Happiest man on earth
I was on a call with the executive and HR when they told me they were letting me go.
The call started with the usual corporate bullshit.
“This was a very hard decision.”
“This is the best for both sides.”
You know the phrases. The ones executives repeat when they want to make something uncomfortable sound thoughtful and professional.
I was listening to him talk, and instead of feeling scared, angry, embarrassed, or worried about what the fuck I was going to do next, I felt relief.
When he finished with the crap, he just left, without even letting me say a single word.
Then, the HR person, who was very kind and professional, looked at me and said, “You can turn off the camera if you feel more comfortable…” I looked at her and said:
“You just made me the happiest man on earth.”
She looked shocked.
I think they expected me to be devastated. I had just lost my salary. I had lost financial security. On paper, something bad had happened to me.
But inside, I felt free…
This is my question:
How bad does a job have to become before losing it feels better than keeping it?
A good salary can hide a shitty job
I took this job because I genuinely wanted the opportunity, and at that point in my life, I needed the financial stability.
My own business was not performing the way I hoped. Money was just ok, and this company reached out to me at exactly the right time.
I was proud too.
Someone had recommended me because of the work I had done at my previous company. That mattered to me. I had spent years learning marketing, working my ass off, and proving that I could do good work.
The first few months were actually fine. I worked as a contractor, spent time with the owner, had good conversations, and started thinking this could become something meaningful.
Then they hired me full-time.
That was when things started changing.
During my first month as an employee, I was already hearing questions about leads and website traffic. The company barely had an online presence. There was almost nothing built yet.
Some of it was said as a joke, but I remember thinking: What exactly are you expecting here?
That feeling kept coming back.
I would bring ideas and hear why we could not do them. They required investment. They required tools. They required resources the company did not want to provide. Or simply the owner wanted to do something else.
However, the expectations stayed.
And little by little, the job I had been proud to get started becoming the place I wanted to escape.
When a company treats you like a number, you start losing yourself
Being treated like an output instead of a person slowly damaged my confidence, motivation, and trust in my own work.
That was the part of this company that fucked with me the most.
I did not need somebody asking how I felt every five minutes. I did not need free lunches, motivational speeches, or some bullshit employee-of-the-month award.
I wanted people to care about the human doing the work.
Nobody was actually listening
There were meetings where I would be explaining an idea, a problem, or something I needed, and I could literally see the screen reflected in the other person's glasses.
They were writing emails or whatever while I was talking.
That tells you everything.
I rarely felt like people were curious about what I thought, what motivated me, or what kind of support would help me do better work.
I would have taken less money for that.
Instead, I got instructions.
Do this. Do it this way. Get these results.
They wanted the output without giving me what I needed to produce it
Ideas were rejected because they required investment.
We did not have the tools, platforms, structure, or resources I believed we needed to do the work properly.
But somehow the expectations never disappeared.
That creates a complex situation.
You are responsible for the result, but you do not have much control over how you get there.
After enough time, I stopped feeling like somebody they hired because I was good at marketing.
I started feeling like a number expected to produce another number.
And apparently, that feeling is far from rare.
In iHire's 2026 workplace survey, 79.1% of people who had experienced a toxic workplace pointed to poor leadership or management, and 65% cited lack of recognition as part of the problem. Separate research from The Predictive Index found that nearly half of workers felt their boss only somewhat or rarely understood what they actually contributed.
That last one hits me.
Because when the people evaluating your work do not understand you, listen to you, or know what you are capable of, eventually you can start questioning it yourself.
Bad leadership can make good people think they are the problem
I had been recommended for this job because of my performance somewhere else.
I knew marketing.
I had spent years studying it. I had produced results. I had enough confidence in myself to try building my own company.
Then I ended up somewhere that made me question the skills I had spent years developing.
My focus got worse.
My excitement disappeared.
Work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. became painful.
And Sundays became a nightmare because I knew Monday was coming.
That is what careless leadership can do.
The executives may still go home believing everything is fine because the dashboards are open, meetings are happening, and employees are still logging in.
Meanwhile, somebody on their team is sitting at home on Sunday thinking about how much they hate the next five days of their life.
The company keeps getting the employee.
They just stop getting the person who originally walked through the door.
Isn’t it crazy?
The executive is not the hero
This company also changed the way I think about leadership.
Some executives seem to believe their job is to be the smartest person in the room.
They have the answers. They make the calls. They tell everyone what to do. They talk about revenue, growth, targets, and whatever other number is on the screen that week.
Then they wonder why the team has no energy, no ideas, and no connection to the company.
I think that is backwards.
A leader’s job is to build the people who build the company.
Give people direction. Give them context. Give them the tools they need. Listen when they know something you do not. Help them improve. Tell them where the company is going and why their work matters.
Your job is not to prove that the company needs you for every decision.
Your job is to build a team that gets stronger because you are there.
What I saw at my last company was almost the opposite.
People seemed more interested in protecting their own ideas, proving what they knew, and telling others how things should be done. It felt like ego and fixed ideas got in the way of listening, learning, and building people properly.
That is not leadership to me.
If every good idea has to come from you, every decision has to go through you, and everyone else exists to execute your instructions, you are not building people.
You are building dependence.
And sooner or later, the people who still believe in themselves start looking for the door.
A shitty job does not end at 5 p.m.
The damage from that job did not end when I closed my laptop.
I had less energy. Less patience. Less excitement about anything. My focus was horrible, and I was complaining about work constantly.
Then Sunday would arrive.
Sunday should have been mine, but part of it was already ruined because Monday was coming. I knew exactly where I had to be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., who I had to deal with, and how I was probably going to feel.
That is an insane way to spend your life.
You give a company a huge part of your waking hours. When those hours make you feel ignored, isolated, unsupported, and constantly frustrated, you do not magically become another person at 5:01.
Research backs that up. Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that poor management and other workplace stressors were associated with major health costs and an estimated 120,000 excess deaths a year in the U.S., according to this breakdown of his research on what happens to your body when you hate your job.
Chronic workplace stress is also associated with sleep problems, headaches, muscle tension, stomach issues, fatigue, and problems with concentration.
And one Deloitte workplace well-being study found that only 56% of employees believed their executives cared about their well-being, while 91% of executives believed employees felt cared for.
That gap says a lot.
Leaders can sit in meetings believing they are doing a great job while the people working for them are taking the stress home, losing sleep, dreading Sundays, and slowly becoming someone they do not recognize.
And that is why I cannot stand the idea that we are supposed to sacrifice everything for a company.
What the fuck are we sacrificing everything for?
A title?
A salary?
Somebody else’s revenue target?
Executives who give a damn about you?
I had already left before they fired me
Many months before the layoff, I already knew this company was not part of my future.
I still showed up. I still did my job. I still cared about producing decent work, but my mind wasn't there anymore.
The salary mattered. I needed financial stability, and I am not going to pretend money does not matter when you have things to pay.
So I stayed.
What changed was that I stopped expecting the company to suddenly become something it had never shown me it could be.
I stopped waiting for the mentorship.
I stopped waiting for the executives to care.
I stopped hoping I would be treated like a person, instead of another resource expected to produce more.
Instead, I started building my way out.
I spent time thinking about what I actually wanted next. I learned. I worked on ideas. I started creating connections outside the company and paying attention to opportunities that could eventually give me another option.
I think this matters because sometimes quitting tomorrow is a terrible decision.
You might have rent. A mortgage. Kids. Debt. People depending on you.
You can know a place is hurting you and still need the paycheck.
That does not mean you have to accept that place as your future.
If you are in that position, my only thought is this: start planning your escape.
Give yourself somewhere else to go.
By the time they fired me, they were ending a relationship I had already decided was over almost 8 months prior.
They just happened to make the final decision for me.
They fired me, and I got myself back
Losing the job removed something that had been draining me for months.
That is why the layoff call felt so different from what everyone expected.
I lost the salary.
I lost the stability.
I lost the certainty of knowing where money would come from next month.
But I also lost the Sunday dread.
I lost the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. block of my life that I had started hating.
I lost the meetings where nobody wanted to be.
I lost the constant feeling that I had to prove myself to people who had never taken the time to understand what I could actually do.
That trade felt fucking amazing.
And maybe that is why the HR person looked so shocked when I told her she had just made me the happiest man on earth.
She was looking at what I had lost.
I was thinking about what I had gotten back.
My time. My energy. My curiosity. The chance to trust myself again.
I am not saying getting fired is something to celebrate. Losing your income can be scary as hell, and I knew I had work ahead of me.
But relief can tell you something.
Sometimes you spend so long afraid of losing a job that you never stop to ask what keeping it is costing you.
I was scared of losing financial security.
Then I lost it and realized I had been paying for that security with my confidence, my energy, my Sundays, and a huge part of my life.
That company probably thought they were ending my employment.
For me, they ended a cycle I had been trying to escape for months.
So yeah.
Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
And when I said I was the happiest man on earth, I fucking meant it.
Sebastian Sepulveda I’m Sebastian, the founder of aoora. I built this company after years of pushing too hard, burning out, and losing connection with myself and the people I love. Now I’m focused on helping and encouraging people to pause, be present, and keep building without losing their lives along the way.
