And then, it was over. At 1:30, they called us all into the center common area, and told us that we’d survived. The layoffs had finished, and we had been chosen for the tremendous privilege of continued employment.

My first thought was relief. But that relief quickly turned back into fear. How disposable I was, I thought. How bound I was to the whims of others. So much of my life and wellbeing was in the hands of people who could easily and uncaringly take it all from me. And as I stood there listening to the propaganda blitz that those above had come up with to placate us survivors, I couldn’t stop thinking about how completely hollow my conception of my career and life was.

Because my entire life has been spent chasing after this exact goal. I spent most of high school sitting in my room reading and studying and programming, because I needed to get into Berkeley. I spent most of Berkeley doing problem sets and going to tech events and networking, and I spent every summer interning at a new place, slowly pulling myself up the cursus honorum of software engineering.

Every fall semester devolved into a mad race of interviewing and studying and anxiety and inferiority. I told myself that software engineering wasn’t a zero-sum game while secretly resenting everyone that looked to have made it, getting offers and passing interviews that I was seemingly incapable of.

Finally, at the end of the October of my senior year, I’d “made it.” I got an offer at Snap, with what seemed to me like a lot of money, and then spent the last month of senior year decompressing. I went home in December, endured four months of boredom and guilt from my family for moving away, and left for Los Angeles in April, knowing nothing and no one, buoyed only by the fact that this nervousness was the nervousness of the “successful.”

And after all that, there I was, listening to some executive tell me about how hard it was for them to let so many good people go. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. I had done everything right to inoculate myself from this. I’d joined the right team, ingratiated myself with the right people, chosen the right projects, justified every decision in the context of our larger “strategic initiatives.” I’d been promoted from L1 to L2 in six months, and I was on track to hit the next level by the end of the year.

And yet, I had to stand there in fear, because to the people that made these cuts, none of this mattered. I could’ve had a bad week when performance reviews had gone through, nullifying everything I’d done, or my manager could have not adequately justified my existence to the directors above. I could’ve fallen victim to one of the many internal political struggles that so engross the string-pullers.

None of this had happened, but the point was, it could have. None of the above things are under my control, but they could’ve sealed my fate at any time over the past year, and if they did, neither my by-the-book background, my personal contributions, nor my sustained effort, would have mattered at all.

I would’ve been axed and replaced, and the world would have kept on turning.