How layoffs became fodder for memes

Hardik Shah is disoriented by the way layoffs unfold. Three years ago, he was laid off from a global social media company in its post-pandemic cull. “I had never even taken a break between jobs. Being laid off was brutal,” recalls Shah from Mumbai who works as a CTO at a hospitality company now. “I deliberated for days before posting about it on LinkedIn,” he says.

When Shah shared the news, the response surprised him. Referrals surfaced in the comments. Strangers reached out with empathy. “Before, referrals were sought only in private. After the purge, folks started talking openly and strangers helped.” The scale of the layoffs had created a collective permission to speak.

What unsettles him now is the speed at which this tone has shifted; how most layoffs are now followed by a meme-fest, as if the punchlines are queued up alongside the official statement. “If you are confident and have a support system, you will shrug off the setback. If you don’t, it will be painful and make you wonder why are jokes at your expense,” says Shah, 43.

Last week captured this shift in a single frame. A meme began circulating on X: In one half of the frame was Jack Dorsey, former Twitter co-founder, now leading fintech company Block. On the other was Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage, dressed in identical black, beard trimmed in a similar style. Above Dorsey’s head was the number 10,000, above Dinklage’s, 6,000, followed by the kicker: “40% smaller”.

The tweet, posted by @peer_rich, has since crossed two million impressions. It surfaced after Dorsey announced that Block would cut nearly 4,000 jobs, shrinking its workforce of over 10,000 to 6,000 in a sweep. Among related tweets, user @jamiegenerated, wrote that this will lead to a wave of reductions in tech, adding “layoffs spread like memes.” The virality of the Dorsey-Dinklage post signals something equally concerning: layoffs are the memes now.

LAUGH IT OFF

The mass layoffs during covid shifted our outlook towards job loss. When thousands of jobs were cut at once, it softened the stigma and got many people posting publicly about it, leading to changes like LinkedIn making ‘Open to Work’ a template frame to use in profile pictures in June 2020. But somewhere along the way, as the rounds kept coming and companies brutally executed them, those affected as well as observing looked to humour for coping. Today, layoffs are one of many meme content formats, inadvertently desensitising people to scroll past what needs to be sat with. It is changing how we perceive and process job loss.

In India, in December 2024, YesMadam, a beauty services startup, pulled a ‘pretend firing’ publicity stunt. After floating what appeared to be an internal email suggesting staff had been fired over reporting workplace stress concerns, the company issued a press release revealing that no one had actually been dismissed and this was part of a marketing campaign intended to spark conversation about stress at work. YesMadam did not respond to Lounge queries sent on the subject.

It makes you wonder how we arrived at a point where layoffs could double as material for humour or marketing, anything other than the life-altering events they are meant to be, carrying anxiety, shaken morale, and very real financial and health consequences in their wake.

Humour can, of course, be a coping mechanism. In January, when Amazon began its recent round of 16,000 job cuts, employees on a 26,000-person official Slack channel shared pizza memes, Business Insider reported. It was a reference to Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza team” rule, the idea that no team should be too large to be fed by two pizzas.

The current trend marks a stark departure from the way layoffs were historically understood and represented. In 1964, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar built its entire emotional architecture around a husband’s sudden unemployment, the quiet shame of it, the way it forced his wife into the workforce and undid the family’s sense of itself. A decade later, Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (1974) made job loss a political act. In Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) followed a salaryman who loses his job and rides the train every day for months rather than tell his family. Hollywood’s Up in the Air (2009) centred on the toll of job loss told through the gaze of a man in charge of delivering the news of layoffs. Even Bollywood’s Bewakoofiyan (2014), starring Ayushmann Khurrana, while lighter in tone, uses a job loss to crack open ideas of love and pride. These films existed because job loss was the kind of event that required a reckoning. You didn’t just lose income. You lost a role, a version of yourself, so much so that it would take a film to contain it. Now it often just takes a meme.

WAITING FOR CUTS

Shreya Panjwani, a clinical psychologist from Delhi, says, “Because you’re repeatedly being exposed to layoff news and it’s being turned into humour, it can blunt the emotional shock that a job loss can create. This kind of desensitisation doesn’t necessarily reduce stress, it turns into a sense of chronic uncertainty for employees.” Chronic uncertainty in turn becomes a stresser, notes Panjwani. “Employees become hyper-vigilant, wondering if they’re going to be next.”

A mid-level executive from Mumbai, who was laid off from Meta India in 2022, knows this well. “I was at my current company’s event recently when my email app threw an error. My first thought: have I been laid off again? Colleagues confirmed in near real time that the error was a company-wide glitch. But even their thoughts were on the same lines even though none of them have ever been laid off,” says the executive who prefers to stay anonymous.

For some, that reflex turns into a reset. Yash Agarwal, a public policy professional in his late 20s, found out he had lost his job at Twitter India in January 2023, after he was discharged from hospital following a health emergency. The experience rewired him. “I don’t attach myself to places now, or people, roles, titles.” The lesson arrived early for him: “You are a line item in someone’s balance sheet.”

Meanwhile, recruiters are watching the same shift from the other side of the table. K Sudarshan, MD India and regional chairman Asia at EMA Partners, a global executive search firm, points to the linguistic softening that accompanied this shift. “Nobody says fired anymore, they say ‘let go’.” The startup boom of the 2010s began normalising layoffs in India well before covid, he notes, but the candour remains uneven. “Indian companies are still far more tight-lipped than their US counterparts, who have learnt to package job cuts as a business strategy.”

It isn’t true for all industries either. In many sectors, Shah points out, people still don’t announce layoffs. “In pharma, in manufacturing...you won’t see senior leaders writing long posts about being laid off. It’s still very hush-hush.”

Within the Indian context, there’s also “information asymmetry” at play, says Mitasha Singh, co-founder of All Things Talent, a talent acquisition and management firm in Bengaluru. “Traditional industries, service industries and older hierarchy-based professions, like lawyers, IAS officers, teachers, doctors, would not talk of layoffs in the same vein or as a matter-of-fact logical conclusion to demand-supply or differing values. Those who do are exceptions.” What we see online is skewed by who is visible. “We’re biased by the exposure we see within tech circles. For every person who creates content off it (layoff), there’s a thousand more who don’t.”

Normalisation shouldn’t lead to numbness. Companies need to do better. When Jack Dorsey announced Block’s job cuts, he acknowledged the harshness of the decision and its impact on people’s lives, saying the company was choosing to make the reductions in one go rather than in waves that prolong stress—a pattern seen across big tech in recent years. Some replies called it a “layoff announcement done right.” Even as layoffs become easier to talk about in some sectors, the challenge now is to ensure they do not become easier to dismiss.