Emotional Costs of the Recession

The signs of the economic earthquake are everywhere: our 401(k)s are floundering, some have had to defer retirement, while others wonder how they’re going to pay for college. But it is the laid off worker that is bearing the brunt of the pain this recession has to offer. Layoffs bring a complex emotional quagmire into play—panic about the checkbook, anger against your boss, fear about being judged at interviews and guilt over being laid off.

By now, most of us know someone who has been laid off. Unlike previous downturns, this recession is hitting across a broad spectrum of industries. The tech bust was more localized by geography and specialization; this time around, the banker is as likely to get the axe as much as the engineer or the admin.

In a world where headlines constantly blare about impending bankruptcies and foreclosures, it should be easier to explain your layoff to your friends, co-workers and potential employers. This may not be the case. Statistics are hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence suggests that despite widespread consensus of a grave recession, laid off workers still have to muster a polished answer to the question: “Why did you get laid off?”

This question and its variants are thought provoking, and the questions much more so than the answers. Regardless of whether the layoff is a casualty of the economic downturn or is performance related, the answer to the question ‘why did you get laid off’ doesn’t tell us very much. The answer will be more or less the same, regardless of actual cause because the global recession has ensured that we all know the answer to this question. And after coaching from a dependable career counselor, the well-crafted reply is remarkable only in how neatly it fits within a narrow spectrum of acceptable answers.

For the laid off person, the question of ‘why’ must be fascinating, especially since its frequency belies the fact that most people already know the answer. So why do we continue to ask why?

I was thinking about this question when I spoke with Denise, a lawyer from a prestigious D.C. firm who had recently gotten laid off. Much to my surprise, she claimed that there were striking similarities in how people approached a rape or a layoff victim.

No one is suggesting equivalencies between rape and layoffs, but there are enough intriguing similarities that suggest we need better ways of addressing layoffs, on a personal and professional basis. Teasing this question apart, ‘why did you get laid off?’ can tell us much about the emotional response that layoffs provoke, usually on a subconscious level. In drawing a line between explaining rapes and layoffs, the questions of “Where was she? Was it a bad part of town” turn out to be much more similar to “Why did you get laid off” than you’d think.

It’s been several years since the highly publicized rape of the Central Park jogger and its racially charged aftermath. If we think back to how that case was discussed in the media, one instance sticks out—the Oprah interview. When Oprah interviewed the victim, the first question she asked was: “When I first heard about you, I thought, ‘Why were you running alone in Central Park at night?’”

Oprah received a lot of flack for this classic ‘blame-the-victim’ question, but to be honest, I think this question comes up fairly often. Given her own tragic history of abuse, I don’t think that Oprah was asking this question to be insensitive; rather, she was asking a question that she knew was implicitly or explicitly on the public mind. The question was of the “Was she in a dangerous part of town? What was she wearing?” variety, or if we want to put it bluntly: “What did you do to invite this horrific attack?”

Rationally, we know that an attacker’s decision to violate someone is independent of his or her degree of undress. In other words, most of us recognize that the “she’s asking for it” argument is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that the attacker bears no responsibility for his actions. But it doesn’t stop us from asking the question, time and time again.

Analogously, the questions, “How many hours did you bill? Did everyone get laid off in your group? Why are you getting laid off?” is rooted in the question, “What did you do to get laid off?” The spouse asks because he or she wants to understand, and the potential employer inquires in order to ensure that you aren’t a bad apple that got kicked out at a convenient time. Co-workers may ask, hoping that you might reveal some terrible personal habit or egregious flaw that led to your unenviable fate. Even worse, those who don’t ask, the friends who treat the layoff like a death that they’re afraid to mention, are thinking the same question. They’re probably not aware that you are also asking yourself the same questions: “What did I do wrong? Why am I getting laid off?”

Why do we ask these questions?

In her memoir, Aftermath, the philosopher Susan J. Brison describes her horrific attack in a beautiful field in southern France, and the reaction of her friends and family. Their desire to be helpful and supportive led to a strange variety of responses, from silence to an aggressive questioning of the details of the attack, as if they could explain it away. She was seized with a protective desire to blame herself because “it can be less painful to think that you did something blameworthy that it is to think that you live in a world where you can be attacked at any time, in any place.” Likewise, her friends’ silences, offered in the name of protecting her from reliving the attack, were rooted in a denial designed to protect themselves, to reject the idea that random violence can happen and that the world where her attack had occurred was also their world. Here we can see that the myth of immunity, the belief that terrible things won’t happen to you, is sometimes contingent on the secret hope that it’s the victim’s fault. Or at the very least, if you believe that there was a chance that she could have avoided her fate through action or luck, maybe you will never have to suffer it yourself.

That’s why we keep asking these sad, rote questions. If we deny the victim a measure of empathy by asking these questions, and refuse to identify with him or her, then we can continue to believe that we are not doomed to a similar fate. If we try and find out why our friends got laid off, then perhaps we can mitigate our own sense of helplessness.

Readers will immediately point out that there indeed are some people who are being laid off for justifiable performance reasons. This is doubtlessly true. Their numbers are impossible to measure. Furthermore, the sense that some people do indeed ‘deserve it’ is aggravated by the reality that only a percentage of the workforce usually gets fired. Despite the reality of worldwide economic distress, some companies have also continued to perpetuate the myth of ‘performance culls, not layoffs’ or even engaged in stealth layoffs in order to preserve what is left of their scanty reputation. More to the point, the mere presence of performance layoffs continues to be reassuring—insidiously, the very knowledge that some small percent of people will be deservedly fired feeds our hopes that we won’t be next and justifies the next time we ask the question. Ultimately, the view that the question is justified because a small number merit its asking, is rooted in an idea of a world where we have greater control over our lives than we do in reality. This is a world where hard work always brings its just rewards, and people get promoted or spared because they deserve it.

What kind of world would we have to live in not to ask these questions? It would be a world of very finite, limited control, where attackers sometimes come across their victims randomly and not because of some grudge or provocation. It would be a world where a remote country’s economic policy or some bank’s merger can have greater impact on your future than your long weekend hours and hard fought professional accomplishments. We keep asking these questions because we don’t want to live in that world—one that turns on luck and circumstance, one that denies you control over the most important and vulnerable part of your life—the ability to feed yourself and your family. We ask these questions because the illusion of control over our own fate is critically important to our continued sanity, and because we hope that if we do X and avoid Y, we can ensure that we emerge from this economic madness unscathed.

Is the myth of immunity necessary to our own survival? Perhaps. But maybe the next time you run into a laid off worker, you can avoid asking the question.

Having grown up on three continents, Sae Park often explores issues of social hybridity, loss and identity in her work. She is currently finishing her PhD in history and is working on a book on Eliza Bowen Jumel, the first scandalous socialite of American society. Most of the time, she lives in New York with her husband and cat.