Today is Independence Day. America’s two hundred fiftieth. Good a day as any to talk about a different kind of independence, the kind that has nothing to do with fireworks.
I’ve been laid off a couple times in my life. The first time, I didn’t really get it. I qualified for unemployment, so getting a check while not working felt kind of like a vacation. That feeling lasted a few weeks. Then I was just another person submitting applications into a void and hearing nothing back.
That was the first time I understood how fragile a steady paycheck actually is.
After that, I got serious about making myself hard to lay off.
I always learned new skills.
Always stayed visible and spoke up during meetings.
And I started freelancing on the side, just enough to know I wasn’t completely dependent on one company for my income.
Fast forward to 2020. I’m in my fifties, an executive at a financial institution. I figured I’d finally made it to something stable. Wore a suit every day, in early, out late, short lunches. On paper, I was exactly the kind of employee you don’t let go.
Then the company hired someone new who became my boss.
He didn’t know much about modern marketing and thought digital was a waste of time. He wanted to go back to the old ways. I had the data. I had the results.
None of it mattered because he was the one in charge.
That friction dragged on for over a year. My department shrank down to just me and I saw where it was heading.
One Friday morning I came into work and found out my position had been eliminated.
I was angry, but wasn’t surprised.
The first layoff taught me never to let an employer hold my well-being in their hands again.
I’d spent years building skills, staying connected to my network, saving for exactly this kind of day.
That discipline mattered more than I expected, because losing a job in your fifties is a different kind of hard.
Ageism is real.
The applications went nowhere, the same as before.
So I leaned into freelancing instead. And the work started coming in faster, and easier, than anything I was getting from applications.
Applying for jobs is its own kind of demoralizing, the auditions, the silence, the rejection that doesn’t even bother to show up as a rejection.
Freelancing was working, and I felt more in control.
Eventually, I stopped applying altogether and bet on myself completely.
Five years later, I’ve got a solid client base, acquired more skills than I built in any single job.
I wear whatever I want.
I walk my dog in the middle of the day.
I make more money than I ever did on someone else’s payroll.
I’m not saying this to brag.
I’m saying it because five years ago, I wasn’t sure it would work either.
You don’t have to want to be your own boss.
Plenty of people are genuinely happy working for someone else, and that’s fine.
But independence isn’t really about who signs your paycheck.
It’s about whether you could survive losing that paycheck tomorrow.
Build an emergency fund of six months of expenses at a minimum. If you can save more, it will give you more confidence, and it loosens the grip of a job you’ve outgrown (or that you hate).
Keep learning skills - especially transferable ones. Not just skills useful at your current company. Skills useful anywhere.
Make yourself genuinely valuable, not just busy. Every organization cares about the same handful of things. Making money, saving money, working more efficiently, reducing risk.
Get good at any one of those and you become hard to replace, wherever you end up.
I didn’t choose to leave that job. The choice was made for me. But the years of preparation before it meant the ending didn’t break me. It just pushed me toward something better.
If you’ve ever wondered whether you could survive losing your job tomorrow, that question is worth sitting with today.