“I searched on Google to see how I can commit suicide,” a good friend of mine told me a few days ago. Troubled, I asked her why she did this, and she replied that the reality she is experiencing has psychologically crushed her.
“I feel a huge weight; I am drowned, I see no prospect,” she continued as I asked her what led her to such a thought.
She is a 36-year-old woman, well educated and very good in the field that she has been working in for the last eighteen years.
However, it seems like these successes are not enough when you are forced to survive in Greece, where you have to ask every month for your salary, call or send e-mails to your boss reminding him that he has to pay your accrued income.
Accounts are running but wages at the greek private sector are given every two to three months. And because I’ve experienced it in the past, I’m telling you that it’s a pretty arduous process.
But it’s not only that. What, as my friend said, has psychologically broken her, is the fact that as good as you are in the field you work, you are not evolving. As a result, the employee “locks” his/her creativity and productivity, and works like a robot on a daily basis. There are, of course, cases of exploitation where talented employees are forced to produce more work and work more hours a day but the salary remains the same.
Reading the above, there are many who will think that these are no such reasons to consider suicide, and I would probably agree if I did not know how difficult it is to be an employee in Greece today.
There are so many difficulties that people have to face in our country that are sometimes surreal. People are at risk of depression - which has risen dramatically over the last eight years in Greece - and thus has led to some form of self-destruction.
My friend’s case is one of the many I hear every day from capable people who have been fighting for a better future for so many years, and now they see only a wall in front of them. Unfortunately, this situation will not change, at least for the coming decade. Instead, the new austerity measures that will be implemented from 2019, which were voted by a left-wing government (!), will even worsen the situation in colonial Greece.
