The One Thing Nobody Tells You About Starting Over

Hey friends, Welcome back to Life Between Titles. I'm your host, Savan. It's been a strange few weeks. I'm watching the headlines about big layoffs at Amazon. At the same time, I'm seeing reports of RIFs and shutdown related to terminations in government. Two very different worlds, and I've lived both. I worked at Amazon and I served in the federal space. So here's the question on my mind. When these institutions we count on to anchor our careers and our identities start to wobble, what happens to us? What happens when the job title is no longer a safety net? What happens when that structure you trusted starts to shake? And that's what I want to talk about today. Let's start with right now. In the federal world, are seeing terminations tied to shutdown planning and budget pauses. A federal judge recently extended a halt on termination notices for employees who were flagged as at-risk during a shutdown. In plain English, people were being told their jobs might end not because of performance, but because of policy moves and budget mechanics. And then on the tech side, Amazon confirmed about 14,000 corporate job cuts and said the efficiency push continues into 2026. Other reports say the total could reach up to 30,000 corporate roles. The rationale is familiar, more automated, and AI, less tolerance for non-core job roles, a need to reshape the future. So here we are. Public sector trimming because of policy and budget risks, private sector trimming because of structural and technology shifts. Both are huge and both are very human. And the through line is simple. Whether you work in a so-called secure federal job or a high-growth tech role, nothing is guaranteed. I've been on both sides of the fence. At Amazon, I saw how fast a company can reinvent itself. Speed and scale start to feel like a belief system, like a religion. We measured everything, output, metrics, performance. Then when I moved to government with the Department of Defense, the pace was slower, but the mission was deeper. People were there to serve something larger than themselves. And still the work was vulnerable to politics, budgets, and reorganization. Across both, the human thread is identity. When a role ends, it's not just a paycheck. It's a community. It's belonging. It's the story you told yourself about who you are. Guests on this show have said it in different ways. 30 years in and separated with a memo. A top performing team lead told their role is now redundant. Same fear, same loss, same question. Who am I without my job? When big systems contract either public or private, the impact is more than just a number on the spreadsheet. In the public sector, RIFs tie to shutdowns, slow programs, erase institutional memory, and break networks that took decades to build. People get swept into policy whether they create it or not. In tech? The message sounds like this. We're shifting to AI, we are reducing costs, and we're getting lean. But when you remove 15 to 30,000 corporate roles, you also remove relationships, mentorship pipelines, cross-team trust, and space to innovate. People start to think, what is next? Will I be next? From the conversations on this show, the biggest losses are invisible. The hallway chats that never happen. the mentorship that disappears overnight, the project that stalls because nobody's left to remember why a decision was made. So here's how I see it right now. institutional memory is fragile. When the people who hold the context leaves, chaos fills that gap. In government, it means rewriting policy from scratch because the why has vanished. In tech, it means a product breaks because no one knows how the system was built. out. The short-term savings of a layoff can become a long-term bill for relearning the basics. Working in both government tech taught me something simple. It is not either or. It is learning from both. When the world around us feels uncertain, when layoffs and rifts hit at the same time, we have a choice. We can react or we can reimagine. So here are three lessons that I've Lesson one, build for change before it happens. Change is not coming, it's already here. that agility has limits. Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs, maybe more because the ground shifts underneath them. Automation, AI, new business models, tighter margins. The future showed up early. And the same thing is happening in government, where a single memo or a budget vote can erase an entire program overnight. So the work for all of us is to get ready before the storm. Keep your skills alive. Keep your network warm. Know that what you bring is portable. Empathy, clarity, problem solving, leadership. Ask yourself, if my title disappeared tomorrow, how else could I show up? Because the people who are moving forward are not the ones with the best resume. They're the ones who are already practiced being adaptable before they had to be. Lesson two, efficiency can't replace humanity. In both tech and government, we love the word efficiency. Move fast, spend less, cut layers. But efficiency without empathy is just extraction. I've watched programs collapse because people who knew how to make them work were cut in the name of speed. I've watched teams and tech lose trust because leadership stopped talking about people. and started talking about numbers. Every organization, every leader has to decide what story they're telling when things get hard. Do they choose empathy or do they choose efficiency? If you're interviewing for your next role or building your next company, ask them and ask yourself, how do we treat people when plans change? How do we preserve knowledge, the relationship, the experience that makes this place worth belonging to? Because efficiency is a strategy and humanity is a choice. And finally, lesson three. Identity comes before the title. One guest on this show said something that I keep coming back to. It wasn't the job I missed. It was the version of myself that I carried inside that job. That line hits home because most of us build our identity around work. And when that work changes, it can feel like we disappeared with it. But here's the truth, you are not that title. You are the person that built that title. You are the skills, the values, the persistence, the care, the curiosity that made that work meaningful in the first place. So the next time you feel lost, do the identity work before the job work. Ask. What story am I a part of now? What difference do I want to make? Let those answers shape your next chapter instead of letting the next chapter define you. Because the titles will always change. Who you are beneath them, that is the part that lasts. These three lessons, being ready for change, leading with humanity, and remembering who you are beyond the title, that is what bridges both the tech and government world. They're the foundation for whatever comes next. If you've been hit by a RIF or laid off by a place like Amazon or you're just watching the ground under you move, I want to hear from you. This show works because people are brave enough to share the real story. When we speak honestly, we make space for others to heal. Reach out. Let's talk. Let's build something new together in this space between titles.