As of last September, one in 20 Americans over the age of 12 suffered from depression. And that was even before the markets really went to shit and everyone seemingly lost their jobs at once. Now, stuck at home and doing the occasional freelance job, many full-time writers are finding themselves stuck in a rut. (Turns out that blogging about your unemployment situation may bad for the economy.)

Friends Without Benefits

"'I am a welder,' or 'I am a teacher,'" says David, a 22-year-old freelance writer, "We define ourselves like that: 'David, Freelance writer.' And most people have a place they go and meet other people who are like them because they all define themselves similarly. So working from home can be really isolating." Ironically, many of David's peers share his experience of loneliness and lack of motivation working from home.

Alli used to work at the Philadelphia Weekly until several months ago. Then they cut back their staff to avoid going bankrupt like all the city's other papers. But Alli says not going to an office everyday doesn't bother her.
"I'm not depressed," Alli tells me indignantly, "I mean I am, 'cause I can't get a job and for some reason you get paid, but the only real downside to working from/not working from home is that it's so dang easy to be distracted," adding, "and to sleep until one—and order pizza all the time."

But that sounds like a college graduate's dream! And in many ways, the line "But there's just no jobs right now, mom!" isn't really an excuse. When I ask Alli why she doesn't just get a job delivering the pizza she loves so much, she sighs. "Hell, I might, but I live in a neighborhood where food service jobs are in high-demand. Lots of artists and activists and stuff who have done this stuff before," which strikes me as a particularly sad statement about today's once-idealistic youth. "Plus, I can't drive, so I can't do delivery." Welp, there goes that idea.

Perhaps summing up the not-working from home scenario best is Richard, a currently unemployed video editor. How does spending all day in your underwear feel? "Lazy. Freeing. Sad." Good times.

You wish you could multitask like this guy

Are the Unemployed Taking Your Job?
Of course, the biggest fear that Internet writers have is that the currently unemployed bloggers among us are generating free content as pleasure and saturating a market that is already scarce with jobs that pay. In October, the New York Times quoted Andrew Keen telling us not to worry:
a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. … I’m pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice.

Which brings us back to the age-old (okay, years-old) question: Is blogging work if you don't get paid for it?

In the same Times article, author/blogger Clay Shirky is mentioned in regards to a post he wrote about Wikipedia. When asked by a friend in the television industry where people find the time to do all those minute edits and engage in Star Wars triva slap-fights, a light went off in his head. He worked out a calculation that proved that Wikipedia, in total, represented about 100 million hours of thought. The amount of time in a year that people collectively spend watching television? 200 billion hours.

Idling Away the Hours

So our desire to blog incessantly isn't the cause of our boredom or ennui, but rather one way of staving it off. In previous decades, being an unemployed 20 or 30-something meant that you sat on the couch all day and watched Married with Children. Today the isolation may feel the same, but because of the Internet, your impact is much greater. Consciously or unconsciously, you are contributing free labor and simultaneously keeping your brain occupied. Whether or not that's a boon to those of us still in the writing profession has yet to be determined.