r/LayoffHedge

If a company is incentivized to mass layoff people to either later invest in AI or boost their stock prices, you should actually price that in when you are doing job search and setting your compensation expectations.

If a company has a history of mass layoffs, you should increase your price so that you will have enough savings to account for the job search period so that you can continue your life as normal uninterrupted.

If enough people begin thinking this way, the incentive for mass layoffs will become financially less sound for a company.

We went viral for our H-1B tool.

So we went deeper. We have now mapped every H-1B filing in America to the congressional district it landed in.

6.9 million filings. 436 districts. FY2015 to today.

Type in your ZIP and see your own.

If you just got laid off, this is for you.

There’s a moment, maybe it already happened to you today, where your whole body changes. Your chest gets tight. Your thoughts start moving in circles that don’t go anywhere. That’s not you falling apart. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it’s built to do when it registers a threat. It doesn’t know the difference between a layoff and actual danger. It just knows something big got taken away, and it’s trying to protect you the only way it knows how, by keeping you on high alert.

So if someone tells you to just think positive right now, that’s why it doesn’t work. You’re not choosing your thoughts. Your body already decided the state you’re in before your mind caught up.

Here’s something that actually reaches that part of you.

Close your eyes for a moment. Go back to a time you felt fully like yourself. Not the version of you that had a title or a badge or a Slack status. The real one. Maybe it’s your hands doing something you’re good at. Maybe it’s a quiet morning that belonged only to you. Maybe it’s someone’s face lighting up because you walked in the room. Don’t think about it from the outside. Go back inside it. Let your body remember what that felt like, because it kept the memory even if your mind is somewhere else right now.

That version of you is still here. It didn’t get laid off. It was never on the org chart in the first place.

You’ll drift out of that feeling in a few seconds. Your mind will pull you back into the noise. That’s not failure, that’s just what minds do. So you go back in again. And again. This isn’t a one time fix. It’s more like breathing, something you return to, not something you finish.

While you’re in that place, don’t ask yourself the big question yet. Don’t ask what you’re going to do with your life. That question is too heavy to hold right now and your mind will treat it like another threat. Ask something small instead. What is this next hour for. Let that be enough for today. Tomorrow gets its own hour.

And when the thought comes, and it will, that you weren’t good enough, that you got chosen to lose your job because something is wrong with you, look at it closely before you believe it. A layoff is a fact. It happened. But the story that it means something is wrong with you, that’s not a fact, that’s fear wearing the voice of truth. Almost every time, this is about numbers on a spreadsheet that were decided in a room you were never in, by people thinking about budgets, not about your worth. That doesn’t erase the pain. But it matters which one you carry forward from here.

You are going to be okay. Not because someone online said something comforting to you today. But because the person who was capable, who built things, who mattered to people, who felt joy outside of any job, that person is still fully here. Nothing about that got taken from you. It’s just waiting on the other side of this feeling for you to come back to it.

Go back to that feeling. Stay in it as long as you can. When you fall out, go back in.

You’ve got this.