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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

> Be honest about it with the people around you. If you think your partner and friends will look at you unfavorably because you don't have a job, then they're not really on your side and you are better off without them.

I think that last one is pretty damaging the way you wrote it. I would slightly change this to say "Be honest about it with the people around you, if your friends or partner evidently look at you unfavourably, then consider whether they're on your side or if it would be worth trying to keep them around, a direct serious conversation can sometimes do wonders for your relationships, and socially isolating yourself can sometimes be useful but oftentimes costly. (or something to this effect, leaning on tangibly being unsupported by your personal relationships rather than vague notions of anticipated rejection)

Merely anticipating people might not look at you favourably is kind of a separate issue.

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Fair-weather friends are not true friends.

If unemployment can help you get rid of people that saved your contact as "Free food", that's a great thing.

That’s true, but neither are leeches. There’s a limit to everything.

Haha, this is so true. It literally happened to me once when I threw a large party at my place and one lady set it in her calendar as "gourmet food" and tried to bring her friends as well.

That's funny, I guess it completely depends on context how that might be interpreted. If she had a reputation for being a leech, negative, but otherwise I think it would be kind of funny or a compliment. At least I'm doing the food right

To be clear, my comment was basically about being your own destructive force, less so about dealing with real perceived judgement.

Unemployment can be inherently isolating. If you surround yourself with status-seeking judgemental people, that's probably not a resilient social circle, but you shouldn't project your own negative perception of yourself and try to preemptively avoid rejection

You don't want to isolate yourself, that's is for sure.

You also don't want to build relationships based solely on commiseration and draining others.

But you need to have some form of support from your close circle of friends.

Absolutely. I do wonder though what circles people are traveling in these days where they'd they'd straight up be alienated purely for that purpose. I would think the more likely situation would be too much attention from an overbearing set of family members, depending on wealth class maybe and ethnic background

> think your partner and friends will look at you unfavorably because you don't have a job

Friends, 100%. But I can see being uncomfortable sharing such information with a partner. Not because they'll think less of you. But because it could stress them out. (You should obviously still be honest.)

Wait, you're saying if you lost your job you wouldn't tell your partner?!

I'm thinking of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnconfessedUnemp...

I regularly joke with my wife that I'm going to tell her I need to start going into the office 5 days a week, but tell my coworkers I still work from home most days.

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