Within hours of getting laid off, she started receiving advice, “offered up like petals at a wedding: stay positive, with your CV you’ll land on your feet, this will be the best thing that ever happened to you, just you wait.”
It is striking how quickly redundancy is framed not as an event but as a stage cue. The same phrases appear with alarming reliability: keep going, you can do this, talk to your network. They arrive from friends, acquaintances, sometimes even strangers, each one offered with genuine intent, yet collectively forming something far more rigid and far less cosseting. What presents as care reveals itself as a script; a set of instructions that leave little room for the messier truths of redundancy itself – anger, self-doubt and even shame…
Across business media, coaching culture and especially LinkedIn, job loss is reframed as a moment of possibility, a chance to pivot, to retrain, to embrace a new purpose. This is appealing because it offers a sense of control where, in reality, there isn’t much of it. It is also deeply misleading. By focusing on what the individual might do next, it sidesteps the conditions that made the displacement possible, while absolving others of responsibility. This is not accidental. The narrative persists because it serves a system that benefits from its repetition. Corporate culture remains blissfully untouched, its decisions reframed as necessary, even benevolent. The coaching industry thrives on moments of vulnerability, particularly among midlifers, already aware of how few comparable roles remain, in terms of ranking and salary.
Research consistently shows that older workers face longer periods of unemployment and are significantly less likely to return to work quickly after redundancy. Those over 50 are three-times less likely to be re-employed within three months than younger workers, while around a third of those unemployed in this age group remain out of work for over a year. Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics also show that redundancies are highest among those aged 50 and over. For some, the outcome is more final: more than one in ten leave the workforce altogether.
However, over on LinkedIn, an entirely different reality is played out. Here, corporate culture and coaching narratives are relentlessly performative and amplified daily: posts thanking past employers for the “opportunity” and the “challenge”, delivered with an eyebrow-raising composure that feels rehearsed even when the circumstances suggest otherwise, alongside an endless stream of experts offering solutions to problems they cannot possibly fix.
I could have written this. All. Of. This. But I didn’t.
She goes on to talk about how all these “stay positive” messages, however well-intended, soon begin to wear you down – you aren’t thinking positively enough. You aren’t being resiliant enough. Your are bringing people down. You are failing because you fail to remain cheerful and upbeat in the face of it all.
I get it: unemployed people that really want to work are downers. Like people who are divorced, but really want to be married.
I have worked very hard to put on a positive, public-facing face since February 2005. Yes, I’ve been dealing with this for more than 25 years. I’m lucky: I’ve had some amazing, brief moments of career success, and that you didn’t realize they were so brief shows you just how damn good I am at marketing. I’ve never lied, but I also learned long ago how to craft an online image.
Sometimes, yes, you have to quit what you love.
Gen X, struggling for employment? I hear you.
Your 50s as a Woman: Let’s Get Real.
Job Searches: They never get easier.
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