Unemployed people in:
1990:
- Wake up
- Have breakfast
- Chill
- Dad finds you a job
2002:
- Meet up with friends
- Binge-watch a movie
- Enjoy sunny weekends
- Friends connect you to a job
2026:
In 1994, Jean-Claude Van Damme was doing 10 grams of cocaine a day. That same year he released Timecop, a $102 million hit that is still the biggest of his career. Peak flexibility and peak addiction, on camera at the same time.
The money arc is steep even by Hollywood standards. He made $25,000 for Bloodsport in 1988. Six years later, Capcom paid him $8 million for Street Fighter. The habit consumed $10,000 a week of it.
The Street Fighter director said Van Damme kept vanishing from set, so they rewrote scenes on the fly to shoot around him. The studio hired a handler to keep him on track. The handler turned out to be a worse influence than the drugs.
By 1998 he was straight-to-video. Then came the part nobody talks about: rehab lasted one week. He walked out, quit 10 grams a day cold turkey, and replaced the cocaine with the same training that built the kicks, five years of which was ballet, the discipline he called harder than any sport he ever tried.
The proof arrived in 2013. At 53, he stood on the wing mirrors of two Volvo trucks reversing at 25 km/h down a Spanish runway and dropped into a full split. Three days of rehearsal for the trucks.
The split itself took one take.