I Survived 23 Rounds of Layoffs Without Ever Getting Fired. It Still Broke Something in Me.
What surviving 23 rounds of mass layoffs taught me about money, loyalty, and the freedom to walk away.
You always knew before they told you.
It was the state trooper in the lobby. Not security — an actual trooper, standing near the front doors of a billion-dollar company like something was about to go wrong. And something was. Within the hour, HR would start walking the floor, stopping at cubicles, and people who had given this place more than 30 years of their lives would be told they had five minutes to fill a box and leave the building. The trooper was there to make sure they did.
I watched that happen twenty-three times.
Twenty-three rounds of layoffs in about six years. And here’s the part that still sits strangely with me: I survived every single one. I was never the one with the box. On paper, I won. In reality, being the one who’s left behind, over and over, does something to you that I’m still not sure I’ve fully undone.
I remember the first time I walked into the lobby and saw the “suits” as we called them (HR) standing there with a state trooper. My initial thought was oh my gosh, what happened? Did someone do something and is getting arrested? Averting eye contact like the terrified 21-year-old I was, I ducked into the closest stairwell and made my way to my desk.
An hour later is when the firings started. They came down each row in our artificially lit cubicle farm, state trooper in tow, quietly telling the people on their “list” that their position had been eliminated and that they had 5 minutes to clean out their desk and “vacate the premises.” When they came to my row, they fired my friends on either side of my cubicle. I remember feeling terrified and betrayed as a naive kid out of college. Isn’t this supposed to be a family, like our corporate values said? These people were my new friends, not convicts. What did they do to deserve such inhumane treatment?
The math that told me everything
The severance formula was one week of pay for every year of service. Rounded down. So someone who had bled for this company for nine years and eleven months got nine weeks. A decade of loyalty, and they’d shave off the extra just because they could.
That number told me everything I needed to know about where I actually stood. I had spent my early years there “paying my dues” — working 80-hour weeks during the Great Recession, being told monthly that my “performance needed to improve or we’d have to have a hard conversation.” I thought if I just worked hard enough, proved myself enough, I’d be safe.
The trooper in the lobby was the truth. The motivational emails about “family” and “culture” were the story they told on top of it.
What surviving actually costs
Nobody warns you about survivor’s guilt in a corporate layoff. You’d think making the cut would feel like relief. Sometimes it did, for about a day. Then you’d walk past the empty desk of someone you’d eaten lunch with for three years, and you’d feel a sense of grief — sometimes for a lost friendship, and other times at how you were expected to pretend like they never existed and move on. And you’d get back to work, because the alternative was to be next.
The hypervigilance is the part that lingers. After enough rounds, you stop trusting good news. A calendar invite with no agenda spikes your heart rate. A closed-door meeting you’re not in feels like a verdict. You start managing your career like a hostage negotiation, and you don’t even notice you’re doing it — until one day you realize you’ve spent years of your one life braced for an axe that, this time, wasn’t for you.
Dan
There was one guy I still think about to this day. We’ll call him Dan.
Dan was the quintessential company man. He joined at 18 as a janitor straight out of high school and worked his way up through the ranks over his entire career. When I met Dan, he was 67, his youngest son in his last year of medical school — he’d already put his two other children through graduate school to give them a life he never had the chance at. Dan was the person we all looked to when times got hard, because he’d seen it all. His only ask to his boss was simple: “I need three more years to pay off my mortgage and retire. Just let me know if you hear my name land on any list.”
One day, the suits came for him too. It was the fall before his youngest’s last semester of med school. No notice. Just five minutes to pack your things and vacate the premises. Nearly 50 years of loyalty, and this is how he was rewarded. Pack your shit and get out. I lost touch with Dan after that. I still think about him and wonder how his life was permanently changed by that day. I hope he’s okay.
Here’s the part that haunts me most, and it took me years to see it clearly: it wasn’t just that they discarded him. It’s that he couldn’t afford for them to. Fifty years in, and Dan still needed three more just to pay off a house. Half a century of loyalty and he was still one paycheck from the edge. Dan didn’t need a better company. He needed to not need them.
None of us did.
The lesson I wish I’d learned on round one
Here’s what twenty-three rounds finally beat into me, and it’s the whole reason this site exists:
The company was never going to save me. The only person who could make me safe was me — and the way I do that is with money.
Not “get rich” money. Not private-jet money. I’m talking about what I now call walk-away money — enough of a financial cushion that the trooper in the lobby stops being able to control your life. Enough that a bad round of layoffs is a setback, not a catastrophe. Enough that you could look a toxic manager in the eye and mean it when you say no.
That kind of money isn’t greed. It’s the opposite of greed. It’s insurance against ever being Dan — five minutes and a box and no plan.
It was after Dan left that it hit me like a freight train. Dan did everything we were told to do, and the system failed him anyway. I didn’t know anything about personal finance at the time, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the “suits” came for me — and when they did, I was going to be ready. Not to fight back, but to walk away on my terms, instead of spending my life shackled and “grateful” for a check I’d already worked far too many hours to earn.
The next day, I started consuming personal finance sites, set a preliminary budget, and opened a high-yield savings account to start stashing money for a rainy-day emergency fund. It didn’t feel like much, but I’d put myself on a path that would start buying back my freedom to step off the corporate treadmill — one dollar at a time.
Most of the people walked out past that trooper never had that money either — that’s exactly why five minutes could end their whole sense of security. I’ve spent the years since building mine, and helping other people build theirs, because I never want to feel that powerless again. And I don’t want you to either.
Where to start
If any of this landed a little too close to home, start here — not with a spreadsheet, but with a single question: how many months could you survive if the suits came for you tomorrow?
That number is your starting line. In the next piece, I’ll walk through exactly how to figure out your “walk-away number” and how to start building it, even on a paycheck that already feels stretched.
You don’t have to escape the treadmill this week. You just have to stop pretending the trooper isn’t real.
