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For the 'funemployed,' unemployment is welcome
Kimi Yoshino, Los Angeles Times
... What most people would call unemployment, Van Gorkom embraced as "funemployment."

While millions of Americans struggle to find work as they face foreclosures and bankruptcy, others have found a silver lining in the economic meltdown. These happily jobless tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s. Some were laid off. Some quit voluntarily, lured by generous buyouts.

Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks or their parents, the funemployed do not spend their days poring over job listings. They travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least till the bank account dries up, they're content living for today.

"I feel like I've been given a gift of time and clarity," said Aubrey Howell, 29, of Franklin, Tenn., who was laid off from her job as a tea shop manager in April. After sleeping in late and visiting family in Florida, she recently mused on Twitter: "Unemployment or funemployment?"

Never heard of funemployment? Here's Urban Dictionary's definition: "The condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life. I spent all day Tuesday at the pool; funemployment rocks!"

... As frivolous as it sounds, funemployment is a statement about American society. Experts say it's both a reflection of the country's cultural narcissism -- and attitudes of entitlement and self-centeredness -- and a backlash against corporate America and its "Dilbert"-like work environment.

... Rounsaville agreed: "The rat race puts blinders on you and makes time fly, and then the next thing you know, you've missed the chance to be your more exciting self, or to push yourself in a gutsier direction."

... By thumbing their collective noses at employment, they also are sending a message to corporate America, Logan said.

"People are saying screw it and they're leaving companies," Logan said. "We need to figure out how to make companies work better for everybody. Until that happens . . . early retirements and furloughs are going to continue. People are going to opt out of the system."
(4 June 2009)

A Race to Keep Up With the Tightwads
Ylan Q. Mui, Washington Post
... The recession has changed the conversation in America. As the era of conspicuous consumption fades along with our 401(k)s, people are clamoring for caps on executive pay and recoiling at the idea of bosses cavorting at expensive spas. At play dates and happy hours, friends are swapping recipes instead of making restaurant reservations. Teenagers are skipping flashy block-long limos and showing up to prom in minivans. Coupons has become a more popular search term than Britney Spears on Google.

Instead of feeling self-conscious about spending less, people are flaunting their frugality. Both those who have lost income, such as Walker, and those who simply fear they may become at risk are part of the new discourse.

"Something very deep has changed in the American psyche," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke. "The recession basically woke us up."

... Such large numbers have helped normalize a new, more thrifty pattern of consumer behavior, Ariely said. In other words, being cheap has become socially acceptable.
(5 June 2009)

Tales of Tent City
Ben Ehrenreich, The Nation
"This is the bigger picture," said John Kraintz, with a sweep of his arm, indicating the roughly two dozen remaining tents pitched around him on a muddy, pockmarked field between the city dump and the slow green waters of the American River. Kraintz is a thin man of 57, a former electrician who had lived in Sacramento's parks and riverside lots for seven years. His home had been right here--in Tent City.

Kraintz had relocated to Tent City's outer boroughs. Its downtown, which briefly attracted camera crews from all over the world--a Third World shantytown in the capital of the richest state in the richest country!--was a couple of hundred yards away. Depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 150 and 300 people lived in Tent City between November and April. But by the third week in April, when I visited, most had already packed up. Some had migrated to this spot to avoid police attention. But the cops came, handing out notices announcing, "It is unlawful to camp in the City of Sacramento" and giving people two days to leave. ("This is not camping--we're living!" yelled one of Kraintz's neighbors.) By the end of the week, everyone had left. Tent City, for that moment at least, had disappeared.

Few people there, though, doubted that it would be back. Tent City is less a single location than a nomadic but constant phenomenon, a shifting blue-tarped shadow to the glass and steel American metropolis.
(3 June 2009)

Econocide: Body Count 3
Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com
After David B. Kellermann, the chief financial officer of beleaguered mortgage giant Freddie Mac, tied a noose and hanged himself in the basement of his Vienna, Virginia, home, the New York Times made it a front-page story. The stresses of the job in economic tough times, its reporters implied, had driven him to this extreme act.

"Binghamton Shooter" Jiverly Wong also garnered front-page headlines nationwide and set off a cable news frenzy when, "bitter over job loss," he massacred 13 people at an immigration center in upstate New York. Similarly, coverage was brisk after Pittsburgh resident Richard Poplawski, "upset about recently losing a job," shot four local police officers, killing three of them.

But where was the front-page treatment when, in January, Betty Lipply, a 72-year-old resident of East Palestine, Ohio, "who feared she'd lose her home to foreclosure hanged herself to death" shortly after "receiving her second summons and foreclosure complaint from her mortgage lender"? And where was the up-to-the-minute cable news reporting on the two California dairy farmers who "killed themselves... out of despair over finances, according to associates"?

Mass Murder, Mass Media, and Missing Stories

Last summer, in the pages of the Nation magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich called attention to people turning to "the suicide solution" in response to the burgeoning financial crisis. Months later, major news outlets started to examine the same phenomenon. Last fall, a TomDispatch report on suicides and a range of other extreme acts -- including self-inflicted injury, murder, arson, and armed self-defense -- in response to foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, and layoffs, was followed, months later, by mainstream media attention to the notion of "econo-cide" -- prompted, in large part, by a spate of familicides (murder/suicides in which both parents and their children die).

While it's impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones, that contribute to people resorting to drastic measures, violent or otherwise, many press reports suggest that the global economic crisis has played no small part in a range of extreme acts.

An analysis by TomDispatch of national, regional, and local news reports in 2008 and early 2009 indicates that a silent, nationwide epidemic of drastic measures may be underway.
(5 June 2009)

Economic Downturn Brings Stress To Life At Work And At Home
April Baer, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Problems in the economy make work a less enjoyable place to be. But the fiscal crunch also means big changes in workers’ home life.

Today, our occasional series on the recession, continues, as we meet a young woman in a supposedly recession-proof industry, who still finds herself in hard times.

The twenty seconds Bonnie Warren takes to walk from her car to her front door are perhaps the calmest twenty seconds in her day.

The minute Warren gets home from work, she’s the center of all the attention her four-year old daughter Fae has to offer. And that’s a lot of attention.
(26 May 2009)
Related:
Tight Economy Forces Some Couples To Live Apart (NPR)
What Good is Happiness, It Can't Buy You Money (Sightline Daily)