Getting Laid Off

When your value is decided for you

Category: Career & Purpose

Sometimes you see it coming. The company’s struggling. There have been whispers. People have been let go already. You’ve been watching the pattern, hoping you’re not next. Then your manager asks for a meeting. Sometimes you don’t see it coming. You’re doing good work. Your reviews are solid. Everything seems fine. Then suddenly it’s not fine. You’re in a conference room with HR and someone’s using words like ‘restructuring’ and ’elimination of position.‘ Your position. Your job. You.

The Moment

The words don’t land immediately. You hear them. You understand them, technically. But there’s a delay between hearing and feeling. Like the sound reaches you before the meaning does. They’re professional. Prepared. They have paperwork. Severance information. Next steps. They’ve done this before. They’re efficient at ending your employment. That efficiency is its own kind of violence. You walk out with a box. Or you don’t, maybe you just get escorted out, leave your stuff behind, someone will mail it. Either way, you leave. The building you entered this morning as an employee, you exit as a former employee. Past tense. Just like that.

What Changed

Your income, obviously. The paycheck that organized your life: rent, groceries, bills, the mundane infrastructure of existence, that’s gone. Or going. Your identity. You were someone who worked there. That was a fact about you, as basic as your name. ‘I work at...’ Now you don’t. You’re someone who used to work there. Former. Ex. Past tense. Your sense of security. You thought if you worked hard, showed up, did good work, you’d be fine. You were wrong. You can do everything right and still be laid off. That’s terrifying. If effort doesn’t protect you, what does?

Moving Forward

You’re not what happened to you. You’re what you do next. That’s a cliché because it’s true. The layoff is an event. You’re a person. Events don’t define people. Responses do. You get to tell a new story. The layoff is part of your story now. But it’s not the whole story. It’s a chapter. Maybe a pivotal chapter. Maybe the chapter where everything changed. But a chapter, not the ending. You survived this. The worst part, the shock, the shame, the immediate aftermath, you survived it. You’re still here. Still breathing. Still capable of figuring out what comes next.

Good Company

Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber, 2018
Graeber was an anthropologist who asked a simple question: how many people secretly believe their job is pointless? The answer was terrifying. He maps an entire economy built on roles that exist to justify other roles, managed by people whose main function is to manage the managers. It’s funny and furious and underneath both is something the booklet knows well, that the system that just discarded you wasn’t measuring your value. It was measuring its own convenience.
Up in the Air — Jason Reitman, 2009
George Clooney plays a man whose job is firing people. He flies from city to city, sits across from someone, and ends their employment with rehearsed compassion. He’s good at it. Reitman made a film about the person on the other side of the desk, the professional machinery of being let go, and somehow made it about loneliness, identity, and the terrifying question of what you’re worth when you’re not useful to anyone. The scene where newly laid-off workers stare into the camera and describe what they’ve lost is almost unbearable. It should be. It’s the truth.
The Suburbs — Arcade Fire, 2010
An album about the promises that were made to you. Work hard. Show up. Follow the path. The suburbs will hold you. Arcade Fire wrote an entire record about discovering that the infrastructure you built your life inside was never as solid as it looked. It’s nostalgic and angry at the same time, grieving something that was supposed to be permanent and wasn’t. The sound of someone driving through a life that was meant to work and noticing that the buildings are empty.