5 Ways to Hide Your Schadenfreude When You Find Out a Tech Bro Just Lost His Job

As thousands of tech industry workers face the difficulty of losing their jobs—including 9,000 Amazon workers laid off this week alone—it’s saddling thousands more with the even more difficult task of struggling to act like they feel bad for any of them. When you’re suddenly stuck hanging out with an unemployed tech bro whose severance package is five times your annual salary, here are five easy ways to seem like you give even a single shit:  

1. Lightly stab yourself with a tiny knife. Peer-reviewed studies show this handy trick increases chances of genuine facial cringe by 25% while reducing chances of immediately rolling your eyes and bursting into laughter by 99.9%.
2. Use ChatGPT to write a condolence message to send or read aloud. If you can’t muster enough genuine sympathy when a tech bro tells you they may have to sell their 5^th home, don’t worry. As the tech bro community’s leading source of therapy and intimacy, ChatGPT has it handled.
3. Wear a mask. Masks don’t just prevent disease transmission—they prevent people from seeing an evil smile crawl across your face as it barely restrains crazed cackles of spiteful pleasure. Tell them you suddenly remember that you’re visiting your 95-year-old grandma Gertrude soon, then run to the bathroom before you stink up the place with a giant chortle.
4. Genuinely recognize our mutual struggles in a cut-throat capitalist economy in which exponentially more jobs are being eliminated through AI and automation. Sure, they made a lot more money than you for a bit, but—just like anyone else—they experience uncertainty, fear and exhaustion worrying about the longevity and values of their skillsets. Being treated as disposable at any moment by a half-trillion-dollar company run by multi-billion-dollar executives so they can save relative pennies is stressful and destabilizing not just for individuals, but for communities as a whole. Wait—omg, did you really think we would ever seriously recommend such hefty emotional labor? Omg, nah, relax.
5. Ask them if they’ve applied to work at Apple, the only tech company that isn’t laying off at least 8% of their workforce this year. It’s the most polite way to tell them to move the fuck back to California already.