Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness.
Psychological studies indicate that unemployment is bad even if you can still live comfortably. (A reliable stream of anecdotes for extreme variants of this observation comes from lottery winners.)
The thing is, HN is a very startup- and hacker-centric community. One of the properties of a hacker is that they always find something to occupy themselves with, even when they don't have a formal day job.
Most people are not like this. Once they're out of a job, they don't really know what to do with themselves. This causes them a lot of stress and unhappiness.
Over time, they will convince themselves that they are actually happy in their welfare-dependent unemployed state. We humans can so easily fool ourselves.
The truth is that for most people (but probably not for many of the HN-type) unemployment causes a lot of psychological suffering.
Psychological studies indicate that unemployment is bad even if you can still live comfortably. (A reliable stream of anecdotes for extreme variants of this observation comes from lottery winners.)
The thing is, HN is a very startup- and hacker-centric community. One of the properties of a hacker is that they always find something to occupy themselves with, even when they don't have a formal day job.
Most people are not like this. Once they're out of a job, they don't really know what to do with themselves. This causes them a lot of stress and unhappiness.
Over time, they will convince themselves that they are actually happy in their welfare-dependent unemployed state. We humans can so easily fool ourselves.
The truth is that for most people (but probably not for many of the HN-type) unemployment causes a lot of psychological suffering.