Late in February of this year, I had the unfortunate experience of being laid off. The news wasn’t entirely unexpected–after the company I was working for got acquired in January, new feature work on my project was stopped, and my team received no real direction or attention from the people above us, leading me to anticipate that I wasn’t going to be part of the company’s post-merger plans. Fortunately, this prompted me to start looking for new jobs fairly early on, and by the time I learned of my layoff I had a number of interview prospects lined up with other companies. Even more fortunately, several of those prospects turned into offers, and I am starting a new position in April, one that I am really excited to start.
I fully acknowledge that as far as things go, I’m pretty lucky. This is a pretty tough market for Software Engineers, compared to the landscape a few years ago. I’m very grateful to have been in a position where I had multiple viable job offers, and could choose the opportunity that worked best for me and my career goals. Before I get too busy, I wanted to reflect a little on my time in between jobs.
Ben Wyatt or George Constanza?
I always thought that if I were laid off, I’d fall into one of two patterns. The first is that of Ben Wyatt in Parks & Recreation, who spends his time between jobs frantically working on personal projects to avoid thinking about the depression of a job loss, sinking himself into hobbies like claymation and tabletop games.
The second is that of George Costanza in Seinfeld, who declares he is using a 3-month severance package to enjoy the “Summer of George”, which results in him sitting on his ass doing nothing in an attempt to “decompress” from work.
It turns out that I didn’t really follow either of these patterns. I’ve had some time pursuing personal projects (on which more later), and I’ve had some “decompression” as well, but on the whole, my days were fairly filled with a variety of obligations, from scheduling and preparing interviews to various household tasks like getting my car serviced and cleaning my garage. The regular cadence of Ian’s school drop-offs and pickups have also provided some useful structure to my days, keeping me from getting either too absorbed in personal projects or watching TV all day.
Re-Kindling my Passion for Software
There certainly has been some Ben Wyatt-style hobbyism over the past few weeks. I’ve been spending a good portion of my free time during the days working on a new passion project: a multi-platform game written in Flame. I see this as another chance for me to recover from burnout by building something for myself that makes me excited. I am slowly working on a multi-level sidescroller (like Super Mario World) that draws on my scholarly interests in books and the pre-modern world. While I don’t want to give away too much, here is a small preview of the world I’m building:
The project is in early stages, and I still have loads to learn about game development, from high-level game design to finding/creating assets, handling physics, and maintaining game state. It’s a neat challenge to use a framework I’m very familiar with (Flutter) to work on something different from anything I’ve ever really built. It’s no Cones of Dunshire, but it’s provided me some much-needed mental spark over the past several weeks.
Enjoying the Weather
Now, development on this game has not progressed very far. One of the reasons is that I’ve been doing other things with my free time, like job interviews, volunteer work, and general housekeeping. But I’ve also been taking full advantage of the fact that my layoff came right at the start of Virginia springtime. As our snow and ice has melted, the days have grown longer, and flowers have started to bloom, I have been using this time to enjoy time on the bike. I have already discussed my love of cycling, and I’m fortunate to be living in a place that is really, really, great for bike rides. In the past month, I’ve gone on several nice day rides on asphalt, gravel, and trails within around an hour drive of my house. While I certainly don’t want cycling to be my only outlet, it has been really nice to have this period of downtime coinciding with nice seasonal weather.
Processing Emotional Burnout
Ultimately, I think it’s for the best that I’ve spent so much time on the bike. I think I really needed it.
One thing I knew when I got laid off was that I needed to take a little time for myself to recover emotionally. The stress and anxiety of constantly watching my Teams schedule and waiting for a layoff meeting to appear wore me down emotionally and physically. If I’m honest, I think that the looming uncertainty of the merger, which we had first learned of last fall, probably contributed to some of my stresses last fall as well.
In some respect, finally getting that dreaded Teams meeting was a bit of a relief, because I no longer had to brace myself in anticipation. However, the weeks of bracing definitely left me feeling pretty drained, and I’ve been working through some difficult emotions regarding the situation–helplessness, anger, rejection, and insecurity. Through therapy, meditation, and my local Buddhist community, I’ve been trying to work through these emotions in ways that allow myself to heal and grow, instead of allowing bitterness to fester.
I want to be careful of spouting a bunch of generic “self-care” platitudes. Modern emphasis on self-care is often more toxic than helpful, as it centers the burden of maintaining wellbeing on individuals rather than addressing the broader social, economic, and cultural causes of their stress. I can’t tell you that meditating has suddenly given me a super-chill, “zenned out” attitude to life that makes me magically feel warm and fuzzy about everyone involved in laying me and my friends off. I can only say that I have needed (and still need) to come to terms with the difficult emotions that this experience has given me, and that I am working as best I can with the tools that have helped me in the past. I hope that each of us in similar situations can do the same.
It’s All Impermanent
Lately, the Buddhist concept of dependent arising has been helping me cope with what has happened. According to Buddhist teachings, the circumstances of our lives are conditioned by what we and others have done before us. Not only the things that happen to us in our lives, but also how we react to these things and the thoughts that arise in our minds about them, are all the result of causes and conditions that link us together in endless webs of interconnectedness.
Importantly, everything in our lives that comes from dependent arising (which, in fact, includes our lives themselves) is impermanent, for better or for worse. I often struggle with bringing impermanence to mind, because it feels like I’m trying to bring myself down with a memento mori, reminding myself that everyone I know and love is going to wither away and die. But the nice thing about the Buddhist view of impermanence is that it applies to everything, not just the good stuff. All of the struggles and stresses of our lives–often described by the eight worldly winds of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, and success and failure–come and go in a constantly changing stream of events. Not only does this help me to accept that difficult situations will eventually change–a “this too shall pass” attitude–it also helps me realize that the worries and anxieties that enter in my mind are the result of previous conditioning that does not have to persist in the future.
Now, it’s a lot easier for me to take this attitude now than it was a month ago, right after I got laid off and did not have another job lined up. While I still intellectually knew the teachings of dependent arising and impermanence at that time, the pain of the moment made it much more difficult to practice with them, especially at first. Still, I had moments of comfort when I remembered that the worried thoughts that creep into my mind in the middle of the night about whether I should have seen my layoff coming, whether I am right to be in software, and how I’m supposed to feed my family, are not, fundamentally, me. They are the result of where the stream of life has led me now, and my awareness in the present can help steer the course of where I end up in the future.
What Now?
To say that my 2026 didn’t get off to the best start would be something of an understatement. Even as I’m excited to start a new job, I’m hesitant to say that I’m out of the woods. The volatility of the world right now, and the general economic instability caused by so many different factors (wars, climate, growing inequality, reactions to A.I., to name a few), makes it difficult for me to really feel like my career is safe. I have always known that layoffs happen in all industries, especially tech, but experiencing it firsthand has definitely made me more aware of how precarious our positions are. Recently, I’ve often felt like a leaf thrown about in multiple directions by winds that neither know nor care what happens to me. Raising a family and leading a nurturing, fulfilling life under these circumstances has been difficult.
Amidst all this, I’ve been doing what I can to find agency. Pursuing a new passion project, volunteering for causes I care about, and getting out for some two-wheeled therapy have all helped me remember the things in life that inspire me. And accepting the impermanence of all things bound to dependent arising has helped me come to peace with the experience of losing my job (though this is still a work in progress). As I embark on the next stage of my career, I look forward to applying the lessons I’ve learned from this time off.