I remember a time years ago when I was out of work and also not studying with any direction. I'd wanted to work, but work was hard to find, unemployment was high and I had no useful contacts to find an inroads job. So I'd landed on this "computer/job searching course" where me and a number of others had, bottom line, been hauled in, because we had to attend if we wanted to keep the unemplyment dole or meagre welfare dough. With the high number of unemployed around, more and more got listed/shoved in on this course which, in the end, didn't fulfil what it had been touted as doing (we'd been promised help to find a practique job after, but that was just forgotten) Soon we were 150 people in a kind of air hangar-like bulilding trying to make the days pass and with totally inadequate equipment to actively search for jobs from this place (this was just before the internet and the cell phone had become an everyday commodity...)

At the same time, I had arranged with a social secretary that I could attend some university classes at evening time (by an idiot rule, this is normaly not permitted if you're on dole or welfare). So in daytime I was with this bunch of - quite often colourful and intelligent - people who were out of work, on a course they half wished they could leave - and two nights a week I went to the university, doing a subject I knew and cared a bout and meeting students (who didn't know what I did in the daytime) - the difference in posture, manner of speaking and self-confidence was very striking.
The students felt they had their own life in their hands, even if they were aware of the risk that it could be hard to get a real opener job later. They spoke with confidence. The out-of-work people, at least some of the time, were irritated, trenchant, vulnerable and hunching; they felt they had been let down and trampled on just too many times - and they would be again. I've sometimes thought about writing a novel about those months and this tumultuous "employment course".