Well, if you want to get all quantitative, imagine the number of people you've helped versus the number of people you've made feel like shit.
I mean seriously, 48K a year not that good?
You simply can't justify that in an unemployment thread. Sorry.
If you gross 48k it's really not
that much. If you actually net 48k, then sure it's pretty nice. You have to take into consideration the geographical location and the actual living expenses in the area on top of any personal debt or expenses you may have. If I lived in LA, for example, I'd need to make $55,000 per year just to maintain my current standard of living. Minimum wage in most states isn't enough for people to actually live on, in an apartment on their own, without roommates or anything of the sort. The minimum I can make to support myself is $13.65 an hour - and that's with 0 savings, just barely scraping by. You're right that 48k gross or net is definitely better than nothing, but it's certainly not a lot by today's standards.
A lot of people that are unemployed are generally going for the service industry - i.e. cooks, waiters/waitresses, customer service representatives, manual labor, warehouse workers, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of competition in the unskilled jobs category from both people that don't have degrees/training for specific jobs and those that can't find jobs in their actual career fields of choice. It's completely saturated and it's a no brainer as to why people struggle to get employment. If you develop a skill that's truly needed it tends to be more difficult for your position to be eliminated or for you to be let go - while people that deliver pizza or push carts at a grocery store are a dime a dozen.
I was unemployed in college and I was living off ramen and pepsi. Or, when I could afford it, I'd buy a package of chicken and/or sausage, freeze them and then eat literally nothing but a chicken breast or sausage link each day. I was scraping together money off writing generic knowledgebase articles for web hosting companies and selling them online. I actually had to move in with my grandmother for a while and I hated every minute of it - I was living in a basement and got to listen to mice scrabbling under my bed at night. Setting up mouse traps didn't help because they'd get caught at 2 am and I'd be woken up by a half dead mouse flopping around on the floor.
So, yeah, I've been in the same situation as a lot of the people here - no job, no money, and when I was employed it was some place shitty like a grocery store pushing carts or at a CVS. If you feel like shit because I've worked my way up to what I have now, then get creative and do something about it. The position I have now I'm 100% self-taught - no degree, no certifications, though I do plan on going to get my degree within the next couple of years.
Like I said, I've been unemployed, missed rent, had late payments, couldn't sleep at night because I was so stressed out over how I was going to make the next payment on my car, and suffered through several months of overdraft hell where I kept ending up $400 or so negative on my bank account in overages and fees, would barely make it back to positive only to be negative again when the next bill came in.
And here I am now, mildly successful and just over 2 years into an industry I love. We tend to have multiple parties having discussions in this thread - those that are employed and those that are unemployed. I see no real issues with it, personally, as I rarely talk about myself and spend most of my time in this thread trying to give advice based on my own experiences and help other people out, or to post up job openings at my employer when they're available in the hopes that I can get a gaffer a job. So don't act like I don't know what it's like to be in their shoes.