Just looking for advice, I just got laid off of my job o two years. Before that I had a series of jobs with the same companies for about ten years. I feel like a failure and am just wondering how other people process something like this.
A failure? What’s that even mean? Do we measure our success by how useful a specific capitalist organization finds us at any given moment? You aren’t a failure. You are just another person trying to make ends meet and getting screwed over by the system. Doing the best you can like anyone else.
Here’s a checklist:
Can you pay your bills for the next 6 months? If no, figure out how to fix that ASAP.
Do you know what you want to do next? If no, start pondering on it.
Have you taken advantage of any support that is out there for you? Unemployment for example. If no, do it.
If all of those are handled then you are good to take a breath and just figure your shit out. Maybe try to do something you didn’t have the time to before. Spend more time with family. Something like that. Whatever it is that would make you happy right now.
Companies’ decisions to hire and fire people are not personal, they’re just business. They need X number of workers for a set of tasks, they hire them. They no longer need that many, they fire them. It’s a purely economic decision. Talent and experience are not even much of a factor.
Don’t blame yourself. Don’t take it as a measure of personal worth. We’re all kind of at the mercy of the market for our labor.
I can say that drinking about it definitely doesn’t help
I got sober almost 7 months ago, I don’t have any desire to throw that away, I hope you’re doing well :)
Well first you apply for unemployment benefits. Then, enjoy a day or two of freedom. Let loose, fuck it all.
Then you make a plan. Did you get any severance payout? Do you have an emergency savings fund? How long will it last you? Form a budget and a timeline. What is your backup plan if that time runs out? Can gig work fill the gap or extend that line?
Then you apply for jobs like your life depends on it. Leverage your professional connections you’ve made along the way.
These are all rhetorical questions for yourself to figure out the next steps. But eventually it will end, and you’ll be an employed drone again.
Layoffs happen. Don’t take it personally, because it will be no help now anyway. What’s important is the future and getting a new job.
It’s okay to feel bad or angry, but don’t blame yourself. Being laid off is a violent act, a theft. They stole from you. Over twelve years, your work provided value to this company. This value flowed into constant capital (buildings, machines, laptops, tools, whatever is needed for that work). All this stuff is still there. You got paid less then you were worth to your employer, otherwise, why hire anyone? The unpaid part of your work (your surplus value) payed for all this constant capital. You didn’t control it, but at least you could use part of it in your job. Now by firing you, they made the theft complete.
The market always has ups and downs, on up times, you didn’t get any fat bonus. On down times you just get let go. For a capitalist, firing people is a natural and expected part of exploiting them.
The antidote to feeling bad about it is doing something about it. Join a Marxist org, read theory, join a union.
Is it over that job or just being jobless? Because if the former I really have to ask whether you thought your management and HR were competent before this incident? Barring real rare occasions every personnel decision I’ve ever been witness to ranges from “baffling” at best to “incomprehensible self harm for the org” at worst
Make art
I chose additional time with friends, and vices in the past. Worked well.
I went on a road trip to Vancouver Island and found a new job there and the layoff ended up being the best thing to ever happen to me
I got laid off when I was 27 and planning a wedding as the primary earner. I was fortunate enough to have savings to get us through till my next job, but that took about 6 months. Its scary, but my advice would be to focus on yourself for a few weeks if you have the financial means to. I dont mean spend a lot of money or go on vacation, but maybe get started on your job profiles and resumes and apply here and there, but also just take time to process and grieve. Go for a walk or a drive and see the world during the day. Play some games or something or work on that fun project you never had time to before.
For me, it was around the time Tears of the Kingdom came out, and zelda is one of my favorite franchises. I would wake up play some Zelda, apply for jobs online for an bour or two, play some Zelda, make dinner for my wife and hang out until she went to bed, then play some Zelda some more.
There’s no “correct” amount of time to be out of a job. I’ve seen people get hired within weeks, but I’ve also seen people go for mo tha or even years. It’s all a process, but like other people said, your job does not define you and you did nothing wrong.
Got laid off. Took them to court for unlawful firing. Won a settlement.
Feelings-wise, I never felt like failure, because all my hate is for the capitalistic system that produces such outcomes. Almost everyone goes through this at least at one point in their lives. While sometimes being fired is of course an individuals fault, it being a traumatic event is society’s fault.
In general though, this seems like a question that is completely independent of the circumstances. You simply should never feel like “a failure” because while everyone makes mistakes, no person is ever entirely wrong or a failure. The reason people feel “like a failure” anyway is because of this constant pressure placed on everyone to “succeed” and “achieve” and whatnot. From friends, family, the media, and so on.
There is no easy way to shed this pressure, but it is possible. First you must truly understand the mechanisms at play in all of this, what state you would like to be in, and then it’s a lot of practice to remind yourself of these concepts again and again and again.
How did you prove unlawful firing?
It’s basically by default in Germany if the worker did nothing malicious. So the burden of proof was on them to prove I did something malicious, which they could not.
It’s one of the cheapest ways to get rid of an employee you don’t like. Cheaper would have been to pay me off from the start, but they gambled that I wouldn’t fight them properly, and they lost.
Not your fault. Companies only care about money so they get rid of employees as soon as they can. Sorry that happened though. Hopefully you got decent severance, and don’t forget to claim unemployment benefits.
I became a communist
It took me a while, but I eventually realized that I’m not defined by my job, and I have such a rich fulfilling life outside of it, or I at least have the opportunity to build one. Once I stopped defining myself through my job, I was a lot happier and more motivated to just find another job and not worry about whether it’s something that a stranger would find impressive, since I’d be talking to them about other aspects of my life now anyway.
So much this. Once you can detach yourself from your ideal vision of external perception and make your self worth determined by you, yourself and not your work it makes life so much easier.
Talking about your skill sets in a different frame can help. So can exploring things outside of work. Life is so much more than work, regardless of what the machine would have you think.
Therapist. Why has nobody suggested getting a therapist? Go to therapy.
Therapy will always be a good answer, but given they are laid off, often times therapy is a luxury
Yeah that’s true. Therapy always seems to end up a fucking luxury. I hate it.
