Story Time
I want to take you on a journey, one that may even feel familiar to you. You live in the United States and, even as a child, have always been highly motivated. Whether enrolling in honors classes, AP classes, and then your dream college, you were always striving to be the best version of yourself. As you begin your career, you aim to conquer the world and become the CEO of your life. You move to a new city and everything is going well: you’re making new friends, you’re doing well at work, maybe you even get a promotion and start to feel financially comfortable.
One day, you wake up and complete your morning phone routine, opening Instagram, Twitter, then your personal email. You see an email from your company informing you that your role was impacted by a reduction in force. You had heard the rumors for weeks now and seen the posts on LinkedIn…but this wasn’t supposed to happen to you. In that instant, everything about your day – your routine, the amount and frequency of your socialization, your purpose and the story of your life – has changed. You have to consider questions you’d never had to think about before. How much longer do my benefits last? When does my severance run out? How long can I last without an income? Is my resume even updated…do I still have it? All the while, everything you see online is painful. Either the news of another layoff, your acquaintance from school receiving a promotion, your colleague going on a fun international trip. You scroll through this wave of extremes while you sit in your apartment in your pajamas, collecting automated rejection letters in an oversaturated job market. Over time, you become more isolated as you no longer interact with work colleagues and your stress increases as you look for a new role. You withdraw further from family and friends, trying to avoid the dreaded question, “any updates on the job search?”. You retreat further and further into your own mind and your own problems and stresses until it consumes you; you become riddled with anxiety and depression. Hoping and praying for a simple email inviting you to an interview.
This is the reality that more than a quarter of a million people in the United States have faced since the beginning of 2022, primarily across the Big Tech sector. The description above may seem exaggerated to prove a point, but I can assure you it’s not. For the people impacted by layoffs, the mental health statistics are staggering:
According to a study from February 2023 completed by the Kaiser Family Foundation, an independent non-profit that specializes in health surveys, overall around one-third of adults experience anxiety or depressive symptoms. For adults who have lost their job or had someone in their household lose a job, that percentage rises to 52%.
How could this be? How is it that losing one’s job could bring some of the most competent and successful people to their knees? Let’s take a closer look at some of the forces at play that would affect peoples’ mental health after being laid off, including questions of identity, negative self-comparison, and isolation.
Before I Get Started..
If you know someone, whether a friend or colleague, who has recently been affected by layoffs, reach out to them. Engage with them authentically and genuinely. They may need a true friend right now.
Achievement and Identity in America
Achievement and success have been a part of America’s core values since the country began. So much so that within 50 years of the country’s founding, two famous phrases, “American Exceptionalism” and “Manifest Destiny”, were coined to reflect this. When combined together, these phrases say “America and its people are unique and superior to the rest of the world and it is our collective duty – our destiny – to spread our ideals to the masses”. Not only a belief in their people, but an obligation for them to fulfill their gifts. These two pieces – excellence and responsibility – became a part of the country’s ethos almost as quickly as freedom.
Over the course of the next two-hundred years, these driving forces propelled America to becoming a world superpower. However, towards the end of the Cold War, concerns began to grow as competitors around the world began to gain on the United States in commerce, science, and technological innovation. In response, the Reagan administration put together a task force to study the American education system and in 1983, they published an open letter to the American people titled “A Nation at Risk”. This report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity” and directly resulted in massive reforms within the American education system, most notably an increase in the importance of standardized testing, all with the aim of placing a greater emphasis on academic excellence.
While an admirable goal to strive for, the push towards standardization and test-taking had significant unintended consequences on the mental health of young people and, in turn, our young adults. In 2010 a documentary called “Race to Nowhere” was released, which dives into the pressures faced by high-school students: the impact of high-stakes testing culture and the need to succeed both academically and in extra-curriculars. The pressure to be admitted into their dream school, to beat their friends, to reach that elusive goal of academic excellence. The documentary suggests that over time, this can take a toll and led to students facing anxiety, burnout, and even suicide.
Despite reaching critical acclaim and sparking a national conversation on our education system, mental health for teens has only continued to decline since then: rates for depressive episode (8.7% to 13.2%), anxiety disorder (25% to 32%), and considering suicide within a calendar year (13% to 19%) all rose significantly in the proceeding fifteen years.
Let’s take all this historical and societal context and make it personal. Imagine you are from the United States, a place where achievement, success, and competition is woven into the fabric of our society. More specifically, you are one of the crop of students described above, which now represent a significant chunk of the workforce. You are the high-achiever who had a lifelong pursuit of goal accomplishment and achievement, throughout high-school, college, graduate school, and your career. Then one morning everything changes; everything comes to a screeching halt with no warning. A hard pause on the journey towards success. When you strip away the achievements and the resume and are finally given time to think and evaluate what’s next, how could you not begin to question everything? How could you not ask yourself…How did it get here? Do I even like what I do? Did I just waste all of that time? Am I stuck here now? What would I do instead? What do I actually enjoy? Do I have any hobbies? What do I do with my day now?
Who am I?
Simply typing those questions was enough to make me anxious. Now imagine living it.
Social Media and Negative Self-Comparison
One of the ways that you undoubtedly would spend that newfound time is on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, LinkedIn…something. It seems like a safe place as it requires no mental energy and asks nothing of you. You can just scroll mindlessly and escape your thoughts and questions…except it might not be safe.
Even though social media has only really existed in its current form for twenty years, its effects on mental health have been studied widely. While the overall impact of social media on mental health is still debated, this is not because there is no effect. Rather, there are two strong opposing forces pulling on each other. On the one hand, there are benefits to being more connected with people and building social capital. However, there are also major concerns that it promotes negative self-comparison. Most famously, research completed by Facebook in 2019 showed that Instagram makes body image issues worse for one-in-three teenage girls. However, perhaps more tellingly, a study conducted in 2021 showed causal evidence that usage of Facebook led to an increase in severe depression in college students.
It isn’t difficult to understand why. On any social media platform, we only see the most carefully curated presentation of the lives of our colleagues, friends, friends of friends, and celebrities all collected in one place. Scrolling through a steady stream of the good other people do, the fun other people have, and the successes and achievements other people receive. Everyday, multiple times per day. Over time, that can truly distort reality, making the routine of real life seem less than it should be. Extended exposure to this for years and decades will bake this into one’s wiring, so much so that its presence is felt when it’s not there. Being hyper aware that, even if not thinking or looking at the platform itself, someone out there is doing something more amazing or more impressive than you. Numbing joy and creating the impulsive need for validation.
Now imagine consuming this content in a particularly vulnerable state. At a time when you may not have a lot going on or a lot to celebrate. When your ego has been deflated from the layoff and subsequent rejections in the job market. When you are actively questioning who you are and who you want to be. How could you not judge yourself? Or feel sorry for yourself? Over time, become sad and maybe feel as though the world is out to get you?
Simply posing those questions was depressing. Now imagine living it.
Isolation and the Remnants of COVID
I hate talking about COVID. I hate thinking about COVID. I hate that I just typed the word three times. Not the disease, although it is awful. But when I write COVID, I think of 2020. Being locked in my house, scared and afraid of the future. Not knowing the rules or when it would end. Feeling isolated and alone, desperately missing human interaction… and I was one of the lucky people to be living with my partner. That weight every moment of every day was exhausting and left a psychological imprint on everyone. As much as life has returned to normal in many ways, the scars are still there for people. You haven’t truly moved on if you are pretending it didn’t happen or using Harry Potter rules and not daring to speak its name. As I type this, it has only been three years since the start of COVID. While it feels like a lifetime ago, it is still very fresh to many people.
I, for one, assumed that I would actually be more social during my unemployment period. I would have more energy and less responsibilities. What else would I have to do? However, I learned that when you no longer have a job, you lose one of the primary ways that you interact with other people. Structurally speaking, you have to walk into an office building and talk to people all day. There are scheduled team events, networking conversations, and even the impromptu happy hour. Even if you work remotely, there are still meetings and virtual coffee chats that have you speaking to and physically looking at people outside of your immediate living situation. All of a sudden without work, you are back to a life only seeing the people you live with or the people you make the extra effort to go see.
In addition to those structural reasons, there are also psychological reasons you may see people less frequently. Keep in mind, you may be going through an identity crisis, comparing yourself negatively to others, or feeling insecure. You will probably avoid seeing former colleagues, as that will be awkward for both parties. Even with friends from outside of work and family, those relationships can become strained. As much as you want every interaction to feel the same and as badly as you want to just forget your troubles, you will inevitably be asked about your job search. It is the one-line biography attached to who you are now: “Aaron Rodriguez, recently laid off and looking for work”. How can they not ask? I promise that even if things are going well, even if you are interviewing with your five dream companies and are far along in the process, you will clench up. You will be reminded of the situation you are in. How things feel when you wake up in the morning or when you lie anxiously awake at night. These get-togethers may feel strained and maybe the insecurity starts to get the best of you. Maybe you just want to avoid the awkwardness, that sting. You may pull away and start to isolate yourself. All of a sudden you realize days have gone by without seeing or talking to a person that you don’t live with. All the wounds and the scars from COVID begin to reopen and those feelings start to bubble to the surface again. It hurts.
Why am I telling you all this?
I understand this was a long read. If you got to this point, thank you for engaging, I sincerely appreciate it. I decided to go into detail to illustrate how deep and powerful all the forces are that impact people’s mental health. And I didn’t even touch upon the financial pressures, the constant rejection in the job market, or the pressures facing immigrants to the country. I tried to paint a picture of the hellish scenario facing more than 250,000 people, with many more to come. It’s a problem and people need help.
If you are reading this and have been laid off recently, my hope is that this article illustrates that this truly is an incredibly difficult situation to deal with mentally and emotionally. That it’s okay to be sad or angry. That it’s okay if sometimes this situation gets the best of you. And that if you are looking for help, either through the job search process or even just a listening ear, you’ve come to the right place.