The focus of this article is offensive. They pull you in with a headline about suicidal youth and the whole thing is about reinforcing the importance of employment for the good of IngSoc.
The word jobless is the most prominate in this article, implying (deliberately) that the source of the problem is unemployment. That there needs to be a stronger focus on worthwhile employment and satisfaction, ie. having a purpose in life.
The article also mentions that the labor department is doing "everything it can" to address the problem, and yet it grows. This is telling you something. It's telling you that employment and wages are not the issue here.
In High School, there came the day. The day when we'd talk about what happens after school. If you had money, you were only thinking about college. The rest of us were thinking about work. We all had miserable boomer parents. Little by little, we all realized that they were pitifully unhappy. That getting up and going to work in a dead-end, dull job as custodians to other people's money was our destiny. Even bringing home six figures would leave you utterly miserable. Some of us had parents who would go straight from the front door to the bottle. But we had one or both parents in a constant state of complaint. Learning about Rush hour traffic took the excitment out of owning a car. The daily grind and the stranger-friendly work environments were apparently soul-eroding. Their families, us, were of dubious comfort because there was never enough money to make things right.
Once we realized it wasn't just our own homes, it was everyone, we spent the rest of the day in stone cold silence. Helplessly drawn inward to ponder our unhappy futures. Escape seemed the only option, but we couldn't get surgery to make us sexy or money to take a big risk. Becoming an entertainer, sports star, millionaire, we all knew the odds. We knew that we weren't winners.
One by one my friends and I would have private conversations about suicide. They were really about hopelessness, and they had the same themes.
"What have we got to look forward to?" All I can do here is give you a big list. - After our 20s, we are only going to get older. Get sicker. Get tired. Loose our hopes, our light and our way. We will become what we hate about adults and we can't stop it. - All systems of change and justice are in control of the biggest, meanest opportunists who ever lived. There will be no revolution. - Crime, death, war all keep increasing with their weapons closely following suit. It's only a matter of time until something REALLY bad happens. (In 1993, eight years before 9/11. What do you think the kids who saw /that/ are worried about?) - Money is getting more and more worthless. At the current rate of inflation we will all be broke, and begging for food at some point. - The Environment is Screwed and Nobody is Doing Anything to Fix it. By the time we're all 60, we will need special appliances just to breathe. - Everything good is going away. Everything bad is growing. Every new solution comes with two new problems. - We're overpopulated out of control and will run out of everything we need in under a century barring some miracle we don't deserve. - Having children or planning to raise children in such a world as this one is cruel by default and literally inhumane. - Anyone who is not aware of this is either ignorant or in denial.
Shouldn't someone have told us it wasn't like this? Nobody did. We learned this from our parents, our elders and our televisions. We knew these were the best years of our lives and their not even that good. We knew that if we lived long enough, we'd stop enjoying life and live in spite of ourselves like everyone else.
I mean, why would you want to go on living?
Fortunately for some of us, we found reasons anyway. We found them in strange places. Some of us joined fringe groups, some found an avenue of study or that special person who made it all seem less terrible. Maybe in a few cases it was a new career, but whatever it was we found a reason to smile. Something to do tomorrow that made today worth dealing with.
And here's the BBC with an unhelpful doctrine that says a busy person is a happy person.