The layoff that hasn’t come

One · What happened

The fear went up while the layoffs kept going down

Pew released a survey on 18 August. Among American adults under 30, 55% now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, up from 47% last year and 39% in 2024. In that same age group 73% expect AI to mean fewer jobs over the next 20 years, and 2 years ago that number was 61%.

Two weeks later, Challenger, Gray & Christmas put out August’s layoff numbers, and layoffs had dropped again.

Two · What it is doing

Fear that has come loose from what is happening

Go looking and you find the same post written over and over, in a dozen different forums, by people whose jobs are currently fine. On a careers forum somebody writes that they’re scared their role will be redundant inside 2 years, and it gets 90 upvotes and 225 replies. A post in a women-in-tech community titled simply that they are scared of AI draws close to 500. On the big open-question boards the same question comes back about monthly, reworded a little, like asking again might get a different answer.

Almost none of these were written by somebody who had actually lost a job. They were written by people rehearsing it, and the rehearsal looks about the same from thread to thread. Other people’s layoffs get read like they’re news about you. The company forum gets checked before the kids do, and the conversation with your spouse has been run a dozen times in your head and never once with her in the room.

The clearest explanation I’ve seen of why that happens came from an ordinary commenter answering a frightened stranger in one of those threads. The more you search for it, he said, the more it gets fed back to you. That’s just how the recommendation systems work, and nobody who builds them would argue with him.

You’re afraid, so you go looking, and looking brings back more of what you were afraid of, and after a while the sheer volume of it starts to feel like proof, when what it really shows is what you’ve been reading. A man can spend a whole year becoming an expert on a catastrophe that never shows up and call that year staying informed, and I’ve watched people do it.

Three · Where the ground is

The one problem that is actually in front of you

Losing your job and being afraid of losing your job are 2 different problems, and only one of them is in front of you right now.

The first one is a real loss and it deserves real planning, and by planning I mean savings, a skill you’ve let go stale, an honest look at what you would cut first, people who would take your call if you needed one. Scripture never treats that kind of foresight as a lack of faith. Proverbs 6 points at the ant storing food in summer, and in Luke 14 the man who starts building a tower without counting the cost is the one everybody ends up laughing at.

The second one is what most people are actually doing when they can’t sleep. It feels like diligence and it produces nothing, and that is more or less the claim Jesus makes in Matthew 6:27. Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? There’s no promise attached to that, no line about hardship staying away from you. He just asks it, and then he points at the birds and the Father who feeds them and goes on to the next thing.

Daily bread

The prayer Jesus taught in Matthew 6 asks for daily bread. It says nothing about a job or a career track, and nothing about a 20-year projection for a technology. A job is how the bread has been getting to you, and losing one is a real loss. It was never where the bread came from, though. A person can lose the job and still get fed, and that has happened to so many people, and some of them are sitting a few rows from you on Sunday and would tell you about it if you asked.

Better to hear that now, while nothing has happened. If the thought of losing the paycheck scares you this much, then the paycheck is probably what you’ve been trusting, and most people don’t find that out until the thing gets taken away, so in a way you’re getting the information early.

The fear of the Lord

There’s an older idea that gets at this better than anything in the productivity books, and the Bible calls it the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 9:10 calls it the beginning of wisdom. A person who has taken God seriously has already stood in front of something a lot bigger than an earnings call, and the smaller fears don’t go away after that, but they do get smaller.

People go looking for this without having the words for it. In the places where frightened people ask questions, 2 threads keep turning up a few posts apart from each other, one asking how do I manage my anxiety and one asking what does it mean to fear God. As far as I can tell nobody has answered them together, and I think they’re the same question.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

When there’s nothing for the fear to do it just circles. So do one real thing today, the thing the worry has actually been about, and let the feelings catch up later.

1. 01

   Do the one thing the worrying is standing in for.

   Update the résumé, or have the conversation with your spouse that you’ve been rehearsing alone, and do one of them today. A lot of the time worry is standing in for a specific, boring task that would take about 20 minutes.

2. 02

   Give the news 2 windows a day.

   10 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening, and outside those 2 windows the news is closed. People land on this rule on their own in every forum where the problem comes up, and most of them break it inside a week, so the part that matters is actually keeping it. Whatever happens in the middle of the day will still be there in the evening.

3. 03

   Stop searching the fear.

   Every search tells the feed to bring you more of the same. Of the 5, this one is the cheapest, because it takes no willpower at all, you just stop doing a thing, and the feed calms down within a few days.

4. 04

   Say the actual sentence to one person.

   To somebody’s face, not in a text. I am afraid I will not be able to provide for my family. Most men never say that sentence to anybody, and the shame that keeps it in is a big part of what makes it grow.

5. 05

   Give something away this week.

   Money, or a meal, to somebody in worse shape than you are. Giving while you’re afraid is the fastest way I know to find out what you believe about provision, because it’s hard to hoard and give at the same time, and pretty quick you’ll know which one you’re doing.