The Layoffs Are Here. So Is Something Else.
A field report from the transition zone
I don’t know what’s going to happen.
But I know what’s happening right now.
In October 2025: Target laid off 1,800 people. Paramount cut 1,000. Molson Coors eliminated 400 positions. Amazon let go of 14,000 workers. One outplacement firm reports 950,000 layoffs through September this year.
This isn’t a prediction anymore. Now it’s documentation.
I’ve been tracking leading indicators for AI-driven workforce displacement for eighteen months—monitoring corporate investment in “workforce optimization,” procurement patterns, executive messaging shifts. I wrote in August that we’d likely see 3-4 million additional unemployed people by August 2026, based on the same methodology that would have warned you about cloud computing’s impact in 2013 or mobile banking’s effect in 2012.
The pattern was clear: investments in AI infrastructure and workforce optimization tools started accelerating in early 2024. Historically, layoffs follow these investments within 12-18 months.
We’re there now. The predictions are landing.
But something else is landing too. Something I didn’t fully anticipate when I was tracking capital expenditure patterns and job posting language. Something that’s only become visible by sitting with the people actually going through this transition.
I started a group container for people displaced from the job market. I’ve been coaching leaders through what feels like a civilizational shift they can’t quite name. I’ve been designing organizational structures for a future that keeps arriving faster than anyone’s ready for.
These felt like three separate things—three different services, three different client bases, three different bodies of work.
They’re not separate at all. They’re three windows into the same transition. And through those three windows, I’m seeing the layoffs. But I’m also seeing something else.
What Displacement Looks Like When It Lands
The first thing people mention isn’t fear. It’s relief.
In our After Employment sessions, this comes up again and again. I asked what shifted for people this week, and here’s what I heard:
(Note: I changed the names here to honor their privacy, and I lightly edited some of the statements for brevity.)
Bonnie (displaced six weeks ago after 19 years): “The feeling that we’ve all commonly felt in this transition is relief. I continue to hear that. It’s interesting when we’re talking about how stressful it is to be in transition—the fact that relief started that whole process is kind of a nice feeling to have that I didn’t expect.”
Vivian (displaced seven months ago): “I’ve learned that I’ve let others dim my light. You need a paycheck, and sometimes you put up with situations and people that you shouldn’t have to. I’ve learned about myself—I have imposter syndrome. I’ve been pushing down and not paying attention to what people see in me. People see my potential.”
Mona (displaced two years ago): “I didn’t feel good about myself when I was put in a position to have to go along to get along. I’ve learned about myself that my irritants can become my superpower.”
Celine (displaced seven months ago): “I have realized that over the course of probably my last seven years… I didn’t feel like I had the opportunity to be myself. I’ve been taking the opportunity to use my voice again. One thing I’ve decided: if I do get another full time job, I’m going to approach it as a consultant. Not giving my all to a full time job is a goal, and that’s something I realized lately.”
Johan (underemployed one year): “Stories are really powerful, and there can be a story that’s being told at work that is kind of like a force of nature. I saw the writing on the wall and kept trying to fight it. You can do everything right, and people will still cut you out because they’ve created this agenda. Maybe I don’t want to be in this position where I’m an employee. Maybe I want to take ownership of what I do as a craft.”
This is what my employment data looks like when it lands on human beings.
Not just loss. Not just fear. But also: awakening. Recognition. Relief from something that was crushing them in ways they couldn’t name while they were inside it.
The command-and-control organizational structure we’ve been living inside has two problems baked into it. First, top-down power dynamics where a person is dependent upon the person above them for resources—a primal human concern that activates parts of our brain and nervous system in ways we may not realize. Second, what that dependence means: we have a model of behave and perform. We take our generalist tendencies as a species and leave most of that at the door so we can fit in and remain competitive for those resources.
Corporate culture as we’ve practiced it is low-level behavioral programming. Culture emerges in the spaces between policy and strategy, but companies try to promote a corporate culture that’s essentially behavioral conditioning.
People feel relieved to leave that. The identity compression. The pretending. The dimming of their light.
What’s interesting is what happens next.
The Consciousness Variable
Here’s what I didn’t fully account for in my models: while the economic disruption is accelerating, something else is accelerating alongside it.
Johnny (displaced six months ago) talked about integrating his spiritual practice with his work: “I’ve been taking classes about spirituality and personal growth. I took a Bible study class about the spiritual idea of God consciousness—understanding what it means to have unification with you as an individual and God. That struck home for me in terms of how you approach everything in your life, including your job and career, and how those interactions with other people are impacted by how you see yourself.”
I’m seeing this everywhere now. Psychedelics as a tool for healing and exploring consciousness gaining acceptance. CEOs and venture capitalists—people I never expected—doing mushrooms and having epiphanies. Meditation, breathwork, spiritual communities. It’s mostly behind the scenes, but it’s there.
I believe there are network effects of awakening beginning to show up in places not visible to the majority of society.
As Joel Fariss put it: the future of work is living.
I’ve been pondering how to come to this topic in a way that’s accessible and relevant for our current moment, yet expansive enough and aware enough to align with the longer arcs of emergence and our place in them. To me, “future of work” is a 3D object. It conveys awareness of the longer arc while being familiar enough and recognizable enough to interact with in this moment. I don’t believe future of work is what we’re really up to here—more a notion that has enough urgency to move in the moment without being so jarring that it creates paralysis.
Work as it exists today seems so embedded in our psyche that it’s difficult to imagine any other way—much the same way that an expansion of consciousness seems entirely foreign and unimaginable until that moment of epiphany happens and you open into a new understanding. While my heart lives in that exploration, my mind lately has come back to what might create the conditions for that glimpse beyond, recognizing that once one has had that glimpse, the joyful work of integration and adaptation can begin.
What I notice is that leaders trained in the unquestioned imperatives of growth seem unable to comprehend working in ways fundamentally different than what they’re doing now. I see people being laid off and sharing relief in leaving work yet immediately seeking another job much like the one they’re leaving. They report not missing the work they were doing very much, but rather the paycheck and the people. Our current object people understand is “job.” That seems to be the means people understand for being in community and providing for oneself and one’s family.
In both leadership and the people being led, there appears to be an insular, circular reversion to a thing we know even as the quality of the thing we know deteriorates.
I’m drawn to John Vervaeke’s metatheory of cognition. Of his four ways of knowing—propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory—our current culture heavily values the first two to the near-exclusion of the latter two. It’s not lost on me that the first two are the ones where AI has already exceeded many of our capabilities. I also believe that perspectival and participatory knowledge can be a portal to get that glimpse of a possible future that looks and feels different from the one we’re locked into.
When you’re able to automate cognitive labor, I believe it is participatory and perspectival knowledge that are really most useful and most inherent to us as human beings.
And this is what I’m seeing in my After Employment group. Not people optimizing for the next job. But people stopping to ask: What are my core values? What gives me meaning? What does my voice sound like when I’m not performing for someone else?
This is the thing I didn’t expect: the economic disruption and the consciousness expansion aren’t separate phenomena. They’re calling each other forward.
Three Work Streams, One Transition
I have three bodies of work that I’ve been treating as separate offerings:
Coaching leaders through inner transformation. The shift has to be moving beyond what they think they know to what their possibilities actually are. The thinking can get insular sometimes even if it’s big thinking. Being able to see assumptions and begin to change them—that’s one of those big leadership shifts. Leadership looks a lot more like stewardship in the new model. It isn’t so much command and control as creating the conditions for things that are wanting to happen to happen.
Designing decentralized adaptive organizations. At Jumpsuit, we’re a constellation of over 200 vetted independent contractors who come together for specific projects. During a recent retreat with 16 people, I did the math: 21.5 billion possible team permutations. More combinations than any company’s org chart could ever map. Every combination creates differently. This is what interdependence looks like—not freelancing alone, not employment making you small, but independent together.
Supporting people in transition through After Employment. Creating space for people to share their stories, support each other, discover what they love doing. Helping them see that the relief they feel isn’t a bug—it’s a signal. Something was crushing them that they can now name and leave behind.
These aren’t three separate things. They’re three facets of one response to one transition.
The future of work requires new leadership (inner work that expands what leaders can see). It requires new organizational patterns (structures that enable rather than control). And it requires support for people navigating the transition (community and bridges while the old world dissolves and the new one emerges).
It all falls under future of work. I believe we’re evolving into a new way of working, and all of these are component parts of the whole.
The Liminal Space
I believe emotion can be a powerful key here. I love ideas. My happiest moments are reading things that challenge my thinking, being in dialogue with people who see things from a different angle, imagining scenarios that look very different from where we are today. What brings those moments color and texture for me, though, are the ways I feel—the exhilaration of engaging with foreign ideas, the lurch of the stomach at realizing the tree trunk I’ve been seeing might be one leg of an elephant.
But there’s the tension point: most people value what’s useful in the near-term, what relieves pain or discomfort by providing a perceived incremental improvement in the current state. For the unemployed, that might be movement toward a job, which will tend to reinforce the insular, circular nature of the current state. A world in which people have time to be in relationship and create together and explore possibilities sounds amazing, but the person with bills and kids and a subconscious need for status will tend to seek the most direct path to those things. It’s the familiar comfort of the known. The unknown can be scary and uncertain, while the mortgage has a clear urgency and cadence.
That’s where “future of work” as an object lives for me right now. Exploring the realms of consciousness is serious play. But I also feel the call to be in this world in a deeply embodied way, to be of service to our fellow humans, and perhaps to bring some perspective from those esoteric ways of knowing.
I believe Buckminster Fuller had it about right: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” But I believe there’s something embedded in that “new model” thinking: the new model becomes attractive by offering enough of what people know how to value in the present moment while opening to a fundamental change in the way they experience themselves and the world around them. New models must be competitive enough and credible enough in the current frame while providing relief from the pains of that current frame. Otherwise they make for great TED talks but not for lived daily experience.
This is the liminal space I feel called to occupy right now. Maybe an adventurer’s spirit with a workman’s sensibility. My intention is that enough people stepping onto the bridge might create the conditions for spending more time a little farther along that bridge.
Where This Leaves You
The layoffs aren’t coming. They’re here. October was brutal. November likely will be too. The pattern I’ve been tracking—investment in workforce optimization followed by displacement 12-18 months later—is proving out exactly as the historical precedents suggested.
But here’s what else is here:
Relief. Not just loss, but awakening. People discovering they were playing small, that they’d dimmed their light, that they have capabilities they’d left dormant to fit into structures that were never designed for their flourishing.
Community. People finding each other, supporting each other, discovering what they love doing when they’re not performing for someone else’s org chart. Network effects of both displacement and awakening.
New models that work. 76 million Americans freelancing. 84% reporting they’re living their preferred lifestyle. Independent together becoming viable not as theory but as lived experience. My Jumpsuit colleagues proving it works. The After Employment group discovering it together.
A consciousness expansion happening parallel to the economic disruption. Inner work reshaping how people think about work, identity, and agency. Perspectival and participatory knowledge emerging as the human edge once propositional and procedural get automated.
I don’t know if the consciousness work will scale fast enough to meet the economic disruption. I don’t know if the new models will emerge quickly enough to catch everyone the old system is letting go. I don’t know what this looks like in six months or two years.
But I know what I’m seeing right now through three different windows into the same moment.
I know there’s extraordinary talent on the sidelines—people who were overqualified for employment discovering they’re perfectly suited for what comes next.
I know there’s a bridge that needs building between the consciousness exploration and the practical necessity, between the expansive vision and the urgent need, between what’s dissolving and what’s emerging.
I know people don’t usually change until not changing hurts more. And for a lot of people, not changing is starting to hurt.
This is the liminal space.
The old world hasn’t fully dissolved. The new world hasn’t fully emerged. We’re in between. And that in-between is where the real work happens—the integration, the adaptation, the discovering what you’re capable of when the structures that defined you fall away.
I’m hosting weekly sessions for people navigating this transition. Not to sell anything. Just to create space for connection and working it out together. If you’re in it, reach out.
I’m in dialogue with people exploring the consciousness frameworks that might help make sense of this moment—tomorrow I’m in conversation with Joel Fariss of the Holon Institute about the nature of work and what’s next for us humans.
I’m working with leaders who sense something fundamental is shifting but can’t quite see what it is yet.
All three windows into the same transition. All three needed. All three parts of building the bridge.
A Little Historic Perspective
Whether one believes homo sapiens has been here for 200,000 years or closer to a million, what seems true is that we began working during most of the day around 30,000 years ago when we became more attached to specific places through agriculture. We became farmers and stayed close to the crops. The work was harder and our roles became more rigid.
But this current iteration of work—the mechanistic, divided labor, time-bound, scientific management model—really took hold in the 19th century and got “perfected” in the 20th. Despite near-consensus that this is “how things are,” we haven’t been doing things this way for very long at all.
Division of labor, synchronization of time, use of extractive energy in production, and the mechanization of humans have been with us for less than 200 years. In the context of lifespan, they’re all we’ve ever known. In the context of the species, they’re a blip.
We have the ability to change the experience of life on this planet, and work as we know it need not be its centerpiece. Yet we are willing to tolerate and ignore suffering on the planet, within our country, at the places we work, and within ourselves.
We’re not special. This moment is not happening to us. We are a lineage and a community much like many that went before us. We are pretty amazing as a species, but so are dolphins and dogs.
What would make us special in my view is the openness and humility to understand that we can turn those abilities inward and become worthy of the moment we’re creating.
The layoffs are here. So is the opportunity. So is the relief. So is the awakening. So is the uncertainty.
So is something else.
Many thanks and much respect to the people who have been sharing their stories. We need these stories. They are painting this next chapter to life.