed. Dwelling on the depressing reality that you’re unemployed will further strengthen its control over you and your brain. Keep yourself occupied with friends, family, volunteer work, housework, and applying for jobs.
Why unemployment may cause psychological harm
There are several reasons that being unemployed may cause personality change and/or psychological harm (for some individuals). Most of these stem from feeling socially isolated for a prolonged period of time.
Social isolation: Perhaps the biggest detriment associated with unemployment is a social disconnect. If you relied on your co-workers to be your primary social contacts in the past, you may not feel like you can talk to anyone. During the day, most other people are working, and you may start to feel socially isolated from society.
Belief system: Being unemployed can quickly change your belief system as well. You may start to believe that the reason you donŒt have a job is due to the fact that you are incompetent and incapable of producing any value. While this is not likely to be true, many people start to believe that they are incapable and/or dont have the necessary skills for a job if they donҒt get hired.
Decreased income: When you aren’t earning any money from a job, you probably won’t be able to afford quality foods, top medical care, and living in a quality community. A simple decline in one area of your life such as that of dietary intake can have major consequences that influence other areas (e.g. cognitive function and mental health). In the past you may have been able to afford quality things, but with dwindling funds, you may have to settle for a poorer quality of life.
Depression: Losing a job can result in many people feeling depressed. They may become depressed for a variety of reasons, most of which stem from a loss. The depression may stem from lack of stability and a structured routine that a job provides. The depression may be exacerbated by lack of finances and the psychological stress associated with getting laid off and/or fired.
Anxiety: Some people become incredibly anxious that they don’t have work. This is due to the fact that their job loss was unexpected, and they “panic” because they have never been without work. Stress hormones takeover the body and a person may even have a nervous breakdown. Others become FEARFUL THAT THEY’LL RUN OUT OF MONEY, aren’t able to stay in the “loop,” or begin to feel inferior to others as a result of not having work.
Loneliness: You may start to feel incredibly LONELY now that you are without work. While loneliness is not the same as social isolation, many people feel lonely as a result of lack of social contact. If you were around many people at work, but now you don’t have a community of people to interact with, you may end up feeling more depressed, and in some cases SUICIDAL.
Perceptual changes: Your entire self-perception may undergo change when you become unemployed. While working you may have viewed yourself as a competent breadwinner for the family. Now that you are no longer working and earning money, you may start to become depressed and feel more uncertain about your future. Even small perceptual changes can be detrimental to your mental health.
Personal experience with unemployment
Although I don’t consider the results of the study to be conclusive and in no way does correlation equal causation, but I can testify for the fact that my levels of: agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness have all dropped (significantly) during the time Ive been unemployed. While employed and occupied with work, I actually found it easier to stay motivated in all areas of life.
Even the little bit of social interaction that I got from the job I worked helped me feel less lonely and socially isolated. If I’m being objective, my personality has changed since Ive been unemployed. Fortunately I wasn’t laid off or fired by my employer, rather I left my old career due to relocation. Below are some phases I personally experienced, many of which I believe go hand-in-hand with post-college depression.
Phase 1: Anxiety / Depression
Initially I experienced a lot of anxiety about where I was going to find new work and stay socially connected. The anxiety was intertwined with a depressed feeling that I shouldve stayed at my old job. I was nervous about making enough money to keep myself alive and functional and I was depressed that I lacked the social skills to go out and get a new job. The more I focused on my reality of being unemployed, the worse the anxiety and depression became.
Phase 2: Existential crisis
Likely due to lack of structure or routine in my day (that work provides) I went through an existential crisis. I got caught up with several addictions (many of which were difficult to overcome). At one point I was caught up in drinking and/or popping pain pills. Eventually the addiction shifted to sex and/or porn. I couldnҒt figure out what I was meantӔ to do here or my purpose for existing. It took me a long time before I realized that if I wanted purpose and meaning, I had to create it.
Phase 3: Social withdrawal
I went through another phase characterized by loss of social skills. I didnt lose all of my social skills at once, rather they just slowly declined with decreased usage. The withdrawal made me less relatable to others, less likely to approach others, and really decreased my courage. I became significantly more timid and less likely to explore new places (e.g. restaurants).
Phase 4: Cognitive impairment
I believe my cognition and wit declined in part due to lack of usage. I know for a fact that my writing isn’t as precise or conscientious as it was in the past. I still try my best, but my cognitive abilities have declined as a result of decreased usage. The ability of socialization to keep me stimulated and mentally “aroused” lead to better cognitive function. The fact that I dont get as much socialization as I did in the past has hampered my cognition to an extent.
Phase 5: Motivational deficits
Motivation declines significantly without social contact and/or a structured routine. Even if your workplace is crappy, you can still stay motivated. In fact, many times people that you dislike working with may serve to further motivate you to change and/or contribute more. It is nature for many to want to compete with others (in terms of production). Being around others can be inspiring and/or motivating in that there’s sometimes a bit of competition.
Phase 6: Realization
At some point, I realized that I had been declining in virtually all areas of my life, including my ability to think critically and write. Upon realizing this had occurred, I took conscious steps to slowly improve my situation. The key is to build some degree of positive momentum when you’ve trapped yourself into thinking that you’ll never be able to make a living or have a good life.
I created this momentum by forcing myself to writehere everyday, which is part of the routine that Ive established. I also make myself go to the gym 4x per week on the same schedule, and attend a ғgroup function 2x per week - regardless of how I feel. I walk outside daily, force myself to call family and/or friends, and talk to people when I have the opportunity. To mitigate the loneliness I also frequently listen to podcasts. Not only does it help me learn new things and gain perspectives, but the comfort of hearing a human voice decreases my loneliness.
Keep in mind: Correlation Doesn’t Equal Causation
It is important to realize that although this study discovered that several personality traits experienced change during times of unemployment, causation is difficult to establish. Some people may actually experience an increase in agreeableness and openness as a result of increased socialization during their time of being unemployed. Although there may be common trends among the unemployed, not everyone experiences this same effect.
There are individuals who lose their job and actually spend more time building quality relationships and making healthy lifestyle changes. It should also be mentioned that this study was conducted in a population of German citizens. Would we find the same trends among populations from other countries? It cannot be assumed until someone carries out a similar study in the particular country of interest.
Certain countries may utilize different coping strategies than others for dealing with unemployment. In some areas, being unemployed may not result in as steep of decline in traits like openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. It would also be worth investigating whether being employed (particularly in a positive environment) could increase the strength of certain (favorable) “Big Five” traits.
In other words, investigate whether people are deficient in certain traits by placing them into positive work-environments. Determine whether their personalities change over the course of 4 years. Similarly it may be worth investigating whether high-stress jobs and/or other unsatisfactory careers may serve as detrimental to one’s personality and/or mental health. Perhaps Working a DEAD END JOB may be worse for your personality than being unemployed.
Note: It should also be understood that not everyone follows the same decline in expression of the three traits within the study with long-term unemployment. Realize that there is significant variation based upon the individual.
Adapting to the current economic times
Its really sink or swim, fly or fall, eat or be eaten, adapt or get left in the dust these days in regards to the economy, which makes it tough for many people. From a historical perspective, many people held cushy jobs that allowed them to earn a healthy living without actually contributing much to society. Now that those jobs are becoming obsolete and companies are downsizing, itҒs becoming more difficult to find work unless you have skills to fit the fast-changing economic times.
Additionally with a growing population and increased demand for technological-related skills, older generations are having a tough time finding work. The unfortunate reality is that if you are unemployed, you need to find something to fill that emotional void. Sure its about making enough money to support yourself, but the other aspects that come with a job such as social interaction (even if they aren’t positive interactions) keep the brain alertand stimulated and are often underrated.
Lack of social stimulation over a prolonged period is downright unhealthy and could lead to various forms of neurodegeneration. The age old adage in regards to personality seems to apply: if you don’t use it, you lose it. The less you express certain personality traits, the less likely you will be able to use them in the future. Similarly with your work-related skills, the less you use them, the more likely you are to lose them - all of which decrease your value in the eyes of an employer.
If you are unemployed, find a new job as soon as possible for not only the finances, but the socialization that accompanies it. You could be preserving many positive personality traits by getting a job as soon as you are unemployed. The longer you wait, the tougher it will be not only for you to find work, but to maintain positive personality traits such as: agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
Section Dealing with Layoff • Section Personal •
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