The Illusion of Safety
Even if we weren’t impacted by the rounds of layoffs everywhere, scrolling through LinkedIn hasn’t been an uplifting experience recently. In one post, a tech worker said he didn’t know how to tell his tween children that he lost his job. He seemed truly shaken and broken.
What happened to him is difficult. But what struck me the most about the post was where his locus of control was: Outside of himself.
How many people who were laid off lost their dream job? Likely not as many as those who lost a comfortable job. I’m not dismissing the pain and suffering involved; some people found themselves in terrible situations, including having to leave the US within weeks if no other job materializes. But most will be fine and move on to the next comfortable, non-dream job. When looking for a job, we’ve been trained to look primarily for safety—measured by the seniority of the role, the size of the paycheck, and the growth potential of the company. What we get is the illusion of safety, since it’s only there until the next recession or round of layoffs.
We think of safety as external when safety is in fact internal. We make Meta or Amazon or Elon Musk our source of safety when our true source of safety is ourselves and our inner knowing that we can face difficult situations, live through them, and grow from them, even if we have no clue how (yet).
By all means, we should allow and accept the feelings that come with such a situation—resisting them will only create trapped emotions that fester over time. There’s nothing wrong with leaning on others—that’s what family, friends, and even random LinkedIn connections are for. It’s also fine to make safer choices—it’s next to impossible to be creative when you can’t pay the bills. But there’s a difference between feeling sad and making an external entity responsible for our happiness. Between asking for help and feeling dependent on that help coming. Between choosing to take a job that’s comfortable and feeling like we lost ourselves if we lost the job. As always, it’s about awareness—noticing where we give our power away to other people or entities because we think we won’t be ok without them.
Like everything else in life, building a strong internal locus of control takes practice. The more “unsafe” (i.e. unpredictable) situations we put ourselves in, the more comfortable with them we become and the less external safety we need to rely on. I was a lot more fearful of not having a stable job when I had a stable job than after five years of not having one (obviously it’s prudent to practice with less dramatic choices).
Where are you putting your safety outside of yourself? What are you giving up for the sake of pseudo-safety?
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