There’s a bunch of studies about pain that show that the intensity of your recollection of how painful something was isn’t about the maximum pain you felt, it’s about the *last* pain you felt. A surgical procedure that goes on longer, with *higher* maximum pain, is recalled as though it was less painful if a superfluous low-pain thing is added to the end of it.

I’m hearing a lot about folks who were let go from companies after long tenures in terrible ways. Cut off from their communities without a chance to say goodbye or get closure or grieve with friends and teammates.

So add on that low-pain thing at the end. Find the people you want to say goodbye to and say goodbye. Organize a last lunch, or a small get-together. Reminisce and grieve and cry and laugh and whatever. Make that your last memory.

My last three jobs have ended in ways that were painful, and I was never able to get any kind of proper closure. You may want to walk away and never see your team or be in that environment again after having been treated poorly, but you have a choice how to end things for yourself. A little bit of effort to put a nice bow on it, and a great side effect is that your long-term perception of how badly things “actually” ended will be significantly reduced.