‘In Your Growth Phase’ Is the Most Honest Lie We Tell About Work

You know the question. You dread the question. So, what do you do?

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of tech workers laid off in the last two years, that question hits different. Your stomach tightens. Your brain scrambles for a response that’s technically true but emotionally armored. And you reach for the phrase that has become the universal code for I lost my job but please don’t pity me.

I’m between opportunities.

A laid-off Quizlet worker recently posted a reel cataloging these linguistic life rafts. Between opportunities. In your growth phase. In hibernation. The comments section became a support group—thousands of people recognizing their own deflections in someone else’s words.

We’ve built an entire vocabulary to avoid saying six words: \”I don’t have a job right now.\”

And look—I get it. The shame is real. When someone asks what you do, they’re not really asking about your labor. They’re asking about your value. Your status. Your place in the social hierarchy. Unemployed carries a weight that between opportunities doesn’t, and that weight is measured in the micro-expressions of the person across from you.

But here’s what’s interesting about in your growth phase—the most popular euphemism in that comments section. It’s not just a deflection. It’s a rebranding. It takes the thing you’re supposed to feel ashamed of—losing your job—and reframes it as a choice. You’re not unemployed. You’re growing. You’re not falling behind. You’re leveling up.

The euphemism doesn’t hide the failure. It hides the fact that we think losing a job is a failure.

That’s the part nobody talks about. The euphemism is clever. It works. It buys you social grace at a dinner party. But its very existence tells you everything about the society that requires it. We live in a culture where your job title is your identity, your employment status is your moral standing, and a layoff is treated like a personal failing rather than an economic event.

Nobody asks What are you passionate about? or What are you curious about? They ask What do you do? And the answer is supposed to be clean. Employed. Stable. Progressing. Not in hibernation.

The Quizlet worker’s reel went viral not because the euphemisms are funny—though they are—but because they’re a shared coping mechanism. A collective linguistic armor against a world that hasn’t figured out how to talk about unemployment without making it feel like a character flaw.

When \”I’m between opportunities\” rolls off the tongue more easily than \”I was laid off,\” the problem isn’t the language. The problem is what the language is protecting you from.

And what it’s protecting you from is judgment. The pitying look. The oh, I’m sure something will come up that makes you feel smaller than the layoff itself. The sudden shift in how people treat you when they realize you’re not a professional contact anymore—you’re a cautionary tale.

So people reach for growth phase and hibernation and between opportunities because these phrases do something remarkable: they give you agency over a situation that stripped you of agency. You didn’t lose your job. You entered a growth phase. You weren’t laid off. You went into hibernation. The language hands back control.

But control over what? Over a narrative that shouldn’t need controlling in the first place.

If losing your job wasn’t treated as a moral failing, you wouldn’t need a euphemism for it. If unemployment was seen as what it actually is—a temporary economic condition, not a measure of human worth—then I’m unemployed would be as neutral as I’m between apartments or I’m single.

The shame isn’t in being unemployed. The shame is in a world that made you feel ashamed of it.

The next time someone asks what you do, and you’re unemployed, try something radical. Say it. I was laid off. I’m looking. Watch what happens. Some people will flinch. Some will pity you. But some—the ones worth keeping around—will say same or I’ve been there or tell me about it. And in that moment, you’ll have something no euphemism can give you: genuine connection.

The euphemisms will still exist. Between opportunities will still roll off the tongue at networking events. Growth phase will still trend on LinkedIn. But maybe we can start being honest about why we need them—and what it says about us that we do.

Because the real growth phase isn’t the unemployment. It’s the moment you stop needing a euphemism to say you’re in one.