The last time I was fired I wasn’t old enough to drink. At the time I worked as a cook in a small restaurant. The owner was passive-aggressive and conflict-avoidant, so his method of firing was understated: he just stopped putting you on the schedule. To this day I’m not sure if I was fired for something I did or if I was just a disposable cash-flow problem. I was an okay cook, showed up on time, didn’t get stoned out back behind the dumpster like many of the other kitchen staff; but I also wasn’t the only part-time line-cook, and I was the lowest chef on the totem pole at the time, so if I were the owner, I would’ve fired me if ends weren’t meeting. I didn’t take it personally, and I had a day job that I wasn’t fired from, so it wasn’t a crisis, just a bit of bad luck.
In case you’re worried, no — I haven’t been fired, at least not yet today. I feel pretty job-secure at the moment, but these days who can tell? I’m thinking about this because I have a hard-working friend (and I mean manically hard-working) who is daily, hourly, constantly terrified that she’s about to be fired. It consumes her. She stays up at night wondering if she’s done something that will get her shit-canned tomorrow, or next week, or next month. She imagines her savings depleted, her mortgage defaulted upon, her kids in rags, her life ruined.
All of this panic is especially striking because — and I’m not exaggerating here — this person is the linchpin of her entire organization. If you made a list of all the people who work for the firm and sorted them by disposability, with the easiest person to replace at the top and the person whose departure would rock the entire company to its core at the bottom, she’d be very, very close to the bottom. If anyone should feel secure in her position it’s her. Firing her would be the corporate equivalent of removing one of your own kidneys by hand, with no back-up plan.
Now, as we know no one is completely indispensable. In our analogy you’d still have one kidney left, and as long as you got to a hospital in time you’d probably survive, albeit with some long-term issues (and a lengthy psych evaluation). But why would a highly-qualified, smart, diligent worker who has all but cemented a sinecure in her position worry herself to death about being summarily fired? Maybe it’s brain chemistry. There are medications to address that, but most people shy away from treatment (she does, I’ve suggested it). Maybe it’s a personality quirk. If so, it’s one I’d be working daily to transform, whether via meditation, counseling, or regular church attendance. Virtually any treatment would seem worthwhile to me if I were losing sleep and having heart palpitations over something that out of my control.
I always ask, when confronted by human behavior that I don’t understand: what are they getting out of this? What could a person get out of obsessive worry that would be worth the price of admission? I think more than anything it’s the quest for control. When we worry we’re scrabbling against the glass surface of a wall we’ll never be able to scale. Our minds are searching for a solution, for safe passage, for a guarantee of safety and certainty. When no security appears to be on offer, the loop repeats and intensifies. Think about it more. Try to find a solution. Look, look, look.
But the truth is there is no security. There never has been. Even if you find the perfect path and walk it without missing a step, you could be run over by a bus on your way to buy a cup of coffee. Worrying about it won’t change it any more than crossing your fingers will help your favorite team win the Super Bowl. There’s a quote by Chögyam Trungpa that I come back to again and again: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”
So today, if you find yourself worried about something you have control over — stop worrying and do the thing you can do. If there’s nothing left for you to do, stop worrying anyway — you’re just falling, like all of us are, and rather than screaming and bracing yourself for impact, you can just lay back and enjoy the breeze.