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Marriage vs. Unemployment
Dear Work Friend,
My husband is a very smart and capable person, but he became very sick in early 2020, and he has barely worked since then, despite tirelessly applying for positions. What can he do?
We recently moved so I could go to graduate school for music, but the stress of trying to make enough money to live on (even with help from my mom) has made it nearly impossible to focus and develop my skills. It’s literally ruining my life.
Currently he is doing an online master’s program in computer science, but I worry that this will not improve his prospects. I don’t really want to get divorced, but I think about it constantly. It’s just too hard trying to support two adults as a nonprofit administrator. I can’t live this way for the next 30-40 years.
Thanks for your help,
Anonymous
I nodded and winced with sympathy through the first two paragraphs of your letter as I thought about the pressures of chronic illness, unemployment and financial strain.
And then I got to the phrase “online master’s program in computer science.”
At this point I stopped nodding, cocked my head to the side, and squinted my eyes in an expression of polite bafflement — the “Tucker Carlson.” I think you are right to worry that this will not improve his prospects. “Learn to code” is no longer a panacea for the unemployed, if it ever was. The number of job openings for entry-level workers in the tech industry has been stagnant for a while, and a master’s alone is not going to help when every new job listing has thousands of applicants, especially given the long gaps in your husband’s résumé. A strong professional network might give him an edge, but it’s hard to form one at a grad program you attend from your living room.
But my real concern reading your letter is not simply that the online master’s program is probably a waste of time and money, but that your husband is using it to hide from responsibility for your finances and your relationship.
There are many very good and rigorous online degree programs, but there are also some whose practical function is to help students avoid the burdens of real life under the cover of productivity. I think it’s telling that you, the stably employed partner, are emailing me to solicit employment ideas, rather than your husband, who actually needs them.
So before you even get to doling out advice, you need to sit down with your husband and tell him that the stress you feel about money is making you miserable, and that you guys need to come up with a plan to mitigate your dread about the future. You will know the most diplomatic way to communicate your distress. But you need to be honest with him that the current situation is unsustainable for you, and he needs to be part of the solution.
I’m not saying your husband must quit his master’s program. But he should have a plan beyond graduating and heading to LinkedIn. At a minimum he should be seeking internships, soliciting informational interviews, attending meet-ups and other networking events, and doing whatever he can to build a portfolio, gain experience, and augment his chances at actually finding a job.
And he should probably be doing more than that, given your misery and exhaustion. Could he get a part-time job serving coffee, waiting tables, or stocking shelves to help ease the pressure you feel to provide for both of you? If he needs to stay at home, could he find remote work in fields like tutoring, editing, transcription or customer service? Or maybe something more oriented toward a future career in software, like QA testing, data entry, or freelance web design? Finally, if his illness is preventing him from finding work entirely, can he augment your income with disability payments?
The point of this conversation is not to fix your difficult problems overnight (it won’t), nor to permanently solve the eternal troubles of money, jobs and relationships (it can’t). It’s to ensure that the tasks of thinking, worrying, and doing something about these issues is shared between both of you.
To that end, if you can scrape together the resources, I would suggest that part of your plan involve couples’ counseling. If that’s out of reach, you should at the very least be setting deadlines and clarifying expectations, so that neither partner is operating under false assumptions about the other’s feelings or needs.
Unless you fix the dynamic that has you emailing advice columnists on behalf of your husband after working all day to support him, I worry that no amount of employment-seeking guidance will help.
An Anti-A.I. Moral Stance?
Hello Work Friend,
I am a data analyst at a start-up. I have been doing my job for a while, and I’m good at it. Lately, all of my peers are diving head first into using A.I. and agents to complement their work.
I am torn on what to do myself. I can see all of the places in my work where A.I. could automate some time-consuming parts of the job, or make it easier to pick out trends when looking at performance across many axes. But I am morally against A.I.s. They have stolen the real work of countless humans, and they (and the data centers behind them) are climate nightmares.
Should I swallow my pride and try to be the best employee I can be for my company? Or should I risk being left behind?
Mike in Massachusetts
Whatever you do, you shouldn’t use artificial intelligence simply “to be the best employee you can be.” Compromising a deeply felt ethical stance simply to impress your bosses and get an data-analyst-of-the-month certificate — or whatever your start-up offers to its best boys — simply isn’t worth it.
But compromising a deeply felt ethical stance to make your life a little easier? To eliminate some tedious busy work and buy yourself a few hours to zone out on a workday afternoon? Now that’s a bargain worth considering.
I’m joking, but only sort of. It seems to me that practical questions of effect are important here: Will using A.I. make your life better? Or leave you the same amount of miserable — and feeling guilty for crossing your own line, to boot?
Of course, the same practical questions apply from the other direction. What’s your goal in refusing to use A.I.? Saving your immortal soul? Throwing a small wrench in the enormous cogs of capital? Will refusing its use do anything to stop its relentless advancement, or just make you feel righteous?
A.I. boosters and critics alike often talk about the technology in revolutionary — if not apocalyptic — terms, which can make the risks of using A.I. (or not) feel overwhelming. To use A.I. feels like participating in morally bankrupt process of technological exploitation, on the one hand; to refuse it feels like consigning yourself to obsolescence and unemployment.
But the stakes are just not that high. If you decline to use A.I., you may end up working a bit harder than your peers, but the process of adopting A.I. will occur over a long timeline, in stops and starts, and the risk of being left fatally and irreversibly behind is low. At the same time, your individual decision to use it won’t make a huge difference to the tech companies you’re wary of on their march to economic domination.
Which is why my recommendation is to refuse the choice you’re offering yourself. Why not use A.I. in circumscribed and deliberate ways to make your work life better? You won’t be refused entry to heaven because you prompted Claude to organize a data set and saved yourself some time and eye strain.
Meanwhile, you could channel your outrage into organized political action rather than an individual ethical choice by joining and supporting climate or labor advocacy groups that are thoughtfully working on the issue. If you’re morally against A.I., you owe yourself and the people in your community more than just a private protest.
The post My Husband Can’t Get a Job. Should I Divorce Him? appeared first on New York Times.
