Go back to school, 'do nothing,' and 'get super in shape': A laid-off worker says a 'silver linings' list helped her focus on new possibilities

It’s an age-old financial fantasy: What would you do if money wasn’t an issue?

Yiyi Zhang says she was forced — and privileged enough — to grapple with that question, at least for the short term, after being laid off in October from her job as a community and PR manager at a game studio.

To do so, she compiled what she calls a silver linings list that helped her deal with her job loss more constructively and look beyond the downsides of the situation to ask, “What are the advantages to getting laid off?”

Thanks to some savings, severance and unemployment benefits, Zhang says she is fortunate that she didn’t need to return to full-time work immediately. And in making the list, she says, she realized her layoff was “actually not necessarily the worst thing that could happen to me.”

Zhang says she saw the writing on the wall several months before her layoff happened.