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.