Perhaps one of the most potent causes of misfits in vocation is economic
necessity. The time comes in the life of most boys when they must earn
their own living or, perhaps, help support the parental family. In such a
case, a search is made for a job. Local conditions, friendship,
associations, chance vacancies--almost any consideration but that of
personal fitness governs in the choice of the job. Once a boy is in a
vocation, he is more than likely to remain in it--or, because of
unfitness, to drift aimlessly into another, for which he is even less
adapted. An entertaining writer in the "Saturday Evening Post" has shown
how the boy who accidentally enters upon his career as a day laborer soon
finds it impossible to graduate into the ranks of skilled labor. He
remains not only a day laborer, but an occasional laborer, his periods of
work interspersed with longer and longer periods of unemployment.
Unemployment means bad food, unwholesome sanitary conditions and, worst of
all, bad mental and moral states. These are followed by disease,
incompetency, inefficiency, weakness, and, in time, the man becomes one of
the unemployed and unemployable wrecks of humanity. Crime then becomes
practically the only avenue of escape from starvation or pauperism.

Thousands of young men taking a job, no matter how they may dislike the
work, feel compelled to remain in it because it is their one hope of
income. The longer they remain in it the harder it is for them to make a
change. Sad, indeed, is the case of the boy or girl who is compelled, in
order to make a living or to help support father, mother, brothers and
sisters, to drop into the first vacancy which offers itself.


RESTLESSNESS