The headline really caught my eye: “The Brutal Layoff Email Disney CEO Sent to Employees”

I have worked in the human resources arena for my entire career, so I’m naturally interested in brutal layoff emails, if only for the schadenfreude. You read these written train wrecks and wonder what poor sap let *that* cluster foxtrot out the door. You imagine the aftermath, too: the hastily-called damage control sessions, finger-pointing, walk-of-shame resignations…been there, done that, designed the embarrassing t-shirt that got a bunch of people canned.

So yeah, I wanted to see how a presumably well-run company could make that kind of mistake. What the hell did they do, send a picture of Mickey flipping the bird at a bunch of displaced Imagineers?

Imagine my surprise when I opened the ‘brutal layoff email,’ only to find that it wasn’t brutal. Not at all. Not even close. No Mickey making a rude gesture, not even Donald Duck squawking a garbled obscenity. The headline would also have you believe that those displaced Mousketeers were notified of their impending career doom with an email, when in fact, Bob Iger’s email was not the notification and in fact was the gold standard of sending emails announcing that layoffs were beginning. It was everything that you’d expect from a company that presumably has Cinderella’s fairy godmother pitching in as the chief HR officer.

Not content with the fear-mongering headline, the article doubled down by referring to Iger’s ‘ominous’ warning to unaffected employees. And then quoted the email with the assuredly not-ominous, gold-standard soother to the challenged employees who have survived a layoff and are standing around their cubicles wondering what was next. 

Brutal? Hardly. In fact, if I ever have to lay anyone off, I will find Disney’s carefully-crafted words and shamelessly crib them, rather than reinvent my own ‘brutal email.’ If I ever get laid off again, heaven forfend, I hope Mufasa is patting me on the shoulder and quoting that email while he talks about my COBRA options. 

Another brutal case in point: in the last month, we were treated to headlines about William Shatner’s heartbreaking health news. I will not satisfy the Clickbait Monsters by linking to it, but I will summarize because yes, I clicked on it because yes, I am a Star Trek fan and yes, I want to keep up on all things Shatner. 

His heartbreaking health news? That he’s 91 and probably doesn’t have a lot of runway left. He  said something to the effect that he could go now or ten years from now, so he’s thinking about what matters most. 

I apologize: I guess I should have warned you to sit down, what with how shocking that must have been.

That’s when I realized what has happened to my internet news lately: it has been overrun with the clickbait headline.

I should have seen this coming, actually. Everything else marching across my feed is designed to make me click, so why not actual news? I have known forever that the interwebz are not free; the parts that aren’t paid for by porn are paid for by advertising revenue. The fact that it’s understandable does not make it palatable. Since the news divisions have to make money through ad revenue like everyone else (that’s kinda my fault; I really don’t want to subscribe, even though I loathe a paywall) they need to make me curious. 

And the fastest way to make me curious is to make me agitated about BRUTAL EMAILS.

If I don’t click on the agitating headlines, then I’m wandering around with one more little thing in my brain that is best summed up by Minnie Mouse on Real Housewives of Disneyland, spilling unsweetened tea about Mickey in a confessional aside. Or picturing Shat over-emoting to the Grim Reaper and then me getting into a funk about how old I am now and how MY CHILDHOOD IS DYING.

And that trend, my friends, compounded over days and weeks of all the *.com headlines that march past our eyes every minute, is adding up to a general…I want to call it a malaise, but it’s angrier than that. 

It’s an itch. A pervasive, almost-so-subtle-you’ll-miss-it kind of itch that is translating into our everyday lives, making us all a touch more annoyed. A bit more fearful. A bit more anxious. 

A bit more brutal. 

The result? A populace that is a lot more annoyed, fearful, and anxious, FOR NO GOOD REASON. Oh, there are lots of specific, excellent reasons to be annoyed, fearful, and anxious, things that require attention. This vague crap is distracting us from things that must be dealt with.

The solution? 

It has been decades since I took my headline writing class, but those babies are meant to follow some rules, and it’s time we started insisting that everyone start using them again. If a headline doesn’t tell you a ‘who’ and a ‘what’ and ideally a ‘when,’ don’t click on it. If the headline says anything about Someone Famous Opens Up About Anything, don’t click on it. If the headline says that the Sports/Entertainment/Whatever World Reacts to Someone Famous News, don’t click on it. 

If it’s important, they’ll be specific. The headline won’t say “The World is Heartbroken for this Asian Nation.” It will say, “CHINA INVADES TAIWAN,” and may include helpful survival tips because I think that means World War III has started. 

Disclaimer: this post is talking about vague, nebulous headlines that are purposefully vague and upsetting so we’re getting all subliminally angrified.  It is not talking about real, non-vague shenanigans and asshattery that deserve our justifiable outrage. Please continue to be pissed off as events actually warrant. And if you want to be ticked off by a real train wreck of a layoff, I’ll send you back to the Better.com derailment where affected employees (derisively referred to as ‘dumb dolphins’ by their CEO) were first notified by a severance deposit in their bank accounts, and then by a Zoom video.

© E. Stocking Evans 2023