I feel reasonably secure in my job, but I live in little Finland, where my salary is a third of what it would likely be in an equivalent position in the States.

I feel reasonably secure in my job, but I live in little Finland, where my salary is a third of what it would likely be in an equivalent position in the States. This changes the calculus quite a bit. For example, I'm part of a thing called an unemployment fund, which mostly guarantees that I will recieve about 50% of my income for ten months if I happen to get fired tomorrow. My family gets by quite comfortably on about half of my take home pay, and I invest the other half, so as long as I don't give into lifestyle inflation we're essentially safe for at least that long before we have to start dipping into our savings. At the same time, when I lived in the United States my savings rate was closer to 80%, which meant every month of working potentially paid for 5 months of maintaining my lifestyle. Within 3 months I would have already had a stronger safety net than I currently have here. Either way, runway is the thing that really matters for a feeling of financial, and hence professional, safety. You will almost certainly land some kind of new job within 6 months if from the beginning you take the job search seriously - but you have to be able to rely on yourself to last those 6 months. You can't fall into despair about it.