The Redundancy Performance

If you have lost jobs a few times over a couple of decades, you will have realised that it is no longer enough simply to lose a job. You must now lose it well.

Not too angrily. Not too truthfully. Not too messily. Not too sadly, and certainly not for too long.

Then, if you do manage to emerge, you should do so reflective, gracious, resilient, and ready to frame the whole experience as some holy gift of growth without which you would not be who you are today. Heck, while you are at it on LinkedIn, thank the company that made you redundant in the first place, conveniently forgetting the social stigma, the winters without heating, the homelessness, the mental arithmetic required to clothe your child or buy a tin of beans.

The demand is not that you survive instability, but that you perform its brutal reality in an acceptable tone. And that, in itself, tells us something about the culture we are living in.