Getting Fired Can Be Worse Than Divorce
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I also find that it would be very difficult to summarize 4000 research papers into a clean graph about subjective life satisfaction in such a way that you could cleanly compare post divorce well-being and post unemployment well-being.
Given, it's VERY hard to find the root study, and most other peer websites are just referencing the Bloomberg article. My guess is the author of the article is conflating some data.
A few interesting references: https://whatworkswellbeing.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/unemp...
References: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/926/1/02-16.pdf To conclude: "Using a longitudinal study of 24,000 people living in Germany, this study found on average that individuals had lower life satisfaction following unemployment and this never recovered to the pre-unemployment levels. These results held for men and women but were stronger for men."
The authors of this study frame their results slightly differently:
"The findings suggests that even a short period of unemployment can cause an alteration in a person’s long-term set-point. Although there was substantial stability in life satisfaction over the years, unemployment did influence long-term levels, thus suggesting that in addition to personality, long-term subjective well-being can also be influenced by life circumstances"
* Your entire team is being cut because it's not generating enough revenue
* No one likes you
* your position can, and will, be outsourced to India
* you are incompetent at your position
I feel like there would be different levels of upset based on those things.
"Why on earth did they fire a hot shot like me? They are crazy."
:)
I've been both divorced and fired. I got fired because my position was outsourced to India. I got divorced because nobody liked me :).
The firing was basically nothing. I think the key difference, for me as an individual, is that I'm not a "lifer." I'm generally well liked in my jobs and get regular raises and promotions, but I'm not emotionally attached to the vision or whatever. In addition to that I happen to be the type of person who keeps a hefty emergency savings and all that. Financially speaking getting fired was a minor nuisance. I had another job within a month.
Getting divorced was really tough. It was an existential crisis. One day I was one thing, a married man with a child. The next day I was this completely different person, a bachelor with half a child. I didn't have ANY single friends, or childless friends who could do adult things when my daughter was with my ex-wife. I had to re-create who I was almost from the ground up.
The key factor, for me, is the "lifer" status. I was a lifer in my marriage, but have never been for a job.
I went through layoffs four times in a row after working at each one for less than two years. Each time it was due to a downturn in the company due to poor executive decisions (in hindsight) or bad timing with the market. I actually started thinking I was cursed, and stopped taking as many chances because I saw too many companies struggle and fail up close and personal.
There was also a period of unemployment in between each one, and my finances took a beating each time (seemed like I had only just recovered when the rug got pulled out from under me again). It sucked. I'm still struggling in some ways as a result of it, years later.
People sometimes use them interchangeably, but it's a courtesy to say "laid off" if someone is simply gone because of a budget cut/re-org/merger/acquisition.
I've been divorced with a kid. It's been over a year and I'm still in therapy. My identity was shattered.
Like you, I have never defined myself by my job, it was what I did to provide for my ... family. Divorce hit me way harder financially as well than job loss. No job every took 50% of my assets and future assets with them.
* your project never had any customer, it was finally decided to kill it after 2 years
* your project, oh wait, you had no project to work on. What were you doing this past year? No even you can tell.
* you got replaced by a cheaper developer who's in his twenties, probably right out of a bootcamp.
* you were at the bottom of the stack ranking.
* your manager doesn't like you and he's got fire power.
* the team was disbanded. half the guys are moving to a new project, half the guys are laid off. you were in the bad half.
* no more budget to pay salaries. Sorry guys.
Also I wonder the extent to which the male-female discrepancy in the data (men do meaningfully worse than women post-firing, per the graph) is driven by the continued decline in blue-collar, traditionally male jobs, or whether another factor explains it (e.g., women tend to verbalize stress with their friends more consistently, thus they process the grief of getting fired faster/better).
My close friend killed himself nearly 4 years ago. The first year was really bad, the second year was just a little better. And now, ya know, I'm mostly back to myself. Life satisfaction isn't a finite resource that you can only lose, you can rebuild it.
For a couple of years after he died, I was really angry and depressed--perfect mood for a classical musician, really. But I wasn't getting any better. After a while, I decided to start trying to understand what was in his head better.
He was always a brilliant Mathematician and Software Developer and Philosopher. I was into tech at the hobbyist level. Purely as a curiosity. So I started reading all the books I inherited from him, and over time the projects he was always talking about and the goals and dreams he had . . . started to make sense to me.
Eventually, I decided to chase some of his dreams for him, and that got me started down the path I've been on ever since. At first I worked on his dreams and took them as far as I could make sense of them. Then I started realizing I was forming my own dreams and goals wrt technology stuff. And I started chasing those.
I have a good life now. Better and happier than I was as a musician. I was a far happier person 4 years after he died than I was before he died. He changed my life and opened up a world to me that I didn't know about while he was alive. And he did it again after he died.
I'm sure that with the suicide rates being what they are in the U.S. that most people have been touched in some way by this particular pain. Though it's easy for me to forget that on a particular day every year.
Sounds like you're dealing with it in a healthy way. Hang in there when it gets tough. It gets less and less tough over time, and eventually, you get to a point where the feelings hit you on your terms, when you're ready for them, and you plan out your response in advance, and you can be honestly positive about how you deal with it--a point where the happiness that this person was a part of your life outweighs the sadness of the loss: a genuine appreciation of a wonderful human being.
Sorry for your loss.
Chronic illness in a spouse or family member is a major stressor. Not only do you watch a loved one suffer, you often have major responsibilities as a result. So when the person passes, there's probably a mixed sense of tremendous sadness, but also a sense that your loved one is no longer suffering, and you can try to move on.
Divorce is different, but similar in that in most cases, problems leading to divorce have been going on for some time. So by the time the divorce happens, it's seen as an undesirable outcome, but one that is better than staying married.
The "missing situation" you seem to be implying or thinking about is one where a spouse/significant other is killed unexpectedly by accident or trauma, like a fatal car accident that is not their fault. My guess is those cases, you'd see a decline in well-being after the event, followed by a recovery to baseline.
The case of women after unemployment was puzzling to me, though. It led me to question the validity of the inferences, or to wonder what's going on with women that's different from men. I wondered if childcare had something to do with it. Perhaps women tend to leave employment because of children, return and then feel satisfied in doing so, but then realize they miss staying at home with the child? Maybe the industries they are in are different from men, and are subject to different trajectories? I have no idea.
Here's a presentation the authors gave though: https://www.uea.ac.uk/documents/5212420/0/Cigdem+Gedikli+.pd... [pdf]
Noise from big data, were I to guess. There's no logic involved in this sort of thing, just a lot of self-reported correlations and just-so stories about the results. I can't say I'm happy that this is what "science" tends to mean these days...
I'd easy to assume than women rely on the income from the men.
They talk about firing, then about firing some more, then they need some hard stats so they talk about long term unemployment. "Unemployed people continue to become increasingly unhappy over the next few years." All the facts are about being unemployed long term, they just talk about firing a bunch. The graph is about unemployment.
"People who regularly attended church had a buffering effect from the impact of unemployment" is the closer.
Am I crazy? This seems like an article about one thing dressed up as another.
Work is a means to getting money, and curing boredom; precisely in that order.
I suspect this is some clever social engineering to get people to be more fearful over losing their jobs.
If they wanted to "help" the employee move on they'd (1) at least attempt to engage them in an honest discussion about the situation, and (2) offer something resembling a decent separation package. Heck even (1) by itself would do a lot to soften the psychic blow -- but that's almost always off the table (in part due to litigation concerns; but in part due also, let's face it, to a simple lack of humanity and empathy).
Instead it's usually "Lawyer up. Manipulate (via bogus performance reviews, or simply not supporting the employee to an extent that they're basically destined to fail). And isolate, isolate, isolate."
Last time I got fired, for refusing to cooperate with illegal and unethical management behavior, it was a huge relief to me and a net benefit.
I realize this is not always the case for people, but it sometimes is. In general though you have a better shot at claiming unemployment insurance benefits you paid for if you're fired without cause than if you quit. This wasn't a factor for me since I immediately flipped to a new higher paying job, but it's an issue for many people.
On the other hand, my last divorce was also a huge relief to me as well. Good riddance in both cases.
It seems like the referenced study is looking at people who become unemployed and who stay unemployed and are unable to find work. Yes, that is a very bad situation. But it's different from the article title that suggests they are talking only about getting fired. Getting fired and becoming long term unemployed (whether from firing, layoffs or quitting) are fairly different scenarios.
Yes, some people are sloppy and never learn, that doesn't mean that others arent self motivated and learn these things without needing someone to spoon feed them through a bootcamp...
> The impact of being fired is particularly pronounced on younger workers, the research shows. Tom O’Sullivan, 18, was fired from his first job after a three-month probation period. He believes it was because he took a sick day during his first month. “It’s obviously not what you want to happen,” said O’Sullivan, who lives in northwest England. “It’s not exactly good for confidence, especially for your next job; you’re going have to say you’ve been sacked.”
It's still bogus to be tossed because you took a sick day.
All this moaning about externals (boss, partner, government, whatever) is quite boring frankly. Yes, in some cases bad shit happens that shouldn't and we should fight with it, but to draw this general picture where responsibility for oneself is shifted to others is just immature. At the end - nobody gives a fuck about you - this adult realisation is liberating: you now have control of your life in your own hands.
As to bosses - it's arguably better to say "we're restructuring business, we've decided to let you go" (more likely in commonwealth/western countries) instead of "you're lazy bastard, you're fired" (more likely in slovian countries for example) - but I'm not sure. Maybe it's just better to say how things are so the person gets clear signal he/she needs to get their shit together? I don't know.
Anyway the best advice is to say "fuck it" and focus on the future.
That's bad for everyone including employers, but especially careerists who need an unbroken chain of employment, because yes, even if you're not laid off there's a stigma to "job-hopping" as well.
Perhaps this article is more useful to those in the UK and it's tailored to them; as their unemployment problem is different than what is in America. So most americans who reply won't get it. (I suspect)
I think long-term unemployment could have more traumatic effects than divorce, but that's very different from being fired. The way the article was written, it spoke more of unemployment than being fired itself.
This is much more convenient for the employer, which is the part of the reason I demand much higher hourly rates than normal employees (and it still worth it). A contract with a regular full-time employee is harder for both parties, which is why the "usual" full-time employment is becoming increasingly rare.
Which is a good thing, if you ask me. We are not in Japan, and the company is not supposed to keep us for life and take care of everything (and even in Japan, it is no longer in vogue).
Working for The Man is a very different relationship and is looked upon differently by everyone from other people through the tax man. So it is a different thing. Working around the same people daily for a long period of time within the context of employment means building different (and usually deeper) relationships. I won't say it is an ersatz family, but there are similar emotional things going on.
Given that you go in to your engagements with the understanding that you can be fired at the drop of a hat means you think about it differently than the person who gets canned. Perhaps people should think differently about at-will employment, but they don't, and society loads them with different meanings.
I had to take a step back and realize that life isn't that easy for most professions as it is for software developers in a city heavy tech.
How would I feel if it took me 6-12 months of looking for a job, rejection letters, not hearing back from employers, etc. at least with a divorce you only got rejected by one person.
A divorce can both be a good or a bad thing (for at least one party it should be an expected net benefit compared to the situation before)
1 parent earns, two disabled kids, parent has chronic illness, alzheimers grandparent lives with them, relatives are absent or unreliable, job was their visa sponsor and now they have to go back to their war torn country of birth, denied retirement, they are a minority race/creed/color...
This strikes me as rather callous, or as well, something that only someone in a relatively secure and high-paying line of work (like software development) -- and of course, no kids to take care of -- could even begin have as a take on the situation.
Yes, getting fired isn't anything like getting maimed or killed, or suffering a truly debilitating illness. But for many people, the resulting financial tailspin that comes from losing a decent job (particularly after one has reached a certain age, after which, keep in mind, they may simply not ever find a comparable position) is an extremely brutal experience to go through (and if one has kids or older relatives to take care of, exponentially more so). In fact it's hard to think of a worse blow one is likely to have to deal with (short of, again, the aforementioned physical deprivations).
You nailed me there! I am a factory worker in my fifties. I raised a child alone. No kidding.