I realized I put two separate thoughts in the same paragraph. When someone is let go in a lay-off it’s often not personal and being a better person might not have saved your position. So it’s probably better not to see it as a personal failure.

Thought 2: if you’re getting let go for performance reasons in a bad time for the company, often they really don’t have performance gripes, but they don’t want to put up with unemployment or file a lay-off, so they let go people that can possibly be fired for performance.