NEET camaraderie
I understand the camaraderie among unemployed, and how good it is for the soul to connect with someone who knows how hopeless and pointless it feels to apply, without the usual bullshit of “Have you tried going in and asking? Have you looked at this or this? Have you used ChatGPT to do this? What if you reworked your resume once more?”
But I think it can also be really toxic or at least disadvantageous to get too involved with unemployed people online. I remember parts of my life were this way too, especially during the pandemic: waking up at noon, scrolling on the phone, getting up and slowly eating breakfast, not really getting ready beyond toothbrushing, getting on the computer, chatting for hours, and then hanging in VC from 8pm to 4am, falling into bed at 5, and repeat. It’s nice for a change, as a break.
But just not something you should do for long, a lot, or the older you get. It just becomes so hard to shift the sleep cycle again, to withstand it at all, and I think it dulls you. There’s just sleep, dopamine seeking and the online world, and then grinding some game together with others until you’re too tired to think. Not much space for anything else.
It’s something I don’t want my unemployed spouse to fall into. I don’t want us to lead parallel lives where I get up at 5am and they go to bed, and as I return from work at 3pm, they get up an hour prior and haven’t done anything they planned to do productivity/household-wise, so either they don’t get done at all or our time together suffers. I also don’t wanna be woken up in the middle of the night by light, game talk, entering the bathroom to get ready for bed and then coming into bed.
We don’t need to be entirely synchronized, and I think once a week, on a Friday for example, behavior like above is okay; I don’t have work on Saturday. But other than that, I do value connection, discipline, and not leading too different lives. I just find that engaging too much with it, with online Discord NEET way of living, is robbing a lot of energy and motivation. After a while, it feels like rot.