Employment no longer ends. It expires. That is the central argument of this piece, and it lands hard. A CEO called an employee over Microsoft Teams during her lunch break, terminated her effective immediately, blocked her access, and cited budget efficiency. No grief followed. Mild annoyance at the timing. Meta cut 8,000 people. Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle followed. The pattern is not new, but the emotional response, or the absence of one, is.
The real subject here is the psychological contract, a term first used by Chris Argyris in 1960 and later formalized by Denise Rousseau in 1989. The old version was a covenant: loyalty for stability, extra miles for a future. That contract required two signatures. When one party stopped paying in, the arithmetic changed. What the author observed in that coffee shop was not callousness. It was two people who never signed the covenant in the first place, so they had nothing to mourn. The milk metaphor is blunt and precise: you do not grieve expiry, you restock. The cruelty is that the carton has no label.
Read the full piece for the part where the author turns the lens on himself. He is the one still looking for the date on the carton, still operating on the old contract, taking notes on a language younger workers already speak fluently. The argument is not that loyalty is dead. It is that loyalty became asymmetric, and the rational response is to stop building someone else's pipeline before your own. That conclusion has practical weight, especially if you still believe your employer is signing the same contract you are.
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