Anatomy of a Layoff

It takes almost nothing for life under capitalism to fall apart

I just got laid off. I’m a software engineer and my company was a mature startup whose funders got spooked by the recent economic crash and pulled out and that was it. No severance, no warning, paltry thanks for a job well done and a “we’ll pass on your resume to our contacts” and just like that my life was thrown into utter chaos. I get an email that says “sign these separation documents and don’t forget to download your insurance card, which will be active until the end of the month”. I don’t have another check to look forward to, and in a couple weeks I will once again have no access to healthcare. The last time I was laid off I waited four months for an unemployment check that didn’t even come close to covering my expenses. I drained my 401(k) and savings to get by, and I was on the verge of defaulting on my mortgage. And here we are again.

Losing a job in the United States isn’t just losing a job. It’s losing all income immediately, it’s losing your ability to see a doctor, it’s losing your feeling of safety, your vision for your future. It is utterly existential. All my plans for the forseeable are deleted. Now I am in survival mode. Hoping that I won’t be one of the many for whom being unemployed for a year or more is the norm. I got into this industry because before that I was a professional photographer and the market became so saturated that I wanted to do something that would offer me real security, never throw me into uncertainty and the whims of the market. There was a deficit of coders, you see, and if you became one you’d always be employed. So I studied. I couldn’t afford the insane costs of attending a university so my only option was to teach myself. I spent 10 hours a day 7 days a week learning to code from home, in between portrait jobs. I did this for three years. It was one of the hardest periods of my life. I was in utter poverty, I was on the verge of homelessness repeatedly, but I trudged on. Eventually I got a shitty junior engineer job at a scammy naturopath company. After some time I worked my way up until I got an offer that blew me away as someone who had relied on the meager subsistence benefits this country offers for most of my life (when I could figure out how to access them). I took it.

For a time I have been able to provide for myself and my daughter as a single mom in a way that far exceeds what I ever could’ve imagined, far better than I had. But the past few years something shifted. The jobs became more unstable, the layoffs happened more often, the constant threat of it all being ripped away was omnipresent. The “recession-proof” industry became anything but. I realize now that there is no safe place to hide from the whims of capitalism. The days where you work at one place all your life, have a respectable salary, a pension upon retirement, and carve something out for yourself are over. Even when you are doing well, you are one president-induced tariff crisis from it being ripped away. You are never more than a couple bad turns from being on the street. You are expected to live your life doing acrobatics without a net. You are expected to enjoy your leisure time and ignore the nagging voice in the back of your head telling you what you know to be true, that it could end tomorrow, for no reason, through no fault of your own.

It does take it’s toll on you. You feel as if you are constantly under siege. That voice reminding you that you could be fired tomorrow is always there. You see the masses of unhoused and you know that it wouldn’t take much to find yourself there. I don’t know at what dollar amount this voice goes away but I think it’s a lot higher than any of us want to admit. We live these lives, under this system, that are lives of unimaginable precarity. We are on a knife’s edge even in the good times. Even the least class conscious of us feels it in our bones. We know tomorrow isn’t promised to be as secure as we are today, and we aren’t even all that secure today. There is no one that is coming to save us, the government doesn’t have your back. They will let millions fall into the unpersonhood of being homeless and change nothing. The people who write the laws, after all, have never had to wonder where the next meal comes from. They’ve never had to face the oblivion of having whatever they were able to carve out ripped away overnight. They could not relate less to what consumes you.

This is the invisible violence we are all subjected to every day. It is the abuse of a people who instead of living in a society built around the person and the wellbeing of the community, is built around extraction of whatever it can take from each and every individual to enrich a handful at the top. A society that is not human-centered will always negate the human to power the machine that it has made into its god.

I sit here and I’m terrified but I’m also numb. I’ve survived more in this life than I’ve actually lived. I’m no stranger to struggle and uncertainty and coming face to face with the abyss. I hope this time isn’t the time that I don’t figure it out. But one thing I am certain of is that it is a crime against humanity that anyone should have to live this way. This is not what life, consciousness is for. Whatever it is that put us here, I’m certain it was not for the purpose of destroying this place and every living being in it, breaking down our bodies and our minds, for a temporary bump in a thing that is really only imaginary so that a few people can get to live well. I know that’s not our purpose. I know that’s not what it means to be human. I know that we are meant for so much more.

As I find my way through this - god willing - it only solidifies for me that we must resist this brutal empire with everything we have. Because human beings deserve human dignity. Because human beings deserve to feel human and not be shredded to pieces by this inhuman machine. Our birthright is a safe and stable earth that we all share. We must never give up on reclaiming it.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

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