Whatever “bureaucratic iron cage” the writer thinks we’re being sold, i’m willing to wager a majority of the population either aren’t buying or are paying no more than lip service to it.
The tendency to focus on emotional states by the younger generations is perhaps natural, as they begin to experience the adult world for the first time and have to acquire the means by which to negotiate it. I’d maintain it’s impossible to remain in that state for long; the constant drip-drip-drip of emoting promoted by the MSM and workplace bureaucrats just becomes too exhausting. Not all, but the majority of adults will eventually turn away from a surfeit of emoting as a natural human instinct.
Bureaucratic systems don’t require the participants belief in them to function, that’s one of their most pernicious characteristics. In any large organisation you will struggle to find anyone who wholeheartedly endorses the bureaucracy, and yet they all tick the boxes, fill out the spreadsheets and maintain the lie. It’s also worth noting that “rational management” includes the use of incentives and disincentives and is bound up with disciplinary systems that can have real effects on people. Much of the way bureaucracy seeps into our lives and forms of thought conforms to Marx’s summary of ideology: they don’t know it, but they still do it.
Yes, good points. Employees of the NHS, education sector and civil service in the UK will find that a familiar background to their working lives.
Alex Carnegie
1 month ago
The recent increased willingness to talk about mental health may be healthy but I think we need a whole new set of words to enable greater clarity. There is a difference between a bad hair day and full blown schizophrenia complete with hallucinations. Eskimos apparently need thirty words to describe different types of snow. If we are going to talk so much about our mental health, perhaps we need a similarly enlarged vocabulary to enable individuals to be more specific.
While much of the current enthusiasm for mental health is perhaps just yet another self serving attempt to create nice middle class roles comparable to those in regulatory and compliance functions – seemingly essential if adding little value – there is a nugget of usefulness. I just wish it was taught in a positive way as “resilience training” rather than medicalising it. I used to work in highly stressful environment and it would have been useful to have been taught a few tricks on how to manage stress beforehand instead of learning by trial and error.
Stuart Bennett
1 month ago
Expecting anyone other than your family and close friends to have anything more than a passing regard for your feelings is completely ridiculous. This is especially true in the workplace. Keep them to yourself and do your job. If your job is making you sad find another that doesn’t. Your employer owes you your agreed rate of pay, you owe them the labour you agreed to provide when you voluntarily agreed to work for them. That’s it. If you stop thinking about how you feel and concentrate on what you should be doing you’ll likely find you get happier too. It’s a fact about the mind you can only pay attention to one thing at a time.
Your employer owes you your agreed rate of pay, you owe them the labour you agreed to provide when you voluntarily agreed to work for them. That’s it.
Spot on. When I started work in 1971 the ‘deal’ was that the business was loyal to you (implied job for life) if you were loyal to the business (implied working as required).
That no longer applies – and I told my young adult sons that the rules had changed. If your name, in a cell on a spreadsheet, happened to be in a section that was going to be made redundant or have the conditions of work changed, then you were out of luck. Your loyalty counted for nothing.
So the Wellness Team, or HR, ‘caring for your feelings’ is just a nominal spreadsheet function applied by the business to maintain its profitability. Nothing personal.
When I started work in 1971 the ‘deal’ was that the business was loyal to you (implied job for life) if you were loyal to the business (implied working as required).
That no longer applies
This was even more the case in Japan – but once that implicit contract was broken employee behaviour also changed. Trust was gone.
That link was broken when technological progress made entire skillsets redundant over periods shorter than a career. It is not because of any deliberate betrayal of the social contract by corporations, if that’s what you’re implying.
And this is accelerating – I’m an IT contractor and even the skills I learned only 5 years ago are becoming obsolete, so fast does the technology develop.
Spot on: and unfortunately all too familiar. If HR were at least honest about their actual motivations, I’d be less inclined to consider them the spawn of Shaitan. But here we are.
I’m afraid I see the idea of a job for life as still expecting to have your needs put first. If someone is expecting a guaranteed job for life with the same employer they better get good at something and be self employed.
Also, the more the company bangs on about mental health, the more employees it will have who claim mental health issues. You always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate.
“You always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate.”
E.g., transgenders.
Dillon Eliassen
1 month ago
I have pretty good health insurance so I visit my mental hygienist every six months; I only have to shell out a $15 copay. They put that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doohickey on my head and 45 minutes later I wake up in the recovery room and the friendly staff give me 8 ounces of apple juice and an oatmeal raisin cookie. I prefer my appointments be mid-morning so I can get back to work right around lunchtime.
Paul T
1 month ago
Fetch water, chop wood.
Adam Huntley
1 month ago
I suspect much of the origin of this declaration of interest in employees well being springs from the same promotion of LGBT+ rights, equality etc, namely virtue signalling. A company with a tick box of compliance, attains the same dubious corporate kudos as when it initiates and advertises it’s commitment to the latest Stonewall or Mermaids delusions.
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
many on the Left have received the sudden and unprecedented attention to mental health over the past decade as a triumph.
Of course, they have. The entirety of the modern left’s MO consists of a binary between oppressed and oppressor, victim and aggressor. No, your boss probably does not care about your feelings, nor do you care about his. You both have a job to do, each exchanging your time and talent for a paycheck and benefits. That’s it. Let’s not make this any more complicated than it has ever been. This need to reduce every single human to a quivering pile of feelings and emotions – while trivializing genuine mental health concerns – is not good for society.
Gordon Arta
1 month ago
I do hope that, if Dr Frawley is to become a regular, she is encouraged to get out more. There are already worrying signs that she is disappearing up her own fundament, always a danger for academic sociologists.
I’ve been writing for UnHerd for four years. Please do tell me the signs though? I’m fascinated.
Albireo Double
1 month ago
Yes kids, you have a choice in life. Here it is.
Work hard, take risks, self-determine, make something of yourself, maybe buy a house and raise a family. Be someone.
Or, feel, emote, blubber, wimp out, opt out, and put yourself at the mercy of dead-eyed politicians for the rest of your life. Do as you’re told. Be a nobody.
Your choice, but get on with it please, because that’s the game we’re all playing, and you’re no different.
John Riordan
1 month ago
It all sounds very Orwellian but where is this actually happening? I’m an IT contractor so I see the inside of two or three different companies per year (although mostly virtually, ever since the pandemic), but never once have I seen any forcible emphasis on mental health in the workplace. To me, the workplace looks much like it ever did – people just getting on with the work at hand.
Definitely does happen. I now have weekly check-ins with my manager – a man ten years younger than I am – and it’s excruciating for both of us. What are you supposed to say?
Whatever “bureaucratic iron cage” the writer thinks we’re being sold, i’m willing to wager a majority of the population either aren’t buying or are paying no more than lip service to it.
The tendency to focus on emotional states by the younger generations is perhaps natural, as they begin to experience the adult world for the first time and have to acquire the means by which to negotiate it. I’d maintain it’s impossible to remain in that state for long; the constant drip-drip-drip of emoting promoted by the MSM and workplace bureaucrats just becomes too exhausting. Not all, but the majority of adults will eventually turn away from a surfeit of emoting as a natural human instinct.
I agree and I find it encouraging that most people do eventually see through the bullshit.
Yes, but I wish they would do it quietly…..
Bureaucratic systems don’t require the participants belief in them to function, that’s one of their most pernicious characteristics. In any large organisation you will struggle to find anyone who wholeheartedly endorses the bureaucracy, and yet they all tick the boxes, fill out the spreadsheets and maintain the lie. It’s also worth noting that “rational management” includes the use of incentives and disincentives and is bound up with disciplinary systems that can have real effects on people. Much of the way bureaucracy seeps into our lives and forms of thought conforms to Marx’s summary of ideology: they don’t know it, but they still do it.
Yes, good points. Employees of the NHS, education sector and civil service in the UK will find that a familiar background to their working lives.
The recent increased willingness to talk about mental health may be healthy but I think we need a whole new set of words to enable greater clarity. There is a difference between a bad hair day and full blown schizophrenia complete with hallucinations. Eskimos apparently need thirty words to describe different types of snow. If we are going to talk so much about our mental health, perhaps we need a similarly enlarged vocabulary to enable individuals to be more specific.
While much of the current enthusiasm for mental health is perhaps just yet another self serving attempt to create nice middle class roles comparable to those in regulatory and compliance functions – seemingly essential if adding little value – there is a nugget of usefulness. I just wish it was taught in a positive way as “resilience training” rather than medicalising it. I used to work in highly stressful environment and it would have been useful to have been taught a few tricks on how to manage stress beforehand instead of learning by trial and error.
Expecting anyone other than your family and close friends to have anything more than a passing regard for your feelings is completely ridiculous. This is especially true in the workplace. Keep them to yourself and do your job. If your job is making you sad find another that doesn’t. Your employer owes you your agreed rate of pay, you owe them the labour you agreed to provide when you voluntarily agreed to work for them. That’s it. If you stop thinking about how you feel and concentrate on what you should be doing you’ll likely find you get happier too. It’s a fact about the mind you can only pay attention to one thing at a time.
Spot on. When I started work in 1971 the ‘deal’ was that the business was loyal to you (implied job for life) if you were loyal to the business (implied working as required).
That no longer applies – and I told my young adult sons that the rules had changed. If your name, in a cell on a spreadsheet, happened to be in a section that was going to be made redundant or have the conditions of work changed, then you were out of luck. Your loyalty counted for nothing.
So the Wellness Team, or HR, ‘caring for your feelings’ is just a nominal spreadsheet function applied by the business to maintain its profitability. Nothing personal.
This was even more the case in Japan – but once that implicit contract was broken employee behaviour also changed. Trust was gone.
That link was broken when technological progress made entire skillsets redundant over periods shorter than a career. It is not because of any deliberate betrayal of the social contract by corporations, if that’s what you’re implying.
And this is accelerating – I’m an IT contractor and even the skills I learned only 5 years ago are becoming obsolete, so fast does the technology develop.
Spot on: and unfortunately all too familiar. If HR were at least honest about their actual motivations, I’d be less inclined to consider them the spawn of Shaitan. But here we are.
I’m afraid I see the idea of a job for life as still expecting to have your needs put first. If someone is expecting a guaranteed job for life with the same employer they better get good at something and be self employed.
The more an organization bangs on about mental heath, wellbeing etc. the more cynical, uncaring and ruthless the company is.
Also, the more the company bangs on about mental health, the more employees it will have who claim mental health issues. You always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate.
“You always get more of what you allow, encourage, subsidize, or tolerate.”
E.g., transgenders.
I have pretty good health insurance so I visit my mental hygienist every six months; I only have to shell out a $15 copay. They put that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doohickey on my head and 45 minutes later I wake up in the recovery room and the friendly staff give me 8 ounces of apple juice and an oatmeal raisin cookie. I prefer my appointments be mid-morning so I can get back to work right around lunchtime.
Fetch water, chop wood.
I suspect much of the origin of this declaration of interest in employees well being springs from the same promotion of LGBT+ rights, equality etc, namely virtue signalling. A company with a tick box of compliance, attains the same dubious corporate kudos as when it initiates and advertises it’s commitment to the latest Stonewall or Mermaids delusions.
many on the Left have received the sudden and unprecedented attention to mental health over the past decade as a triumph.
Of course, they have. The entirety of the modern left’s MO consists of a binary between oppressed and oppressor, victim and aggressor. No, your boss probably does not care about your feelings, nor do you care about his. You both have a job to do, each exchanging your time and talent for a paycheck and benefits. That’s it. Let’s not make this any more complicated than it has ever been. This need to reduce every single human to a quivering pile of feelings and emotions – while trivializing genuine mental health concerns – is not good for society.
I do hope that, if Dr Frawley is to become a regular, she is encouraged to get out more. There are already worrying signs that she is disappearing up her own fundament, always a danger for academic sociologists.
I’ve been writing for UnHerd for four years. Please do tell me the signs though? I’m fascinated.
Yes kids, you have a choice in life. Here it is.
Work hard, take risks, self-determine, make something of yourself, maybe buy a house and raise a family. Be someone.
Or, feel, emote, blubber, wimp out, opt out, and put yourself at the mercy of dead-eyed politicians for the rest of your life. Do as you’re told. Be a nobody.
Your choice, but get on with it please, because that’s the game we’re all playing, and you’re no different.
It all sounds very Orwellian but where is this actually happening? I’m an IT contractor so I see the inside of two or three different companies per year (although mostly virtually, ever since the pandemic), but never once have I seen any forcible emphasis on mental health in the workplace. To me, the workplace looks much like it ever did – people just getting on with the work at hand.
Definitely does happen. I now have weekly check-ins with my manager – a man ten years younger than I am – and it’s excruciating for both of us. What are you supposed to say?