A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda

Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job

I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)

> "socialism", "communism",

Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.