The message on the bumper sticker was stark and jarring, the unadorned voice of the Victim: “On my way to work. Please kill me.”

Wondering what the person must be like who would put such a statement on her vehicle, a car she presumably drives to work, I crept up at the next light to have a look. She did look stressed: tousled hair, heavily furrowed brows, down-turned mouth. At least she has a job, I thought as I drove off. I wondered how some of the several million who’ve lost their jobs in the past year would be affected by her grim message.

I’ve been hearing a lot of negative statements about work these days. For instance, one man said to me recently, “In every other house on my street is a person out of work. In every other house is someone going crazy trying to do the work of those who have been laid off.” While this might be the exaggeration of a defeatist, work life has become increasingly unstable and the defeatists seem to be multiplying.

“‘Change-Of-The-Month Club, I call it,” said a man in a seminar I conducted a few weeks ago on coping with workplace change. Asked to elaborate, he went on, “I can’t wait to see what horrors the executives have in store for us next month. Last month they gave me a ‘promotion’ to a job I didn’t want. Now they’ve asked me to fire my old associates.” Change like this—or even the threat of it—can challenge the emotional wellbeing of the toughest employee.

In each of these cases, I wondered, as I did when driving behind the woman with the bumper sticker, what these people might say if they actually lost that job they apparently hate. I’m not saying they should be grateful for a stressful job or value a job where they are treated poorly. But, hey: it’s all relative.

This is on my mind because I lost a job once, quite without warning and utterly without fanfare. It was humiliating, shocking, and liberating at once. The whole thing took less than 60 seconds. After my boss was through with me (that was the 60 second part), a stranger from HR came in and reviewed my “severance package” (love that term!). Talk about deer in the headlights. I staggered to my car and called my wife. I picked her up and we sat in an empty parking lot for an hour talking about how we would cope with the situation. I committed to her right then and there that I would derive enormous value from the experience. As people in the Obama administration are fond of saying, there is no point in wasting a good crisis.

As violated as I felt by the process that was my job termination, I will never put a bumper sticker like that woman’s on my car no matter how bad any future employment might be. True, workplaces can be unfair, humiliating, and worse. But no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to stay there. I am coming to the awareness that the mistake I made in my own job situation was the tremendous effort I put in to hanging on to an employer that clearly did not value me. That wasn’t my boss’s fault it was mine. Viktor Frankl’s words come to mind. Remember him? He wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a firsthand account of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp:

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”