A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.

At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")

I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.

We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?

I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.

The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?

You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.

For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.

The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)

Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.

Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.

But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.

We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.