This is one of the best and most disturbing reads I’ve had in a long long time

While members of the precariat by definition have access to jobs, albeit without any job security or obvious possibilities of future advancement, being part of the unnecessariat gives no access to jobs and no future as such. What the unnecessariat does have is access to drugs and other means of suicide:

»Looking back from 2016, one pertinent characteristic seems obvious: no matter how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t. Don’t, won’t, and know it.«

But unlike other social detonations in the past, there are no actual communities to mitigate — not to say fight back against — the hopeless conditions of the unnecessariat:

»If you want a quick shorthand, your community is the set of people you could plausibly ask to watch your cat for a week, and the people they would in turn ask to come by and change the litterbox on the day they had to work late. There’s nothing like that for addicts, nor suicides, not now and not in the past […]«

And then Trump happened…