In my experience, anxiety is something you have. Layoffs give it a convenient focus but it doesn't have to be that way.
I used to work at a hedge fund that basically screened for mental health during hiring. When we had layoffs, nobody freaked out. We knew we had a good run, we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market. So we metabolized the layoffs and went on with our lives.
My job after that was at a scale up that leaned woke (a lot of employees were sold a tenuous connection between our work and a feel good mission). When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety. The facts weren't that different than at the hedge fund but the amount of angst and freaking out was through the roof.
Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
I once heard the analogy of an orange. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
I think something you're overlooking is that people from less privileged backgrounds tend to experience a higher degree of financial insecurity.
If you don't have family that can help you and you grew up eating out of soup kitchens, you're going to have a very different attitude to the prospect of job loss (even if you're "making decent money" at one of these "woke companies") than someone who comes from money and didn't have these issues growing up.
You're less likely to take risks, and you're more likely to pursue more secure careers (tech being a good one of late).
Now that tech is not looking so safe anymore, of course there are a lot of people who are having full on crises.
Dismissing those people as "being made of anxiety" fails to acknowledge the factors that caused the situation in the first place. Sure, someone with a wealthy family isn't freaking out right now, and they're probably less anxious in general. They have good reason to not care about maybe getting laid off, just as the people who are quite worried about it have good reasons to be anxious about getting laid off
Yep, additionally some people may not have nearly as much of a financial safety net depending on their circumstances. I'm pretty privileged but early in my tech career if I had lost one of my gigs I don't know if I would have been able to find something else before I would have chewed through the limited savings we had. This was at a time when remote wasn't nearly as popular and high CoL made it much harder to save.
I'm not as lucky, and this almost exactly happened to me. I burned through all my savings just paying rent, eventually losing my apartment and leaving the industry for a few years, then moving back home in a different city. Which of course I was happy to have, but it's a cold and desolate isolated place. Went from a promising development career yo literally working part-time at Starbucks in my late twenties. To this day I have like 8 years of accumulated back taxes to resolve, which will probably end up being a refund at this point.
First, everybody is capable of anxiety and that's normal and to be expected in the current climate.
> a scale up that leaned woke [...] When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety.
Second, having an anxiety disorder is not a moral or behavioral failure and I don't see necessarily how it could be correlated to "wokeness".
> When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.
Again, this analogy doesn't make sense. It's totally normal for oranges to be full of orange juice. It would be weird if something else (or no thing at all) came out... Same with anxiety - it's normal for people to be stressed out in a stressful situation. It's not necessarily healthy, but should be expected.
Otoh, having an anxiety disorder is not a normal psychological state, but that's something that shows up all the time, not just when you're "squeezed".
I responded to them too, but I think their point is that some people have an internal sense of resilience, or a constructed foundation of security, that makes them less susceptible to anxiety in the face of unexpected change.
You’re right that this doesn’t mean that people who are more anxious have somehow failed morally or behaviorally, and also right that nobody is immune to anxiety altogether.
But I don’t think they were saying those things. They were just saying that some people are capable of navigating stuff like job loss with confidence and sharing their experience of environments that seemed to have proportionately more or less of those people.
I do think that on net it read as dismissive to the real personal experience of the “oranges” who are highlighted in the article, but also think you’re responding to things that weren’t said there.
Thank you for articulating what I was saying better than I did.
You are exactly right in what I am saying and there's a part of me that hopes some people are inspired by this information to build up their resilience
> their point is that some people have an internal sense of resilience, or a constructed foundation of security
This may be true, but I think that this is also something that can be learned, at least to a good degree. Personally I feel I have managed to become less anxiety-prone through conscious effort and introspective work. Being an "orange" is not an immutable fact.
Maybe not clearly expressed, but I took the parents point about mental preparedness and environment being big factors in dealing with anxiety, generally, and layoffs.
Probably because they are more likely seek and have access to mental health resources and help (hence the ability to have their problems “identified”). Then you have a high gun suicide rate among conservatives (who have easier access to guns than mental health resources).
"Don't worry -- the reasons you have for anxiety are illegitimate" is sure to calm people down. If software doesn't work out you should consider talk therapy.
> hedge fund [...] nobody freaked out. [...] we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market.
> scale up that leaned woke [...] feel good mission [...] all out mental health crisis [...]
> FAANG [...] emotional vibe is somewhere between the two [...] Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
Rather than attributing this to some employees being made of more-anxious stuff, could this also be explained by:
* Concern about personal financial safety net (war chest, family money, connections, job market for them at that time)?
* Concern about being able to find another work situation that they like (including perceived woke feel-good mission, and like-minded colleagues, for those people)?
What's the lesson here? I'm guessing you're not literally saying "don't hire people who suffer from anxiety issues", but it's not clear to me what anyone is supposed to do if they think you're correct.
Okay, so people who had historically high-paying jobs, who were at a high-paying company with above-average severance, didn't have anxiety around layoffs. You can't say anxiety around layoffs is purely about mental health without looking at the financial aspect of it.
> Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
This rings true to me too. Another factor I'll highlight is the average age of the employees. I'm older than most of those I work with. I've been through rounds of layoffs at other companies. It's stressful, but I know how it happens and what to expect. A lot of them have worked their entire careers at successful companies during good times. They're freaking out because they haven't been through it before.
Okay, but when you hire a few hundred thousand people into a booming industry and promise them unprecedented compensation, you’ll probably end up with at least a couple oranges in there. Maybe even a lot.
Can we offer them some understanding and sympathy?
Must there be some token sympathy shown in any sort of analysis on this topic? Anyways
> promise them unprecedented compensation
They were promised and received uncompensated compensation. No promises of indefinite employment were ever given, and it’s a bit naive to assume boom times never end. I think it’s fair to make this point too, even if on an individual level I sympathize with pretty much anyone that loses their job.
I deeply appreciate your other response to me as well as this comment / question.
Obviously this is going to happen, I am not shocked or surprised and I get how it can cause anxiety to emerge.
I do think there's a connection between resilience (as you observed in your other response) and entitlement. I am not sure which way causality flows but you wrote: "promise them unprecedented compensation" - I feel like there's also a realistic mindset that should go with interpreting that: I am hired to do a job and things could change (vs something like I get this comp because the universe knows I am the shit or something like that)
200k is an arbitrary number but the general point is that someone making multiples of the median household income with high future prospects does not know the kind of struggle faced by many people and therefore does not deserve sympathy.
I used to work at a hedge fund that basically screened for mental health during hiring. When we had layoffs, nobody freaked out. We knew we had a good run, we knew severance was good and we knew we'd be highly desirable in the market. So we metabolized the layoffs and went on with our lives.
My job after that was at a scale up that leaned woke (a lot of employees were sold a tenuous connection between our work and a feel good mission). When layoffs happened, it was basically an all out mental health crisis, with everyone feeding into everyone else's anxiety. The facts weren't that different than at the hedge fund but the amount of angst and freaking out was through the roof.
Now at a FAANG, obviously had layoffs recently. The emotional vibe is somewhere between the two above. Coworkers that came from tougher places (finance, Microsoft, Amazon) are holding it together fine. Others are not.
I once heard the analogy of an orange. When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out because that's what an orange is made off. If extreme anxiety comes out when you are squeezed, it was there all along.