Employee, You're Just a Resource in a Spreadsheet
My LinkedIn feed is a graveyard of corporate loyalty. After 15 years, here's how I stopped taking layoffs personally — and stopped being a hostage to a job.
A few years back, a layoff felt like a freak event — the kind of thing you read about, not something that happened to you. That’s over. Since mid-2022 it hasn’t stopped. Q1 2026 brought the biggest spike since the peak in Q1 2023.
My LinkedIn feed is a graveyard of corporate loyalty right now. People who gave a company 5, 10, 15 years, writing these aching “end of a chapter” posts. You can feel the betrayal in them. The grief, even.
And here’s the part nobody wants to hear: we did this to ourselves. We identify with our employers way too much. We swallow the “culture,” the “mission,” the “we’re a family” line — and then we’re stunned when the math changes and the math wins.
The Illusion vs. The Spreadsheet
Everything about corporate life is built to make you feel indispensable. Look at what’s on offer:
- “We’re a family.” Families don’t usually lay you off to clean up a quarterly margin.
- Learning budgets, free lunches, the snack wall. Retention tools. Not gifts.
- Vague promises of “growth.” Sure — right up until your growth stops lining up with the ROI.
Strip it all away and you’re a number in a cost column. And honestly? That’s fine. The moment you accept that a job is a transaction and not your identity, you stop being a hostage to it. You get your power back.
The Dinosaur Playbook
I’ve been doing this for 15+ years. Here’s what it comes down to for me — three rules I don’t break.
1. It’s a contract. Treat it like one.
You’re trading specific skills and specific hours for a specific amount of money. Do the work well — actually well — but never forget the contract has an end date written in invisible ink. The day the money stops, the loyalty stops. Both ways.
2. Always be looking.
You don’t go looking for a job when you need one. You look when you already have one. Keeping your CV current and your network warm isn’t disloyal — it’s basic maintenance. And the only honest read on your market value is the one you get when there’s no severance clock ticking over your head.
3. Don’t take it personally. It was never personal.
When a company cuts 10% of headcount, they’re not firing you. They’re deleting a row to keep a board or a shareholder happy. If you never bought the “family” speech, you won’t be gutted by the termination email either. It’s a math problem. It was always a math problem.
And it cuts the other way too. Didn’t get the promotion? Maybe it’s not about you. Maybe the company has too many seniors already. Maybe there’s no budget for a raise this year. Maybe it’s a math problem — same as everything else.
Final Thoughts
Stop waiting for a corporation to love you back. It’s a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have a heart, and it was never going to grow one for you.
Put that energy into your own skills, your own name, your own runway. The goal was never to be un-fireable — nobody is. The goal is to be un-shakeable when the fire shows up. Because it will.