Dole Scum

It's coming up to month number four on the dole for me now. Don't get me wrong, I was pretty miserable when I was working. Life is indeed like that famous Smiths' song. I'm pretty anti-capitalist in a slightly hypocritical way and I think being on the dole forever is a totally valid life-style choice and the notion that to be a valuable member of society means you spend 40 hours a week working a job because life oughtta revolve around money is actually pretty ludicrous. However, after a while, being at home alone does start to get you down when all your friends are either working or doing phds or whatever. And being from a nice middle-class background I don't wanna go on about being skint too much as I know I will never end up homeless, but nonetheless it's not fun. Mind you, most of my friends with jobs are skint as well.

I've been on the dole several times before. The longest was when I lived in Brighton. I was on the dole there for about six months. I had all these lofty romantic ideas about how I was going to write loads and stare at the sea. Did I do that? Did I bollocks. I stayed in and neurotically checked my myspace (this was back in 2007) and facebook and emails and drank cider and felt directionless, pretty similar to now.
I feel like the way I interact with the world is to react to the things that happen around me or to me, so -despite going on about initiative on my application forms- initiating anything by myself is never much of a goer. I need constant external stimuli, I need to be pushed and moving all the time. I write much better under pressure. If I have all the time in the world I will invariably do nothing which is really what's happened lately. I am also an extrovert exhibitionist and I always need people around me to be interacting with. I feel like there's no point in doing anything if no one's going to see it, so the patient process of writing and editing something, well, I just can't handle all that alone time. Hence facebook habits. I always wonder what books would never have been written or what films would never have been made had facebook been around for the past 100 years. Because no one wants to feel alone and facebook promises you constant company but it's not really sufficient.
I have a friend, well, a facebook friend, and I'd like to think if we ever got to spend time together we'd be friends in real life, who has just finished his second novel, but he posts on facebook so many times a day. How does that work? How does he do it?

I don't want to rely on the insistence that unless you work or are in full time education your life is pointless, but I crave some kind of structure imposed upon me. I wish I was like those ballet dancers you see on documentaries (what? 'Black Swan' wasn't a documentary?!) who are so focused that nothing else matters. I mean I don't wanna be a ballet dancer but I want to be so focused it's unhealthy and I'm completely unbalanced, instead of the other way round. And I don't mean so focused on work and being a valuable capitalist money-earning subject, I mean on anything. And the less I leave the house the less focused on anything in particular I feel.

Yeah, so a little self-indulgent rant there. On the upside I just got on Spotify. I know, about three years after everyone else and I can only listen to it for twenty hours and there's loads of adverts. And the above Pet Shop Boys song is brill.