The Mac & Cheese Millionaire

3TerminationWhy Being “Let Go” Is the Best Euphemism Ever for Losing Your Job

“Courage is what others can’t see, what is never affirmed. It is made of what you have thrown away and then come back for.”

—Leonard Cohen

Have you ever thought about the phrase “being let go,” instead of “being fired” or “terminated”? Terminated sounds like your life is actually being put to an end. Being fired conjures being engulfed by flames, so that’s also like your life is being put to an end, but this time in the most painful way possible. Both of these phrases have a covert implication that losing your job is tantamount to being extinguished as a human being.

To be “let go,” by contrast, sounds downright delightful. As if your old job set you free to greet something else that was calling you. Like being released into the embrace of something more beautiful.

The morning after I lost my job (another ridiculous phrase, like “oops—where did it go?!”), I definitely felt like I had been fired. My insides felt like they were burning, as acid roiled in my gut at the thought of calling my family to share the news. I decided to hit the road for a few days to clear my head. I’d call my family from the car.

My parents were going to freak out. My mother, like many Jews of her generation who lost family in the Holocaust, is obsessed with financial security. My grandparents were the sole survivors of large families all killed by the Nazis, so my mother grew up without grandparents, aunts and uncles, ...