Marie Jahoda's latent deprivation model says a job quietly supplies five things people rarely notice until they are gone: a structure to the day, contact with people outside the family, a shared purpose larger than yourself, a status and identity you can state in one sentence, and enforced regular activity. The model grew out of the 1933 Marienthal study, in which Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Zeisel spent six months living with an Austrian mill town whose only factory had closed; the striking finding was not poverty but a slowed, apathetic community whose days had lost their shape. The model has since been measured directly. Paul, Scholl, Moser, Zechmann and Batinic (2023, Frontiers in Psychology) pooled 106 studies; across 56 samples covering about 48,000 people, employed people reported more of every one of the five than unemployed people, with status showing the biggest gap and social contact the smallest, and across 134 samples the five together accounted for roughly a fifth of the differences in mental health. So when a job ends, five separate supports end at once. You can now name which of the five you have actually lost, instead of treating the whole experience as one undifferentiated bad feeling.
The latent deprivation model, from occupational and social psychology, holds that employment provides five unpaid psychological benefits beyond income — time structure, social contact, collective pur…