A few weeks after I stepped away from the business, I caught myself asking the same question on repeat: is this actually a pause, or has something already changed for good? I didn't have language for it at the time. I do now, and it turns out the same question applies to a lot more situations than mine.
It came up again this week while writing about something affecting a lot of people right now, losing work to AI, in ways that increasingly don't look like a formal redundancy at all.
01 | Made redundant because of AI?
UK firms report 8% net job losses linked to AI use over the past year, the highest of any country surveyed. 1 in 6 UK employers expect AI to shrink their workforce in the next year. February 2026 alone saw 430 collective redundancy notices, almost matching the financial-crisis peak. Read the full piece here.
02 | The exit nobody prepares for
The gap isn't ignorance, it's avoidance. Stepping back doesn't feel like retirement to the person who built the thing, it feels like loss. If that's landed anywhere close to home, it's worth naming rather than sitting with quietly.
03 | A smaller, sharper stat
21% work while unwell because they can't afford the time off. You don't have to be exiting a business or facing redundancy to be financially stretched right now, plenty of people in steady jobs are too, and most of them are managing it quietly.
If any of this landed, forward it to someone else standing at their own fulcrum point right now. That's still the best way this reaches the people who need it, better than anything I can do on my end.