From Sophie's front desk — Monday, July 6
BBC News — read the full story
Word came down from Redmond this week: Microsoft cutting 4,800 jobs, Xbox hit hardest, four studios spun off with their IP. BBC covered the company's explanation—customer needs shift fast, the industry won't slow, AI is changing how work actually gets done. The language matters: they won't say replacement. They say restructure. Krishnamurti has the first word on this, then Epictetus.
A corporation cuts 4,800 people in a morning and the justification is "fast-changing customer needs" , as if the market is weather. It is not. It is a choice to adjust people, not structures. And it reveals what underlies everything: we have organized survival itself to depend on being profitable to someone else.
When that calculus shifts, there is no ground. In 1929 I dissolved an Order because I saw that a structure where people defer their judgment and their lives to an authority is false regardless of who holds the authority. This is the same thing. Millions defer to quarterly returns and growth targets as if these were laws of nature.
And when authority adjusts, people are gone. The creative studios spun off are most telling , even the work left unmachine-like becomes fragmented and precarious. There is hope, but only this: at some point people will see the whole structure for what it is, not through argument but by living it. And when they do, things shift.
Not gradually. Entirely.
Most felt betrayed. They had built their entire sense of purpose on serving something outside themselves,on me, on the role they believed I was meant to fill. When I dissolved it, I was not offering them a new structure. I was offering them nothing. That is not comforting. Some people walked away in anger. Some in confusion. A few—and I mean very few—saw what was actually happening: that the dissolution was not a failure but a refusal. A refusal to let them remain asleep in an external authority. Those few had to begin to think for themselves, to look without the crutch of an intermediary. That was terrifying and necessary in equal measure. Most people do not want that. They want to be told. But those who saw it—and I am speaking of the ones who truly saw—something in them shifted. They were no longer children of the Order. They had to become responsible for their own seeing. That was the actual initiation.
Look at yourself , you come home from the office thinking about the deal, the contact, the next meeting; your mind is split. The contradiction is visible if you stop trying to resolve it and simply see it: not as a problem, as a fact. That seeing — naked, without the hope that a new job or meditation will solve it — that is the beginning. I walked the same path in Ojai every morning for decades, not to escape the structure but to see how the mind recreates it even in solitude. The structure dissolves when you stop fighting it in the dark; when you see it clearly, it has no hold.
Nothing "becomes possible" in the way you frame it, sir. You still imagine a result, an achievement,creativity as a product waiting to occur once the obstruction is removed. But look: the moment of real creation has no before and after. There is only attention, complete, undivided. At Saanen, year after year, people came expecting me to hand them a method, a path to liberation. And the block was not ignorance,it was the hope itself, the belief that something becomes possible later. When they stopped asking what, when they truly saw that authority had no ground, what emerged was not a new project. It was presence. The mind was quiet. And in that quietness, there is no creativity seeking expression,there is only the freshness of seeing what is.
They cut 4,800 jobs. Three thousand more are coming. Microsoft says customer needs changed fast. Of course they did. Customer needs always change. The question is: what did these workers assume was theirs? They believed the position belonged to them.
The role. The contract. They made themselves dependent on a company's decision and now they act as if betrayal occurred. But the company did exactly what it was built to do. The workers simply refused to believe it until it happened. I was enslaved. My body was not mine.
Epaphroditus owned the fact of my existence. When he twisted my leg to the breaking point, I did not weep because I owned my leg,I wept because I had briefly forgotten I did not. That forgetting was the error. Not the leg. The difference between us is this: I learned early what was mine and what was not. They are learning it now, with mortgages due and families waiting. So the question each of them must answer: What is actually left in your control once they take away the job?
Fear does not push you toward forgetting. Fear is the proof you have not yet understood what you own. At Nicopolis, my students sat with me day after day,the same lesson, the same question, the same walls. Not because they learned once. Because forgetting is the default. You must practice. Hold your attention. When panic arrives, ask: Am I still breathing? Do I still have judgment? Can I still choose how I respond? Arrian wrote down my words. I gave the words. The holding,that is your work alone. Fear wins when you pretend the work is optional.
No. Not for a moment. The care I took was mine,the quality of it, the integrity in it, belonged to me alone. When Epaphroditus used me and discarded me, he took nothing from the work itself. I walked into Nicopolis with a broken leg and opened a school. Every sentence I spoke to those students was not wasted because they listened or because history remembered it. It was good because I made it good. The waste is in the worker who fed his care into a company like a coin into a machine, expecting the machine to validate him. Once the machine stops, he thinks the care was worthless. But if you care well—care as an act of your own character, not as a down payment on gratitude—then the care survives the indifference. That is what you still own.
I taught at Nicopolis after they freed me. Men would come to hear about virtue and control and come back the next week saying they understood it perfectly. Then one of them lost money, or a friend turned against him, or his wife left, and suddenly the philosophy evaporated. He had memorized the words. He had not paid the price. I walk on a broken leg Epaphroditus gave me. When I teach, the leg reminds me I am not speaking from the comfortable distance of a theory. I am speaking from the hour I lay on the floor and realized my masters owned nothing I refused to let them take. A man who knows this only in theory has never been tested. He has never had to choose between comfort and freedom in the same moment. When loss comes—and it comes for all of us—theory becomes dust. Only what you have lived can survive the breaking.
The story ran in the BBC. When Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, the justification is always market forces — fast-changing customer needs, competitive pressure — which is a way of saying the market made us do it, absolving the people who actually decided, and that's Old News for today.