The basic American dream for a huge swath of Americans is to have their own home, a good job, or jobs, a good family life with a couple of kids, and all the other basic accouterments that come with being in the most recognizable version of the middle class which is a fair and reasonable goal to aim for, and pretty much de rigueur of attainable achievements.
The thing, though, that often seems to be the most insidious destroyer of them all, is the loss of employment, for that very loss, can be and has been for many a good American, the actual beginning of the end of not only a pretty good life, but the ultimately the loss of everything that made that life good to begin with. When it comes to working, in our modern age, most people, in one form or another, do not work for themselves, as in owning their own business, having their own trade, farming their own land, and so on and so forth, but rather are working for somebody else, and therein lies the potential problem, for when you are not the master of your own domain, but essentially are a servant or employee to somebody else, you may well find, that your value to your employer can literally plummet overnight, and if that indeed just happens, it may well change everything, and not in a good way.
When you have a job, for many Americans, even those that have degrees, tons of experience, professional skills, up-to-date in their professional abilities, personable, conscientious, and all that sort of stuff, your job, may easily be that type of job, in which, unbeknownst to you, is actually vulnerable to unanticipated employment disruption. Further to the point, you are employed at will, or, even if not, can be dismissed without foreknowledge for various dubious reasons and thereby your means of employment, the very thing that literally puts food on table, a roof over your head, protects your family, and that many people defined themselves as, is effectively gone.
It would be one thing, if the sudden departure of your job, often lead to other opportunities which were just as good or better, as opposed to the rather frequent reality of it, in which your salary and job opportunities are basically literally eviscerated, so that those that use to have something and now find that they are earning close to little or nothing, will become in a relatively short period of time suffering the privations of a life that has completely fallen apart, and as bad as that is, the conscious realism that things are not ever going to get better. Those type of life changes, sudden, unexpected, and completed undesired, will take a man of magnanimity, virtue, and grace and turn him into a vulnerable, defeated man that has been reduced to a mere shadow of his former self.
The long and short of it is as follows, for those that used to make good money, finding employment at 50% of your previous salary will often be not nearly enough to stop catastrophe, which means that when everything of value is gone or is being inexorably depleted, that a future good life has been reduced to pathetic wishful thinking, which will hollow out a man to his very core, and place him effectively amongst the walking dead, never to rise, for he is nevermore.