Q4 Purge

They won’t call it a layoff.

They’ll call it a strategic reallocation of resources, a realignment, a difficult but necessary decision made with deep appreciation for your contributions. And they’ll do it just in time for the holiday quarter to look clean.

Q4. The quarter of thanks. The quarter of profit.

You gave them five, ten, twenty years. Loyalty, overtime, sleep sacrificed for strategy decks. You missed birthdays, funerals, weddings. Not because you had to, but because the culture taught you that showing up made you worthy. That staying late proved you were essential.

Essential — until the stock price said otherwise.

The contract your parents had — work hard, retire secure — has been shredded. In its place: a severance clause and a LinkedIn update.

This is how it happens:

• They open the all-hands with a quote about gratitude.
• The CEO posts a selfie with a food bank.
• HR sends out a well-being survey.
• And then the cuts begin.

In batches. In silence. Under NDA.

They stagger them just enough to avoid headlines, just far enough apart to make each departure seem isolated. No layoffs here — just a few redundancies. A few restructures. A few performance misalignments.

By the time you realize the pattern, the severance clock has started. Your calendar is empty. Your Slack goes dark. Your badge doesn’t scan.

These aren’t layoffs. They’re quarterly sacraments — offerings made to appease the spreadsheet gods.

This is not malfunction. It is design.

The spiritualized corporate culture was never there to protect you. It was there to delay your clarity. To keep you docile long enough for them to gut you quietly.

HR isn’t human. It’s replacement strategy wrapped in euphemism. They fired the recruiters, inflated the requirements, and blamed the skills gap they engineered.

Values? They vanish at earnings call time. The mission? Liquidity. The family? Disposable.

Holiday emails still say “we're grateful for you.” Even as the spreadsheet says: remove headcount.

The friendlier the tone, the bloodier the cut.

And here’s the kicker:

They don’t just fire you. They repackage your labor.

Your job: atomized. Your tasks: outsourced. Your legacy: exported to a deck.

You trained the system that replaced you.

You trained. You upskilled. You followed the rules. But they posted the job behind a velvet rope of fake requirements. Experience became a moat. The ladder was pulled up years ago.

So here’s your Black Friday deal:

Your loyalty in exchange for liquidity. Your identity in exchange for deniability. Your silence in exchange for a severance clause.

Even six figures isn’t enough to outrun the algorithm. The American Dream was liquidated and resold as a financing plan. Your reward for survival? A Cyber Monday coupon code.

You weren’t given raises — you were given credit cards. Instead of equity, you got interest. Instead of ownership, you got a limit increase.

And when the announcement drops, the world won’t flinch. They’ll be too busy refreshing sales pages.

This isn’t just rot. It’s rot in a designer robe.

Wrapped in mission statements. Perfumed with gratitude. Packaged for public relations.

This isn’t just economic violence. It rewires who you believe you are.

Scalpel Cut:

The sale wasn’t just the product. It was you — gift-wrapped in metrics, fired in silence, and replaced by a slide deck.