Man sits at desk wearing glasses and looking across the table.

The Second Lesson I Learned from Getting Fired from Every Job

A lot of this “working hard to get very little” is fake

This week, I started a series about the many times I’ve gotten fired. For some reason, I thought it would be encouraging to look at the shape and scope of my failures. That’s not the case. Writing about failure is not as clean and inspiring as those Nike Jumpman ads about it. Losing feels terrible and no one should have to experience their worst losses over again. All told, revisiting trauma has proven so troublesome that I’m unsure why I’m doing it in the first place. The trivial human need to make sense of loss seems to plague me.

I’ve been watching “Pen15,” a high-concept comedy about adolescence wherein the creators play themselves at 13. Like “Big Mouth” before it, the show both messily and precisely mines the depths of growing pains.

That’s what I’d call getting fired: adult growing pain at its finest. Right up there with a torn ACL or waking to back spasms, the pink slip is an entryway into the inescapable vulnerability of adulthood. Yet, some of us get more fired than others. That’s a plain fact I can’t deny about myself anymore and it bothers me. What if I don’t fit anywhere? How much longer will it take me to find the place I fit? Is this capitalism at large or a signal of my…