4 Work and Unemployment
The insupportable Labour of doing nothing.— Sir Richard SteeleFull- time workers spend at least a quarter of their waking
life at work.^1 But sad to say, on average, they enjoy that time
less than anything else they do. The worst time of all is
when they are with their boss.^2
Even so, people hate it even more if they are unemployed.
This is not just because they lose money from being out of
work. They lose something even more precious— a sense of
contributing, of belonging, and of being wanted.
In this chapter we explore all these issues, focusing again
on people under 65. We first look at unemployment— how
much it hurts, whether you can adapt to it, what legacy it
leaves, the role of local unemployment rates, and what de-
termines who becomes unemployed. Only then do we turn
to the quality of work.
Unemployment
The pain caused by the experience of unemployment is
one of the best- documented findings in all happiness re-
search.^3 Most unemployed people are struggling and less
happy than when they were in work. For the same reason
they become happier when they get back to work.^4 We can
document this most clearly from the panel studies, but first
we can use the British Cohort Study to look at how satisfied