Part 1: You’re Not Special. You’re Just Expired.
You’d think after nearly four decades in the workforce, you’d get a better sendoff than silence. No fanfare. No ‘Welcome back.’ Not even a post-it on your monitor saying, “Hey, glad you’re not dead.” You go out on leave because your spouse gets cancer—because real life kicked in the fucking door—and when you come back, it’s like you never existed. The office is still there, sure. Your name’s on your laptop. But the job? The team? The respect? Gone. Like a bad magician’s trick: now you see it, now you’re outsourced.
That first day back, I opened my inbox: almost 18,000 unread emails. Most were system alerts and spam, the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds. But the real shock wasn’t the unread—it was the unanswered. No notes. No check-ins. Nobody wondering how things went. Just an open chair and the echo of “we’ve moved on.”
It’s the high school football team all over again. Back then, I missed the cut by a hair. The coach pulled me aside and said, “You’ve got heart, kid. Just not the speed.” At 56, I’ve still got heart. More wisdom. Less cartilage. But the playbook hasn’t changed. You’re only valued when they need you—and only missed when you cost less to keep.
You don’t expect a parade. You don’t even expect a cake. But what you do expect—especially after years of sacrifice—is a goddamn acknowledgment. Something that says, “You mattered.” Instead, you get a login error and a bonus that quietly vanished during your leave. Not suspended. Not delayed. Just gone, like it belonged to someone else. It landed two weeks after I got back—probably as an afterthought. Or a cover-your-ass maneuver from payroll.
And what kills me? I wasn’t dead weight. I wasn’t coasting. I gave more than I took. Worked through illnesses. Missed vacations. Pulled 100-hour weeks when the world was on fire. But when the company needed to shave a few points off their quarterly, guess who suddenly became redundant? Not bad. Not broken. Just inconvenient. Not officially, mind you, but what else could my boss–when we finally did speak 4 days after my return–hinting that it might be time to polish up the old rez mean?
See, the American workplace doesn’t fire you anymore. It ghosts you. Slowly. Strategically. They take away your projects. They shift your calendar. They “reorganize” until your job title is a trivia question no one remembers. You’re not fired—you’re vapor.
And yet, here I am. Still logging in. Still pretending there’s a seat at the table, even though the table’s been moved and no one thought to update the seating chart. You become Schrödinger’s employee—employed on paper, absent in practice. A relic of loyalty in an age of cost-benefit analysis.
So no, you’re not special. You’re just expired. A box unchecked in someone’s workforce reduction plan. The same way milk doesn’t curdle until you open the fridge—your usefulness doesn’t rot until they need your desk for someone younger, cheaper, and less likely to remember pensions used to exist.
Part 2: They Don’t Pay You in Gratitude
I wasn’t looking for a gold watch. I wasn’t asking for a balloon drop or a sheet cake in the breakroom. I didn’t even expect anyone to remember my start date. But when I gave years of my life to a company—sleepless nights, skipped meals, canceled vacations, anniversaries postponed—I think I’d earned more than a quiet fade to black.
In my first year, I saved the company more than double my salary. Year two? $1.5 million in annual savings, locked in for life. Even in my most recent year, with less runway and more red tape, I found a way to cut more than $35K per month in ongoing costs. And that’s just what I can point to on a spreadsheet. That doesn’t count the all-nighters. The Saturday logins. The emergency conference calls that ran longer than most relationships. That doesn’t count the toll.
There’s this lie we’re sold—especially in America—that if you just work hard enough, long enough, and with enough self-sacrifice, you’ll be safe. Valued. Protected. The truth? The harder you work, the more invisible you become. They call it “reliability.” They call it “dedication.” But really, it’s just consistency they can exploit.
There was a day—not long ago—when I was pulled into a crisis we later dubbed The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The entire production pipeline went down—databases, systems, infrastructure. Gone. No one asked if I had plans. No one wondered if I had dinner reservations or someone waiting for me. We all just got to work. We put in 54 hours straight. The kind of exhaustion that rearranges your DNA. Monday rolled around, the systems were back, and the only “thank you” was another fire drill waiting in the inbox.
Four years later, Valentine’s Day came again. But this time, I was on FMLA—because my wife had cancer, and I was doing everything I could to keep her alive. The contrast wasn’t lost on me.
You give them your soul, and what you get in return isn’t appreciation. It’s a paycheck. And don’t get me wrong—getting paid is the contract. It’s the agreement. But don’t call it family. Don’t call it loyalty. Don’t tell me I’m “critical to the business” when the moment I step away, I’m a ghost with a forwarding address.
Because here’s the thing they never say out loud: they don’t pay you in gratitude. They pay you in silence. In distance. In plausible deniability.
And the minute you become inconvenient to carry? They drop you—and tell themselves it was never personal.
Part 3: At-Will, At-Risk, At-Fucking-Any-Moment
There’s a particular kind of paranoia that seeps into your bones when you work in an at-will employment state. You don’t talk about it—hell, most of the time you don’t even consciously think about it—but it’s there. Like radon. Like lead in the water. You breathe it in with every performance review and sip it every time the CEO announces “exciting changes.”
You don’t have to do anything wrong to lose your job. That’s the beauty of it—from the company’s perspective. Maybe your boss had a fight with his wife. Maybe your division missed a quarterly target and someone’s gotta bleed. Maybe the new VP wants to “bring in his own people.” You won’t be warned. You won’t be heard. You’ll be informed.
They don’t need a reason. That’s the entire point. “Wrongful termination” is a cute phrase, but in practice it means almost nothing. The bar for proving it is so absurdly high that unless your boss fired you mid-racial slur while choking a puppy, your case is going nowhere.
And so you learn to walk the tightrope. You stop using sick days—even when you’re actually sick. You stay logged in late, hoping the green dot buys you another week of safety. You soften your emails, turn your cameras on, say “great idea!” when it’s not. You become… pliable.
What makes it worse is that excellence doesn’t protect you. In fact, it makes you a target. You’re expensive. You’re opinionated. You remember what things used to cost. You’ve optimized so much that there’s nothing left to fix—and now they can swap you out with two interns and a Jira board.
During COVID, I was essential. While three-quarters of the company was furloughed, I was kept on because I knew the systems. I could be trusted. I wore four hats and never once let anything drop. And now? That same reliability, that same capability—it’s a liability. Because I’m not just a line item. I’m a cost center.
At-will means at-risk, always. You’re not a person with a mortgage and a sick spouse and 30 years of experience. You’re a switch on a dashboard. And someone in a glass office five time zones away gets to decide when to flip it off.
It’s not job security. It’s job roulette. And the only rule is: The house always wins.
And while we’re busy playing roulette, the rest of the world’s playing chess. In Germany, you need months of documentation to let someone go. In Sweden, sick leave isn’t a career gamble. In Switzerland, everyone gets four weeks of guaranteed vacation—and if a company tried to fire someone for using it, they’d be laughed out of the building. In Europe, they plan for your absence. In the U.S., they prepare your replacement.
Here? Hell, you call in sick two days in a row and they start watching your Teams status like it’s a lie detector.
Part 4: You’re a Number. You Just Don’t Know Which One.
They said it was FMLA. Said it was “there to protect you.” Said it wouldn’t change anything—that when I came back, things would be the same. And maybe on paper, they were. Same badge. Same email address. Same title. But the job? The responsibilities? The place I held in the structure?
Gone. Not restructured. Not paused. Gone.
And that’s the point people miss when they say “the system works.” Systems don’t fire people. Systems don’t cheat or lie or gaslight you with terms like reorg or realignment or cross-functional redistribution of accountability. No, systems don’t do that. They’re just the spreadsheet where someone else presses delete.
The day I left, I mattered. I was managing cloud infrastructure, cost optimization, consulting engagements, and crisis mitigation. Hell, I’d saved them millions—some years in perpetuity. I was essential during COVID furloughs, wearing 3–4 hats while most of the company went dark. I was the guy who stayed when things got hard. I didn’t just justify my salary—I justified the lights staying on.
And then my wife got cancer.
It wasn’t optional. She needed me. I told my boss I’d be stepping back a bit—taking a day here, a day there. He “understood.” Then HR got involved. They told me how FMLA could relieve the burden. “Use the time. Focus on what matters,” they said, “nothing would change.” Everything did.
While I was gone, the gears turned. The meetings continued. My duties were quietly dispersed across teams I’d once mentored. And by the time I came back, I was a ghost in my own inbox. My role had been repurposed by people who couldn’t do my job, but sure as hell learned how to survive without me.
There wasn’t a pink slip. No evil HR rep rubbing their hands together. Just silence. A calendar with no meetings. A title with no function. And a leadership team that treated my return like a surprise party they forgot to plan. Because I wasn’t a person anymore—I was a record. An empty cell. A line that could be backfilled or deprecated depending on quarterly goals.
The system didn’t betray me. It didn’t even see me. Because I’m not a name. I’m a number. I just don’t know which one they used to decide I was done.
They tell us to be grateful—grateful for six holidays a year if the calendar lines up right. Meanwhile, countries we claim to be “more productive than” give their people double the time off, plus protections we can only dream of. We call it hustle. They call it human.
Part 5: Capitalism Didn’t Eat You. It Just Didn’t Know Your Name.
There’s this thing people say when you get laid off or passed over or steamrolled by a reorg: “Don’t take it personally—it’s just business.” But what the hell else am I supposed to take personally if not my livelihood? My purpose? My time? My soul?
I didn’t get ghosted. I got deleted by a macro.
See, the machine isn’t evil. It’s indifferent. That’s worse. It doesn’t want to hurt you—it doesn’t even know you exist. You could be Steve. You could be Sam. You could be a fucking serial number. Doesn’t matter. You’re not a person in the system. You’re a unit of cost. An asset with depreciation. A line item dragging down the forecast.
You think the company “knows” you because you stayed late. Because you were the one who fixed things on Christmas Eve. Because you helped onboard six managers and knew all the acronyms by heart. But they don’t know that. Hell, they don’t even know who wrote the SOPs. You did? Cool. The metadata says “Last Modified by: admin.”
And the people left behind? They can’t speak up. They’ve seen what happens to the ones who raise their hand and say, “Wait, wasn’t Steve the one who—?” They get told to stay in their lane. “It’s above your pay grade.” “It’s just restructuring.” “We need to stay agile.”
But this wasn’t agility. This was amputation. And I wasn’t even offered anesthesia.
And the most gutting part is this: I didn’t lose my job because I was bad at it. I lost it because I was too good. I made it look easy. So easy, in fact, they assumed it could be done by three other people—and two of them part-time. You think that’s capitalism rewarding efficiency? It’s not. It’s capitalism assuming you’re replaceable because you made the impossible look routine.
And when they finally cut the cord, they won’t send flowers. They’ll send COBRA paperwork. They’ll deactivate your badge while you’re still in the building. You won’t get a goodbye lunch. You’ll get locked out of Slack—or Teams—and realize you were just another variable in someone else’s pivot table.
Part 6: The Burnout Wasn’t a Bug—It Was the Product
People think burnout is a glitch. A symptom. Something that happens when a good worker just works too hard for too long without enough self-care. Cue the TED Talk, the spa weekend, the HR mindfulness seminar delivered over Zoom by a guy who’s never worked a 60-hour week in his life.
But burnout isn’t a malfunction. It’s a feature.
The system is designed to get everything it can out of you. To test your limits. To squeeze the orange until there’s no pulp left and then ask why the juice isn’t flowing. Burnout isn’t the end of your usefulness. It’s the signal that you were being used to your maximum potential.
And the reward for all that? Suspicion.
See, the moment you show signs of slowing down—missing a beat, taking a breath, logging off on time—suddenly you’re not “reliable” anymore. You’re not a rockstar. You’re a risk. You become the subject of whispered conversations about “bandwidth” and “coverage.” Because God forbid you act like a human in the machine.
I used to wear it like a badge of honor. “I can handle it.” “I’ve got broad shoulders.” “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” And you know what? They let me. Because they knew I’d never drop the ball. Even when my hands were full. Even when I was bleeding internally from the stress. Even when I had a heart attack.
Burnout wasn’t the warning sign. It was the expected endpoint.
And when it comes—when the fog rolls in and you can’t remember why you started doing this job in the first place—there’s no cavalry. No reset. No thank-you. Just a quiet restructuring meeting where your name’s not even on the slide deck. A “resource realignment.” A silent demotion into irrelevance.
Because here’s the ugly truth: the system doesn’t want you at your best. It wants you at your maximum yield. And once you’ve hit that peak, once you’ve done all the overtime and carried all the water and smiled through all the politics, it stops seeing you as an asset—and starts seeing you as a liability.
The business didn’t break you. Breaking was the business.
Part 7: We Built This. And We Can Burn It Down.
They keep telling us we’re family—right up until they change the locks.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How quickly the narrative shifts. One minute you’re being celebrated on the company intranet for a job well done, and the next, you’re gone without a trace. Not even a whisper in the break room. Not even a Slack thread to mark your absence. You just… disappear.
And it doesn’t feel like malice. That’s what makes it worse. Malice at least implies intent. This feels more like apathy on an industrial scale. Like being pushed off a moving train by a conductor who doesn’t even know your name.
The machine hums on. That’s the part you have to internalize. That’s the part they never teach you when you’re 20 and hungry and just thrilled to have a badge. You are not essential. You are replaceable. No matter what you’ve done. No matter how many nights you gave away, how many vacations you deferred, how many times you said “yes” when every fiber of your being screamed “no.”
You gave your soul to this place.
All you got was a paycheck.
And you were told to be grateful.
Be thankful you have a job.
Be thankful you’re still employed.
Be thankful we didn’t let you go sooner.
But the truth is, they should be thankful they had us.
Thankful for every over-delivered project. Every middle-of-the-night page. Every crisis contained, every customer retained, every million quietly saved in the background while someone else took the credit.
Without people like us, the numbers wouldn’t add up. The charts wouldn’t point up and to the right. The shareholders wouldn’t be satisfied.
So no—I’m not bitter. I’m not angry. I’m just done pretending the system isn’t rigged.
They built this house of cards on our backs. They mortared it with our loyalty. And we held up our end of the deal.
So the next time someone tells me I should just be lucky to have a job?
I’ll look them dead in the eye and say:
“Be thankful you have us as employees. Otherwise, you’d never satisfy the shareholders.”