"You can't eat scenery" - My decade of rural under-employment
Throughout the 2010's I was stranded in Ayrshire, unable to find a proper job, left with gallons of time to kill and miles of open countryside to roam. I am shocked to find myself missing those times.
“These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes…so you depend on them.” The Shawshank Redemption (Stephen King)
Three years ago, this country was still in the grip of COVID and a prolonged second (or third) lockdown. For a great many people, the immobilisation was suffocating and demoralising. For me, it was in many respects a continuation of a way of life to which I had become accustomed.
Over the course of the 2010’s, I increasingly found myself ‘at a loose end’, seemingly washed up on the Ayrshire coast, figuratively wandering the desolate landscape of the post-2008 financial crash, which seemed reified in the rugged foothills and idyllic woodlands that characterise the gerrimandered county of North Ayrshire. In the brittle Buyer’s job market post-2008, frontline jobs were being casualised, HR departments were inventing new drawbridges for whittling down the hundreds of completed applications per vacancy, and most of my many, many job applications went unanswered. The 16+ hrs/week threshold became a glass ceiling. From 2009 to 2014 I found myself trapped in a seasonal zero-hours contract in Paisley. From 2014 to 2021 - what I term the Nebuchadnezzar years - I disappeared off the PAYE radar altogether. Throughout 2014, I experienced wave after wave of anger, despair and boredom as under-employment gave way to long-term unemployment. Like the infamous Babylonian emperor who thought himself invincible, I found myself cast into the wilderness for seven years, reduced to an animal braying amid the long grass.
A decade on, three years into my cleaning career - and having recently sent a very large cheque to the taxman to plug the huge National Insurance shortfall - and I am astonished to find that I look back on these protracted periods of rural idleness with nostalgia, even longing. In recent months, I’ve started experiencing rose-tinted flashbacks: the sight of a bright green knoll being grazed by cattle; a tree-lined road glittering in the early afternoon sun; a visit to a small rural cafe; even striding through the offices in a southerly direction towards sunlit windows - these vivid sights now trigger recollections of days when I had to fill the long empty hours by climbing the Ayrshire foothills, trekking south from Largs to West Kilbride, or drifting casually in and around the town centres of ‘Doon the Watter’ settlements. Memories which, strangely, are no longer stained with the feelings of fear and frustration that defined my rural isolation throughout the Wilderness Years.
Throughout much of these work-scarce times, I had every reason to feel afraid and frustrated. My bank balance kept bouncing off the bottom as I found myself trapped in a Bermuda Triangle of under-employment, self-employment and total unemployment. Early in the 2010’s, my STEM skillset had withered on the vine, and the years of encroaching house arrest only accelerated the erosion of soft and technical skills. The periods of total unemployment and signing on at Saltcoats JobCentrePlus ushered in another fear - of being conscripted to the modern-day ‘workhouse’ (of being made to toil in some warehouse or courier job), or face sanctions. For us UC claimants, the Amazon Warehouse in Gourock with its exhausting 12-hour night shifts and Hire & Fire culture cast a long shadow across the Clyde coast. I managed to dodge these bullets by selling items on eBay, by offering academic proofreading services to students - but self-employment is precarious, and I never could secure a regular, reliable income.
Silver linings and Normalisation
My family relations and I are still coming to terms with the fact that, after many years of sitting at home, I am back in full-time employment. Dare I say it, being unemployed or working from home wasn’t all bad. I was at home and available nearly all the time. I could visit other people at a time which suited them. I helped my parents look after the grandchildren. Most of all, I was available to house-sit and look after my siblings’ pets, and help them with flitting, assembling furniture, or transporting a great tottering mass of junk to the recycling centre (the ‘cowp’ as we say around here).
Similar benefits (no, not social security benefits) of being out of work and chilling at home are described by the Christian writer Nwamaka Onyekachi. The famous self-help guru Eckhart Tolle has written at length on his own experiences of unemployment, which forced him to simplify his life, minimise spending and consumption, and fill the void with meditation and useful activity - in essence, to reconfigure his expectations and self-perception, debunking the belief of “I am jobless, therefore I am intrinsically worthless and not even worth knowing”.
Further, I wasn’t alone. Especially in the ‘Three towns’, Largs, Greenock, Rothesay and other settlements around the Firth of Clyde, I encountered many other adults who struggled in itinerant employment, who were retired, or had bailed out the job market altogether. For 14 years, Largs was my local town: a retirement seaside hub full of pensioners stirring their lattes, a few children and teenagers milling around, and lots of scruffy working-age adults mooching around Greggs and the local library - most living off small sums of money. (If you dislike the 9-to-5 treadmill and want to surround yourself with peers, Largs is the place for you.) During the double-dip recession years I encountered dozens of STEM students at Paisley who couldn’t find a job for jack. During my many visits to Saltcoats JobCentrePlus I found myself waiting alongside young and not-so-young men and women filling their time doing bleep all. And these people were surviving, if not thriving. To quote Dan Pena, I was in bad company, hanging around with losers. And the loser lifestyle not only is seductive, it is possible.
These seaside ‘Doon the Watter’ towns offer little treats to the idler, enough to quench the fire being lit beneath him or her. The years of almost enforced under-employment left me feeling like Tom Hank’s Mr. Navorski in The Terminal who, finding himself trapped in Homeland Security limbo in a giant airport, is at a loss as to what to do, and is told by a security officer:
“There’s only one thing you can do: Shop!”
For years I contended with making lemonade on the lemon farm, having little disposable income and very narrow expectations. These constraints have left their imprint: even now, I have no direct debits, no car, no TV, no credit history, no subscriptions, and I very rarely buy clothes or even a takeout. Being an ineligible bachelor living with parents throughout these years, I knew that dating was out of the question. Out of boredom, I’d hop on the train, or trek around the Muirshiel Hills, or sail over to Bute, or sit at promenades nibbling some sugary, greasy treats from Aulds. From 2012 onwards, I became a habitual rambler, exploring almost every back road, path and rough track around Cunninghame. During the empty summer months of 2013 and 2014, I surveyed 28 walking routes around the Firth of Clyde. With gallons of time to burn, I made impromptu videos and audio recordings and uploaded them to Youtube. I churned out hundreds of such videos. I haunted the local libraries, meeting other unemployed or self-employed individuals and pensioners marking time.
In the immortal words of a Londoner in The World at War who lived through the Blitz and rationing, “You get used to it. You can get used to anything.” And once adjusted, it is very hard to break away.
Infantilised and ‘Pensioned off’
The life of indolence - of living off the low-hanging fruits of cheap entertainments and unhealthy foods, of being left to wander around like a stray, of being left unwatched and bereft of responsibilities - is a dangerously addictive, albeit sorry, existence. In a remote Local Hero-like seaside town composed of relatively few diligent adult workers and many layabouts rich and poor, the indolent lifestyle seems less abnormal. In an economic climate of high unemployment and stubborn HR departments, it almost becomes justified. As the 2010’s dragged on, I deteriorated into something at odds with my age group: I seemed to be ‘pensioned off’ from the world of work and, worse, slowly reverted back to being a child.
Back in 2014, a few months into my long-term unemployment, in bitterness I whipped up a Youtube video ranting at the jobs market, and calling on the government to let me retire and claim a small pension. In some ways, my wish was granted.
In this era of ‘manchild’-shaming, of touch love dispensers calling out worthless ‘NEET’s, ‘incels’ and ‘chavs’, another large group of non-workers tends to be overlooked: pensioners. Especially in Largs, many pensioners live not for a few months or years, but for decades. One has to go far back in history to find two significant figures condemning the man who chooses a life of ease on a small income. Samuel Johnson made the crude entry in his dictionary: Pensioner, a slave of state. William Cobbett, arguably one of the first life coaches, had this to say about people choosing to forgo a life of work and purpose for a few pieces of silver:
“And what could induce a man to submit to this? His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table, his disregard of the precept Vivre de peu…and be it observed that indulgences of this sort…make men poor, and expose them to commit mean acts, tend also to enfeeble the body, and more especially to cloud and weaken the mind.”
Nevertheless, when I consider the inactive, unmotivated working-age adult’s character becoming stretched and skewed towards the infantile and elderly margins of Age, I know which extremity is worse. Time management is an obvious casualty as the schlub’s typical day consists not of several micro-managed time slots, but vague temporal slabs composed of two or several hours of procrastination, of eventually tiring and going for a walk, of filling in blanks - almost a form of clock-watching. One is reduced to a small child with no responsibilities, nowhere to go, nothing to do, being left to entertain oneself for long stretches of time. One of the worst aspects of total unemployment was seeing school pupils commuting around 8am-9am and returning home around 4pm, and knowing that even the kids had a purpose, had work to do, had somewhere to go and people to meet up with. I was less than a school pupil, almost a preschooler.
Jordan Peterson is not the first scholar to describe the sad phenomenon of Peter Pan Syndrome, specifically, a man in his thirties or older who remains resolutely immature, forever putting off the transition into proper adulthood of making sacrifices, delaying gratification and bearing responsibility. Even in an unforgiving economic climate, certain behaviours and decisions are inexcusable. The degeneracy among the growing numbers of male ‘boomerangs’, ‘incels’, ‘foreveralone’s rotting in bedrooms and basements in the Internet 2 era was vividly encapsulated by Perla Lundquist writing for Thumotic:
“These men are beasts in human skin: unemployed, unloved, surviving on social assistance, family support, or inheritances; waking up every day and playing video games, m******ating, watching cartoons, and sharing their lives, such as they are, with each other on internet forums. Many will never escape. They will hide in their rooms, dying one day at a time, while the years and decades slip by.”
Looking back, I know that the deterioration of my character was tempered by a certain scaffolding, that my lot during the 2010’s could have been substantially worse. For starters, I’ve never been a fan of alcohol, parties, video games or even television (which is all internet streaming services, so I am told). Living with my parents daily kept me in line - awake before 7am, in bed by 10pm, sitting at the dining table for meals, no booze or smoking, living in shared space, car-sharing and splitting the cost of petrol, paying rent each month, concealing my own feelings and opinions - without all this duress, God only knows how far more boorish, perverse, scruffy, untidy, feckless and bone idle I might have become. The two church attendances each Sunday imposed on my chaotic week a time for contrition - and a rare chance to share a room with several more useful, self-disciplined members of society.
Self-employment - the many stints of it - kept me preoccupied, occasionally busy, and forced me to delay gratification and maintain a timetable of sorts. However, the flux of work was inconsistent, and too often I was left with an entire afternoon and evening of sitting around or marching out into the hills. And oh! what delectable hills. Evening constitutionals were often rewarded with kaleidoscopic sunsets. Even when the weather wasn’t playing ball, just a walk in the woods around Skelmorlie or Fairlie with my mobile and headphones would be considered a luxury by many workers.
However, I can say with 20/20 hindsight that my strange bohemian life of periodically working from home, idling online and wandering the countryside was detrimental to my soul, and slowly making me dysfunctional. Psychology studies have shown that many adults tend to perceive themselves as younger than their real biological age.
Stranded in the countryside, I often went for days without ever seeing anyone of my generation. Looking back on my Ayrshire cum Castaway adventures, I know from my own experience that a not-so-young man deprived of regular work, responsibility, regimen and social interaction with coevals, not only ends up a half-child, half-pensioner, but subconsciously begins to identify with them, align with them. However…he lacks the vitality and natural beauty of the former, and the wisdom of the latter. Not only does his demeanour clash with age stratification, but his own perceptions become detached. He becomes the creepy, irresponsible Gary King of The World’s End, an inebriated forty-something fossil from a past era trapped in an 18-year-old mind who is shocked to discover his old school buddies are greying middle-aged men in old people’s clothes with refined mannerisms.
Sometimes, this distortion took on more vivid patterns:
One afternoon in February 2018, unemployed and bored, I paid a visit to the small wooded park in West Kilbride, where I suddenly experienced vivid flashbacks to my early childhood spent in the uncannily similar Lade Braes outside St Andrews. Part of my brain detached from the present, travelled back 30 years in time. Seeing the tall deciduous trees overlooked by the Wimpey housing estate further up the hill, the two halves of my mind were in conflict, claiming I was in two different points in time and space.
On one of those glorious first hot and sunny summer days, in late May 2019, I was striding along the cycle path from Lochwinnoch to Kilbarchan. Bathed in bright sunlight and primary colours, immersing myself in some early 90’s music, I suddenly experienced a manic episode: I’m 12 all over again, and it’s the school holidays! For about an hour, I felt almost delirious, detached from the present and its attendant worries (unemployment, low bank balance, back on UC, dreading being sent to some awful worksite, etc.).
Breaking out of the quicksand
“People must seek work…to keep striving and seeking work… Self-help on its own sounds like an empty phrase, but it doesn’t matter what help anyone else gives - unless people help themselves, nothing can happen.” (Norman Tebbit, 1981)
I can name many other people off the top of my head whose books, seminars and podcasts became the strong arms that kept tugging me as I began to sicken of being stuck at home and longed to return to the workplace - only to find that I had lost my will to break out of the comfort zone and step into the unknown.
This is the grave danger of being long-term unemployed, of spending months or years sitting at home and being left to one’s own devices: like quicksand, one sinks slowly into that way of life until it reaches chest-height, and stays there - and it takes superhuman strength to break free. The analogy of sinking into quicksand is a good one: one does not submerge underneath and sink into the bowels of the earth, but ends up half-submerged and trapped. It is possible to remain half-buried in the mud, and live for maybe a few hours before the tide returns. And the tide will slowly return - it is only a matter of time before the trapped person drowns.
Before long, the country schlub has become a broken record, and his way of life less tenable. The government steadily reduces or withdraws his social security payments. His freelance income streams remain stubbornly slim, and fleeting attempts to increase business fall flat. In his perverse undisciplined mind, surrounded by such limited pond life, he secretly fancies women who’ve been happily married for years, and girls much younger than him. The golden sandy beaches, cafes and confectionery shops, sapphire blue skies and distant hills no longer lift his spirits. Friends, family and online forum followers eventually tire of his excuses. Double-dip recession and mass layoffs, Brexit, Covid pandemic and lockdowns - these storms gradually pass. When the millions of unemployed from last decade are back in jobs, eventually the schlub finds himself standing all alone like a village idiot. He even bores himself with his own repeated thought patterns, poor decisions and same old results.
Then one night, he stumbles across a disturbing video clip of someone like him being thrown in jail - and catches a glimpse of the fate that awaits the male derelict. (In my case, a trailer for Time featuring a middle-aged man being sent down appeared in late May 2021 - and scared the hell out of me.) “Right, that’s it - I’m applying for any job I can find!” And one day, a job turns up.
Then - as happened to me in late June 2021 - something strange happens. A great psychological wall has to be scaled. Suddenly, and for no rational reason whatsoever, the seasoned loafer desperately mourns for the Neverland from whence he is about to take leave. Like the view across the Clyde to north Arran (my photo, taken when I started my touchpoint cleaning job), the sky is bluer, the clouds become polished marble, the land greener.
Looking back now, I have to say that had the cleaning job not been based at my local JobCentrePlus offices of all places, I might not have stepped across the threshold. I saw the job ad online, applied for it, was contacted by Blue Arrow and asked to show up…at my local job centre. I could not escape! Half the DWP officers there already knew me. Even so, it took a few podcasts by Michael Savage and Dan Pena to finally motivate me into putting one foot in front of the other, and marching into that familiar centre with its large green cladding and banners.
One of my job coaches, Julie, was surprised I even showed up. “So now you’re working here? You’re a glutton for punishment.” She was not aware of the sharp pens and harsh voices of the many tough love dispensers who had driven me to her desk: Pastor Steve Anderson, Alex Belfield, Ralph Emerson, CS Lewis, Dan Pena, Jordan Peterson, Michael Savage, #TheUnrealMan on Youtube…the list goes on.
My rehabilitation, my rejoining of society, was a gradual transition. For months I was only working the Saturday shift as I struggled to sustain my dying freelance editing business during the week. One of my co-workers, Michelle, thought I was mad: “Why won’t you ask the agency to give you more work? Look, I’m working three cleaning jobs.” I was simply grateful to be back on PAYE street. In November, I eventually got on the phone and asked for more work…and after a few random shifts in various offices around Glasgow, I landed a five-day-a-week position at Greenock JobCentrePlus. A few months later still, my parents and I finally escaped from Ayrshire.
Sliding Doors
Shortly after advancing to full-time employment in Greenock, I was standing at my perch near the JobCentrePlus entrance with all my sprays and cloths, watching an irate long-term claimant turn aggressive and moan bitterly about having his benefits trimmed, then claiming he had this disability and that housing cost, and this and that and the other, before storming out, his funnel belching out expletives. He was livid at being told, in polite guarded language, that he had an obligation to seek gainful employment, that he was living on his own (a luxury, in my view), and the government isn’t there to enable him to live comfortably at his own pad and spend the whole week burning taxpayers’ money on drugs and other expedients.
As soon as he stormed out onto the street, the security guards and reception desk officers sniggered, shook their heads and divulged their honest opinions. Then I contributed my own withering observation. One of the guards, a very tall, serious man named William, quietly rebuked me: “How do you know? That could have been you.”
It certainly could. In some ways, it was me.
It is only now, sitting here in Renfrewshire, when I cast my mind back that I realise how entitled and dysfunctional I had become, in spite of the scaffolding. I would waste hours, day after day, standing on the hillside ranting at my phone - like the hairy Nebuchadnezzar raving in the long grass; almost like Pinocchio’s feral friends on Pleasure Island turning into donkeys - complaining about my predicament, railing at politicians and the economy, moaning about being socially invisible. Jordan Peterson defined the Peter Pan phase, childhood, as a state of endless potential. Self-pity, dwelling on what could have been, what pleasures I felt I ought to have enjoyed - all Potential, none of it grounded in the Actual. To become an adult, one has to shed all the imaginary potentials, make the necessary sacrifices, and live in the Actual and accept its limited stock of possessions and experiences.
Even if you think you can eat scenery, you can’t.