A Call to Arms: Guarding Yourself from Despair in an Ocean of Layoffs

Let’s be honest about the current environment in tech. The past decade made us soft. We got caught up in the hysteria of unicorn valuations. Companies succeeded despite mediocre execution. And along the way, we tricked ourselves into believing things would always be up and to the right. 

But we all have to learn this lesson sooner or later—never allow yourself to be caught off guard. To combat this, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency are critical—the ability to think for yourself, adapt, and focus on what’s within your control.

When you get caught up in it and lose your sense of self along the way, these lines become blurry. Your company and your job consume your identity. And over-identifying with a job or a company strips your ability to think for yourself and hands over your peace of mind to something beyond your control.

It’s difficult to guard yourself against this as you get further into your career or if you’ve idealized working at a certain company as your ‘dream job.’ The definition between you and your job begins to blur. You get wrapped up in your work because you care, you see your recent valuation as a lottery ticket, and you tell yourself that your Metafam will always take care of you. Then a downturn hits, your job is cut, and you’re facing an identity crisis. 

“No one is crushed by Fortune, unless they are first deceived by her.”

— Seneca

It’s easy to feel like it’s all over when the winds of fortune shift, as they can and will for all of us. Because too many of us have trapped ourselves into focusing on externals and things beyond ourselves to define who we are and fuel our sense of self-worth. And too often we fail to recognize that conditions of the recent past won’t extend indefinitely into the future. 

To combat this you must first untangle yourself. You are not your company. You are not your job. If you were impacted by a layoff and feel blindsided, you are not alone. Now is the time to build the muscle so you’re never caught off guard again.

This starts with a focus on the mental models and resources you need to establish a greater degree of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. With these, you can build resilience, flexibility, and independence. That way, when the unexpected strikes, you are able to avoid catastrophe, instead using that as a catalyst for growth. 

Hold your identity lightly

“You are not your work” sounds catchy. People throw it around, but what does it actually mean? When you tell yourself you are a ‘Head of Product’ or your identity is constructed around the fact that you were an early employee at Stripe, and then you’re pushed out, things crumble. Because titles and companies are externals that fall beyond your complete control. Over-indexing here can make you rigid and fragile. 

“When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.”

— James Clear

The reframe this, you must go back to why you do what you do. Who are you as a person? Forget the bullshit, forget the vanity, forget the ego. Who are you at your core? Are you the type of person who loves building and creating? Are you a storyteller?

When you base your identity in who you are rather than what you are or where you are, you create room for flexibility and resilience. Holding your identity lightly allows you to adapt. It allows you to find harmony in the motion that is life.

Assign things their proper value

Inherent to this focus on who you are rather than your title or your company, is a shift back to what’s within your control. Self-sufficiency begins with identifying what’s within your control, what’s beyond, and what falls in between. By going through this exercise, you can start to map out and assign things their proper value. 

You can control how you show up. You can control your focus on your craft. You can control the boundaries you set between your job and your identity so they’re not blurred beyond all recognition. You cannot control economic conditions. You cannot control every decision made at a company. 

Focusing on what’s within your control is about reducing the dependencies you create between external conditions and your internal well-being. The less reliant you are on others to provide the things that only you’re able to give yourself—meaning, character, integrity—the more resilient you become to the whims of market conditions and executives. 

“There is only one road to happiness—let this rule be at hand morning, noon, and night: stay detached from things that are not up to you.”

— Epictetus

Live below your means

If you’re working in tech, you have been in an extreme position of privilege in terms of compensation. But inflating your lifestyle to match your income is one of the most dangerous things you can do. And while you might be able to get away with this in good times, should economic conditions turn south, this mistake will crush you.

“Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate. And past a certain level of income your savings rate is driven by your ability to keep your lifestyle expectations from running away.”

— Morgan Housel

If you’re in this position currently, write this on your mirror and stare at it every day: build a safety net. When you’re employed, you should be stashing away as much of your paycheck as humanly possible. While inflating your lifestyle to match your income makes you fragile and dependent. A safety net creates flexibility, independence, and peace of mind so you’re never buried in desperation. 

You always want to have options. This is about taking back your life from those who have you strung out on an addiction to your biweekly paycheck or annual bonus. 

Getting laid off from a job can be a catalyst to come back to yourself, find alignment, and focus on more meaningful work. But without a contingency plan—emergency funds and a modest lifestyle—you’ll throw yourself into a state of panic. This state of desperation forces you either jump at the next opportunity rather than the right opportunity or get stuck in jobs you hate. 

The mania will return one day, do not allow yourself to get caught up in it. Begin building a buffer to protect yourself against ruin. You always want to have the power to walk away or bounce back if difficult times come your way. Work your ass off to create a safety net that puts you back in control of your own life. 

The good times won’t last forever, but neither will the bad.
 

Take back your identity

If you want to take back control of your life and build resilience, focus on eliminating dependencies. Disentangle your identity, your sense of self-worth, and your well-being from your current job and company. Assign things their proper value by focusing on what’s within your control.

You are not invincible. You are not immune to the winds of the market. The best way to guard yourself against the waves of mania and panic that define the human condition is a relentless drive toward self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. 

With these skills, you can take your happiness, your well-being, and your life back into your own hands. No one else can do that for you. Not your partner. Not your job. And certainly not your company. This allows you to build resilience, flexibility, and independence which guard you against despair when all hope seems lost. 

It all starts with creating the space for yourself and sitting in that. No matter how uncomfortable it might be or how much easier it is to lose yourself in the busyness of work. You must sort through the noise and determine what is your own. 

Now is the opportunity to find your way back to yourself. Now is the opportunity to create your own momentum in life.

Self-Sufficiency: The Ultimate Stoic Virtue

Above all else, the Stoics were masters at assigning things their proper value. The great Stoic philosophers knew the importance of identifying what was within their control, what was beyond, and what fell in-between. And they maintained an unwavering sense of focus on the things within their realm of control.

Nowhere is this more evident than the core Stoic virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. But at the foundation of this Stoic range of virtue and your sphere of influence sits one underlying principle that ties it altogether – self-sufficiency. From self-sufficiency stems all other virtues.

It’s a dangerous game to tie your sense of meaning and wellbeing to someone or something else. When you fixate on things beyond your control, you become restricted, dependent, and weak. And you introduce dependencies that can drop you into a state of anxiety, envy, or despair without warning.

But when you guard your self-sufficiency above all else and focus more attention on what’s within your sphere of control, you gain flexibility, independence, and strength.

“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled – have you no shame in that?”

— Epictetus

Self-sufficiency is about focusing more of your time and energy on the things you can actually have an impact on. And it demands that you assume responsibility for those things.

There are those who argue against self-sufficiency as if it’s the enemy of progress. And there’s an element of truth to this. Since we don’t all have to worry about harvesting our own food, sewing our own clothes, or building our own tools, we can get further up on the hierarchy needs. We can trade chores and focus on what we find meaning in. This is progress.

But I mean self-sufficiency less in terms of technology, and more in terms of the reliance on others for the internal quality of your life and your wellbeing. Assuming you’re healthy, the less reliant you are on others to provide the things that only you’re able to give yourself – meaning, virtue, character, integrity – the greater your capacity to give something back to the world.

And while it might fly in the face of progress, voluntary hardship is an important tool for self-sufficiency. Sometimes you have to do the work, suffer a little, and take the long way home. This is a training ground for your mind. It builds willpower and resilience.

“As wood is to the carpenter, bronze to the sculptor, so our own lives are the proper material in the art of living.”

— Epictetus

Philosophy is about the art of living. By focusing on developing yourself first, you’re able to improve yourself as a human being. And in doing so, you increase your capacity to give and amplify the impact you’re able to have. But so many people want to give advice without first figuring out their own lives and accepting responsibility for themselves.

It’s easier to focus on other people’s problems – the latest gossip, family drama, or outrage featured in today’s news – rather than facing your own uncomfortable truths. Distractions are the crutch we use to avoid facing ourselves.

Self-sufficiency is about recognizing that life is a single player game. The only person you can change is you. It might seem counterintuitive, but if you start here you’re able to increase your capacity to make a difference in other people’s lives.

By becoming less dependent on others for your every need, you’re able to create more than you take. And you provide yourself with more opportunities to demonstrate virtues like wisdom, compassion, and courage.

There are obvious exceptions when it comes to the sick or elderly. But if you’re a provider for someone else and you fail to establish a degree of self-sufficiency, you’ll always have a self-imposed limit on what you’re able to provide. To make up for the discrepancy, you’re likely taking from other people in your life to help fuel that. And if you’re lucky, the world breaks even in the exchange.

Your capacity to give without expecting something in return is directly tied to your degree of self-sufficiency.

By requiring reciprocity for an act of kindness, you negate its impact. With a stronger sense of self-sufficiency, you eliminate the ego-driven need for anything in return. And this is how you flip the script and create a net positive in the world.

In the pursuit of self-sufficiency you increase your capacity to contribute in every other facet of your life. It’s foundational to giving more than you take. And that’s what the world needs. More people giving back to the world. More people taking risks to live at their best. More people with a deeper well of kindness for the people around them.

But it all starts with self-sufficiency. With this foundation in place, the rest of your virtues can grow without limit.

The question, then, is how to begin honing your own self-sufficiency. Here are five first steps to help push you in the right direction.

1. Assign things their proper value

Self-sufficiency begins with identifying what’s within your control, what’s beyond, and what falls in-between. By going through this exercise, you can map out and assign things their proper value. What’s within your control should take precedence, in terms of both time and energy. After all, this is where you can have the largest measurable impact.

2. Create room for reflection

This also requires creating room for reflection each day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a meditation practice in the morning, taking a walk after lunch, or journaling in the evening. What matters is that you create space to process and think for yourself. This helps guard you from being pulled into races that you’re not willing to run. 

As humans we’re highly impressionable. Opportunities for reflection will help you discover what’s meaningful to you and avoid absorbing someone else’s guiding principle as your own. And this is perhaps the most difficult skill of all – sorting through the noise and determining what’s your own.

3. Practice voluntary hardship

In a world of mental hacks and shortcuts, there’s no substitute for discipline and resilience. To develop this, look for occasional opportunities to remove automation and assistance. These can act as barriers to your own abilities and your natural filter for priorities.

This might mean cooking tonight instead of ordering out or going for a run instead of watching another sporting event. The ability to embrace a little bit of discomfort goes a long way when it comes to self-sufficiency. If you want to create something meaningful and transform yourself, it rarely comes through the path of least resistance. 

4. Master a multidisciplinary approach

As you push yourself, you create more opportunities to pursue a wealth of experience across disciplines and dial in a multidisciplinary strategy. This begins with fueling your natural curiosity, drawing connections between your wide-ranging interests, and exploring new ways to stack the skills that set you apart. 

From here you can assess things from new angles, identify your gaps, and survey the range of available options. It also guards you from false patterns and foolish attempts to apply a single model to every problem you face. If you only have a narrow range of mental models available when you negotiate the challenges inherent to life, self-sufficiency is impossible. You need multiple weapons if you want to outthink and outmaneuver obstacles.

5. Embrace the silence

But self-sufficiency doesn’t mean you need to have an opinion about everything. It’s more about the ability to subsist without validation. If you’re focused on the right things, for the right reasons, you won’t need external recognition each step of the way. Everyday conversations are a good place to begin practicing this. 

Another way to practice this is when you experience something memorable – a landscape that humbles you or a concert that inspires you. Allow that to be enough. Avoid the temptation to reach for Instagram. Not everyone needs to know every minute detail of your life. The meaning you find in that moment is worth far more than the short-term high that comes from someone mindlessly scrolling through their feed and tapping your post.

““These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest…It succeeds in its own purpose…””

— Marcus Aurelius

Self-sufficiency doesn’t mean you need to live off the grid. You can and should enjoy the conveniences of modern life. But you should also assume responsibility for your personal wellbeing.

Living well is about eliminating internal dependencies. No one can tell you what’s meaningful to you, what your guiding principles should be, or what the right decision is each step of the way. You have to determine this yourself.

If you want to make a measurable difference in the world, it starts with assuming responsibility for yourself. This is perhaps the most important lesson the Stoics had to offer. You can’t create anything meaningful without first taking responsibility and transforming yourself.

If you’re a well-rounded human being, you can give more back to the world and the people around you. It starts and ends with you.

*This article was originally featured on Daily Stoic.