“The company could disappear tomorrow so I have to squeeze every advantage now”

The Ledger Never ClosesYou've noticed your to-do list is longer now than before the reduction happened. Most of it you assigned to yourself. The justification is simple: if the organization could shed people that quickly, nothing is guaranteed. So you volunteer for the extra project, take on the neighboring team's audit, respond to old requests you'd normally defer. The myth underneath is clean: if I become indispensable through sheer output, the next round of cuts will skip me. The company's fragility becomes your personal responsibility to outrun.

Why Effort Feels Like InsuranceNoer's research on layoff survivors documents a consistent pattern: people increase their work output after witnessing a reduction, as if the intensity of effort could retroactively justify the decision to keep them. The logic operates privately and feels urgent because the threat was real. You saw it happen. But here's the mechanism that keeps the myth alive: overwork produces visible results—completed tasks, met deadlines, solved problems—which temporarily silence the underlying question you haven't asked yourself. If I wasn't actually worth keeping, could I have worked hard enough to make it so? The harder you work, the longer you avoid…

Testing Whether Intensity Buys SecurityFor one work day, track how many of your tasks you genuinely chose versus tasks you assigned to yourself because they felt protective. Don't change anything; just notice the ratio. Then ask: did the extra work I did yesterday actually prevent anything, or did it just consume the day? This isn't about working less—it's about checking whether the volume of effort has any relationship to actual job security, or whether it's become a reflex that feels safer than stillness.