Being made redundant is a kick in the teeth. It doesn’t matter how nicely HR phrases it or how decent the severance package might be; it feels personal. One day you’re part of the furniture, complaining about the office coffee and worrying about the next deadline, and the next, you’re standing in the car park with a cardboard box, wondering what on earth just happened.
It leaves you feeling a bit unmoored. The first few weeks are usually a blur of panic about the mortgage and frantically updating a CV that hasn’t seen the light of day since 2015. But then, a funny thing happens. The dust settles. The phone stops ringing quite so much. And you find yourself sitting at the kitchen table on a Thursday morning with a strange amount of quiet.
You Get to Step Off the Hamster Wheel
It’s in that quiet where the real shift starts. When you’re in the thick of it, working nine-to-five (or let’s be real, eight-to-six), you rarely get a moment to actually think. You’re just doing. You’re on autopilot. But redundancy forces the engine to cut out.
You might start looking back at that old job and realising, actually, you were miserable. Or maybe not miserable, but just… bored? It’s easy to mistake being comfortable for being happy. Since you aren’t rushing out the door every morning, you start asking questions that used to be too scary to ask. “Is this it?” “Do I really want to spend the next twenty years selling software/managing accounts/pushing paper?”
You Can Find Something That Sticks
This is usually when the search for ‘purpose’ kicks in. It sounds a bit grand, doesn’t it? But it’s not about becoming a monk or saving the rainforest (unless you want to, of course). It’s just about wanting to feel useful again. Real human usefulness, not just hitting a KPI.
People start looking at their lives and wondering where they can make a dent. For some, it’s about turning a hobby into a little business. For others, it’s about community. We see it happen quite a lot, where people realise they have a spare room, a bit of life experience, and a desire to help a young person who’s had a rough start, so they contact foster agencies and look into what it takes to become a foster carer. It’s a massive change from the corporate grind, obviously, but that’s the appeal. It’s real. It’s messy and challenging, but you go to bed knowing you did something that actually mattered.
You Have the Freedom to Choose
And that’s the silver lining, really. Redundancy is horrible, but it hands you a blank slate. You don’t have to jump straight back into the same old role just because it’s what you’ve always done. You can try something on for size.
Maybe you take a pay cut to work for a charity. Maybe you retrain. Maybe you just work part-time so you can walk the dog properly. It’s terrifying to step off the expected path, but it’s also the only way to find out what you’re actually capable of. So, while nobody puts ‘get fired’ on their wish list, it might just be the thing that nudges you towards a life that feels a bit more like your own.