The six months I quietly fell apart while looking ‘fine’ to everyone else.
But Why?
Since 2022, every year in the U.S. has come with a new wave of layoff news, especially in tech and white‑collar work. Even though I wasn’t laid off, living through that time prepared me for the worst. The constant headlines, stories from friends, and rumors at work made job security feel like a myth, and it created a quiet, background fear: “What if I’m next?”
In that atmosphere, I made one simple choice: when people asked, “How are you doing?” I stopped acting strong and started telling the truth. I said, “I’m not doing well.” At first it felt risky, because we’re trained to sound fine and professional, no matter what. But the more honest I was, the more honest other people became with me. Some admitted they were anxious about layoffs too, some confessed they were burned out, and others said they were scared of what AI and restructuring might do to their jobs.
In those months, my life became a series of small, unexpected honest conversations. A colleague who had survived a previous layoff admitted they were living with constant anxiety, waiting for the next round. A friend in another company confessed that they had also been laid off but hadn’t told their parents yet because they didn’t want to disappoint them. Someone else, still fully employed, admitted they were burnt out and terrified that one email could erase years of effort overnight. Each time I said, “I’m not doing well,” I watched other people give themselves permission to stop pretending too.
Those months taught me that you don’t have to actually lose your job to be affected by layoff culture. Just hearing about layoffs again and again can damage your sense of safety, increase anxiety, and change how you see work. My way of dealing with it was simple: I didn’t pretend everything was okay. I let conversations become real. That honesty didn’t change the economy, but it changed how I moved through it.
Outside our private conversations, the machine kept spinning. Every week, another big name announced “strategic workforce reductions” or “organizational restructuring,” even when they were still profitable and growing. Layoffs had become less a last resort and more a management reflex: trim people to impress investors, reset expectations, signal that leadership was “disciplined.” On paper, this was about margins and efficiency. In my living room, it was about staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., wondering what I was worth if I could be deleted that easily.
The more I watched, the clearer it became that my story was not a personal failure arc; it was a local instance of a global script. The pandemic years had inflated hiring. Then inflation and rate hikes deflated the bubble. Job openings cooled, hiring slowed, and white-collar workers discovered they were not as safe or “essential” as they’d once believed. Companies adjusted quickly, but the people they let go were left to carry the emotional and financial cost over months, sometimes years.
In that context, my small act of honesty started to feel strangely radical. The system around us relied on euphemism: “rightsizing,” “rebalancing,” “workforce optimization.” I decided not to add one more euphemism on top of my own experience. If the email could be brutally direct about my job status, then my mouth could be honest about my emotional status. I stopped saying, “I’m fine.” I said, “This hurts. I’m scared. I don’t know what comes next.”
Those conversations didn’t magically pay my bills or rewrite the economy. They didn’t reverse the layoff. But they did something important: they made sure this period of my life wasn’t only defined by corporate language and investor logic. It became defined, at least in part, by human connection. By the friend who listened without trying to fix me. By the colleague who checked in weeks after the news, not just the day it happened. By the small network of people who admitted that they too were not okay in a world that kept asking them to be relentlessly “resilient.”
Looking back, August to December 2022 is still one of the hardest stretches I’ve lived through. It was the season when I saw how quickly a company can move from “we’re a family” to “we regret to inform you.” It was also the season when I learned that the only way to survive being treated like a number is to insist on living like a person. In an era where layoffs have become an annual event and workers are reduced to cost centers, telling the truth about how you are is a small but meaningful refusal to be flattened into a line on a balance sheet.
That’s what I did in those months: I didn’t do well, and I stopped pretending I was.