What If We Re-humanize?

My protective and committed mom instincts have been activated!

And today I’m saying with a vengeance what I’ve been saying for a long time, and will keep on saying:

Our dehumanizing ways of working are harming people, and we need to knock it off!

This social system we co-create together is abusing us, and by extension, we have learned to abuse each other and ourselves. All this dehumanization and harm done in the name of productivity and control are not going to help us solve our problems, produce happy customers, or get sustainable good results. On the contrary.

We have to stop this madness and stop expecting that work should be threatening, fearful, and harmful because this is taking a terrible toll. And we must start expecting and acting on the fact that work should and can be safe, humane, loving, and healthy.  

Here’s why I’m even more animated than I usually am:

My 32-year-old son Zach had an unexpected life-threatening health emergency recently. It took two weeks in the hospital to bring it under control so he could go home last Sunday. He will spend the next 4-6 weeks plus recovering at home.

So now, his “work” is to be still and rest.

He needs to rest to heal so that he doesn’t end up back in the hospital or worse.

To prepare him to go home to his wife and kids, we discussed what he would not be able to do for a while, which is pretty much anything other than lying or sitting and resting so that his leg heals.

Family and friends are rallying to support with practical help, but still, his first reaction from his hospital bed where he could barely move was insisting that he would, “do what he needed to do for his family and make things work.” Meaning, not resting.

I looked at him lying there, proud of his huge heart that wants to care and provide for his family.

AND my heart broke when I saw just how much he’d been conditioned by society to deny his own critical physical and emotional human needs to work.  

The Pressures Are Real

Financial realities are, of course, one driver of my son’s reaction.

For this young, blue-collar family living month-to-month, like so many, such situations can have serious, immediate consequences. So his instinct for heroics is understandable; except that he literally can’t move.

Identity and self-worth also play into his response.

In a society that thinks of organizations as machines and people who work in them as disposable parts, we only have value as long as we produce as a part of that machine. Stop producing and we stop having value.

This week, a friend who’s pregnant and a few days past her due date expressed feeling the pressure that she hasn’t “produced” her baby yet and that she is “late” per the metrics of the system.

What on earth have we come to?

A Pathological System

All this pressure and dehumanization causes sickness and suffering.

The symptoms of this pathology include pushing through pain and exhaustion to get work done sometimes to the point of injury or neglect of physical health, neglecting important relationships, making choices that help the organization in the short term, but harm self and family, and no longer participating in activities that bring meaning and pleasure, perhaps because there’s no time, energy, or resources.

The results are persistent, chronic emotional and mental health challenges, physical illness and injury, fractured relationships and families, and the illness of loneliness that compounds all these areas of impact.

What Do You Notice?

Now, as you’ve been reading this, I invite you to notice what came up for you.

What was your response?

What internal voices spoke up?

You may be able to hear voices of empathy and identification, but also voices of justification for the extreme norms of production and mechanistic work.

I find it helpful to pay attention to those voices, to become more aware of my internalized programming, and to question it all.

We can reconsider what is healthy, what is reasonable, and what kind of world we want.

Because, remember, we get to decide. Together, we make choices for how we think about work, and what we do to each other and ourselves.

Right now in our society, all this pressure and demand is internalized as normal.

Even if it is physically impossible or unsafe, we push on.

We push through.

We push our needs aside.

We push each other away.

We believe in hard work but at what cost? And what defines what is “enough hard work” anyway?

What If We Re-humanize the Way We Work Instead?

What if we understand ourselves as part of an interconnected living system dependent on the health and well-being of every person for its success?

What if we valued and actively cared for each other's well-being as much as our own?

What if we measured and tended to the wellness of our team members because this is the right thing to do and, good news, this also supports quality and customer satisfaction?

What if we understood that a living wage and healthcare are essential to the success of our organizations, families, and communities?

What if we accepted that sometimes our work is to rest?

What if love was at the core of our work?

How would our lives and our world be better?

What if?