The Displacement Will Not Be Televised
Five posts in 24 hours, all the same shape, and nobody in the comments saying the thing out loud.
I’ve seen five of them in the last 24 hours. Different people, different parts of the country, a couple in the US. None of them know each other. None of them would describe what’s happened to them as part of anything.
They’re all posting the open-to-work card. The green ring on the profile photo, the “this isn’t a post I expected to write,” the bit at the end asking for likes and shares to help it reach the right people. Which is fair enough. As an individual move it’s one of the boxes you check. Everyone else does it, so you do it too, and you’ve got as much chance as the next person. I’m not knocking anyone for posting one. If I were in their position I’d probably do the same.
But here’s what struck me, and it took five of them in a day for it to land.
Every single one is looking for a job in the exact thing they’ve just been made redundant from.
The senior marketing manager wants another senior marketing role. The operations lead wants another operations lead role. And in the normal logic of a career, that’s the sensible thing. You’ve got ten years of doing the thing, so you go and find someone who needs the thing done. That logic has held for every previous generation of worker who lost a job. The role still existed somewhere. You just had to go and find the version of it with your name on it.
The logic only works if you’re the one being displaced.
If the role itself is being made redundant, going to find the same role somewhere else is going back to the same edge of the same cliff, just at a different company. You’re not unlucky. You’re early. And the thing you’re applying for is the thing that’s quietly being removed from org charts in the same month you’re applying for it.
That’s the part that nobody’s saying.
Go and read the comments under any of these posts. I did. They’re full of decent people being kind. “That’s a shame.” “Good luck, all the best.” “Can’t believe it’s happened to you.” Genuine, warm, well meant. And not one of them says the actual thing.
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Nobody says: this happened because you’re in a senior marketing role, and a senior marketing role is one of the easiest things in the building to displace, because an AI can do most of the day-to-day now. Nobody says: the reason it’s hard to find another one is that the people hiring have worked that out too. Nobody says: the gap between the role you want and the roles that exist is going to keep widening, and the next one might not last either.
They don’t say it for one of three reasons. Either they don’t know it. Or they know it and don’t want to be the person who says it under a post where someone’s already having the worst week of their year. Or, and this is the one that sits with me, they half-know it and saying it out loud would make it real. As long as nobody names it, it stays a run of individual bad luck. A few people who didn’t quite land the next thing. The moment somebody names it, it becomes a pattern, and the pattern has a direction, and the direction includes the person reading the comment.
So everyone keeps it as bad luck. It’s easier. It costs nothing to type “good luck, all the best.” It costs a lot to type what’s actually happening.
This is what the slow version of a crisis looks like. Not a crash. Not a headline. Not a number on the six o’clock news. Just a steady drip of individually-explainable exits, each one with a perfectly reasonable story attached, each one absorbed and moved past, each one followed by a sympathetic comment and a scroll to the next thing in the feed.
There’s a phrase for the way societies live inside a situation everyone can feel and nobody will name. Everything stays the same until it suddenly doesn’t. You keep finding ways to read the evidence as normal, right up until you can’t.
The redundancies are real. They’re happening now, this week, to people you’re connected to. But they don’t arrive as displacement. They arrive as a green ring on a profile photo and a brave caption and 188 likes. The wave is already here. It just doesn’t look like a wave from inside it. It looks like a coffee request.
The displacement will not be televised.
It’ll be posted, one open-to-work card at a time, and we’ll all wish them luck, and we’ll scroll on.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.