Real psychological impact of midlife redundancy

The issue, when your job stops, is that everything else keeps going. The mortgage still comes out of your bank account. Food still needs to be bought and the bills still need to be paid. It’s like you’re sitting in a stationary cab with the meter running and it feels like there’s nothing you can do. Worse, there’s nothing in place to make it feel like anything other than failure.

“I’ve applied for so many jobs, I literally can’t tell you how many,” says Dan. “The police, delivery driver, I’ve applied to stack shelves... I didn’t get a call back, not one. They were probably a bit weirded out by a 50-year-old man with a CV full of nature documentaries.”

Dan has only ever worked in telly. Pretty successfully, too. He’s directed documentaries and TV shows you’ve probably watched and enjoyed. It wasn’t an easy road to get there either. Television can be relentless: you’re hustling for work, putting in long hours. In the early days of your career, you’re often expected to work for nothing. It’s all par for the course — you’ve got to pay your dues in these businesses.

Then, after a quarter of a century of solid work, the ground shifted for Dan. The streamers took hold, budgets for mid-range documentaries dried up, and production companies that once burst at the seams in snazzy Central London offices shrank down to two or three people working from home. His worst stretch of unemployment lasted 11 months.

He rewrote his CV and went to workshops that reframed his experience as transferable — managing teams, risk assessments, delivering to deadline. “And I just didn’t get anywhere,” he says. “I hit a complete stasis. I didn’t know what to do. I was like, what do I actually do?”

Similarly, Minreet — who is also a carer for her two elderly parents — turned her back on a successful marketing career to pursue her passion for telling stories, and excelled as a BBC journalist in a job that was a dream come true. Then, like so many others working for “Auntie”, she couldn’t be protected from job cuts.

“I want to work,” she says. “I’ve been looking for jobs and applying for jobs but constantly getting rejected, even from my previous line of work. It’s so disheartening, but what else can I do? I’m too young to retire; I’ve used all of the money I’d saved up just to get by. It’s scary.”

“My mum really feels for me,” she continues. “She sees me working day and night trying to get a job, and she can see that it was never that hard for them, for their generation.”

Part of the problem is age itself. “Let’s be honest, not many people want to hire people in their fifties,” says Travis, who spent decades building a career in the drinks industry before his work hit the skids. “The job opportunities are fewer and fewer. It’s a worrying time.”

These certainly aren’t one-off examples, but part of a growing trend of professionals who have spent decades doing everything they can to forge a successful career, only to find that the goalposts have been shifted and that they’re suddenly surplus to requirements. Or — worse — the goalposts have disappeared altogether. Former fashion journalist Stacey Duguid has posted on social media about her struggles to find work, striking a chord with many others facing the same uncertainty.

For some, it’s the impact of AI. For others, it’s the suspicion that decades of experience count for less and less in a job market that equates relevance with youth.

As someone who has written for a living for the last three decades, I’ve felt the impact myself, watching much of my bread-and-butter copywriting work vanish in the wake of ChatGPT. For people who built careers on skills they assumed would keep them in work, the ground is shifting beneath their feet.

“I don’t think we’ve had anything close to this in terms of the speed and the scale and the impact,” says Victoria Pile, a former corporate vice president who now coaches people through career transitions after 50. “Not since the industrial revolution.”