I wrote yesterday that layoffs are a reality of modern working life. They are. And if you work for a company, be it multinational telecommunications giant or small business, there is nothing you can do about it. The layoff is coming. You can be a superstar, or slacker; short-timer or veteran. There is a pink slip with your name on it.

Smacks of defeatism, I know. But, here’s why I think it’s not: first, this is our reality. Workers are laid off to satisfy budgets-of-the-moment, shareholders, or general economic conditions. These are macro-factors you cannot affect, armed as you may be with all the skills and corporate rah-rah in the worker bee arsenal. Face it: reality has nothing to do with you.

That’s a truth we accepted six years ago, when Mike took the job with said telecomm giant. Layoffs, like sewage backups in the basement, happen; and placing it in the category of “Inevitable” early on led us to two conclusions:

1. There is no personal component to the layoff process. You’re cut because of numbers, not performance; and severance is determined by the same. Cold, perhaps, but, you know what? That understanding removes the debilitating guilt and humiliation that may have once hampered our ability to move on.
2. Work ethic is a purely self-interested pursuit. People used to view the corporation as a parent-entity, remember that? There was an interest in working for the collective good, for something greater than one’s self. And that’s not an old-fashioned notion, or something I pulled from Japanese corporate culture: that was the ethic we lived by as late as the early 2000’s, working for a postproduction house in Washington, D.C. The murder of that code was recent, and perpetrated by whatever cultural and economic forces you’d like to name: call it the Bernie Enron Street Gang, for all I care.

So, there you are: violent economic change is a bankable reality, and work is an entirely self-interested endeavor.

Again, you might think I’m walking a dark and powerless path here … I’m still not. You see, what our working lives boil down to – if the fires beneath us are macroeconomics, health care crises, technology and global communications – are the personal relationships we build. Person-to-person. And isn’t that, after all, the most human we’ve been since the day after Al Gore invented the Internet?

Mike spent every minute at that company working his hardest, achieving more, doing more than was expected, precisely because we knew those minutes were numbered, and, consequently, his highest priority was to reinforce his human safety net: the individuals he met and impressed would deliver him to the next employment opportunity (where the layoff clock is reset).

Human relationships. How 1897 of us. They’re more critical now than they were even five, seven years ago, when a job-seeker could still hope to find and be seen on a site like Monster.com. Technology itself, including better user-interfaces, proliferation of high-speed Internet connections and our general improved aptitudes have brought the masses (job-seekers and shady folks with “work-at-home, make $20k a month” schemes) to those arenas and basically choked the effectiveness right out of them. Mike’s next job won’t come from a cold online contact; it will come from someone he knows.

And that is why we feel optimistic: the basic, non-technological humanity that wakes us early and keeps us up late to work hard and do our best every day. That is how we’ve wrested power away from the Bernie Enron Street Gang.

That is also one of the primary reasons why we own a small business. We haven’t hired anyone to work for us yet – we’ll probably add a salesperson at the end of July, when Mike’s severance begins – but, when we do, I’ll have a good understanding of what motivates that person, too. And I’ll look for ways to create incentives (monetary and not) that will support his or her personal quest for stability through connections.

We started this blog to talk about low-cost but cost-effective ways that small business owners can market their companies. It’s an interesting enough subject but, as it turns out, not enough to fuel the “I swear to blog weekly” ambitions I thought I had.

I find myself distracted by events and circumstances: a crippled national economy as it impacts people I know; profit-driven insurance conglomerates that inject themselves, insidiously, into our everyday decisions; indescribably brave, green-clad individuals who move me to evaluate the sacrifices I am prepared to make for my family, and for freedom.

As an advisor to small business owners, it is almost incumbent upon me to talk about using social networking sites to expand your reach, monitor what customers are saying about you, control your brand—blah, blah. In reality, I think Twitter is the dumbest thing that any less-than-utterly-narcissistic person could ever do. Honestly? You want your every unfiltered, truncated, grammatically-incorrect thought out there for any client – any human being – to see? I hope not. If you do, then I don’t want to know you. (For the record, blogging isn’t much better. The audience size for the average blog? One.)

But I would dutifully recite its purported value to any client for whom social media, Twitter included, makes sense. It would probably even make a good blog topic. The fact is, I never saw the purpose or true value of the thing until I stumbled on the #IranElection channel. Now that, I sincerely believe, matters.

Don’t get me wrong: small business matters, too. So many of us rely on it for income, for employment, for the health and security of our families. But where we used to farm the land, build tangible products, trust our future to pensions; nowadays ideas are our seedlings, services our products and the future uncertain to a degree that it simply wasn’t before. Given this, how do we keep ourselves (and subsequently, our businesses) connected to real things?

I’m not sure.

My husband was laid off the other day. He is our primary earner, the source of health insurance and retirement savings (what’s left of them). We formed this company solely to pay our daughter’s school tuition … and in preparation for the arrival of this inevitable day (because layoffs are a reality of modern working life that no exertion of effort or dedication will delay) when we require a ready-in-the-works backup plan. Small ambitions, until now.

Now, our business plan changes – under duress maybe, but still, it changes – and we navigate the tumultuous waters of unemployment, health care and growing a small business in the ugly face of a down economy.

We’re hopeful. We see this as an opportunity to do anything, to live more authentically in our personal and professional lives. And what I’m going to do is blog it: because our real-life challenges can maybe produce some workable ideas that will help you face yours.

We’re starting ankle-deep in septic water. We were, quite literally, mopping the mess with every towel we no longer own, when his boss called with the news. Tuition is due tomorrow, and that’s all of our savings. No credit cards, and about 30% of our accounts receivable are more than 50-days overdue.

I hate to do it, but I guess that’s where we start.