To Be or Not to Be Human at Work

In yesterday’s article entitled “The (Semi)Dystopian Answer to the Work/Life Balance Question” I spoke about the far-too-chilling Severance series currently featured on AppleTV.?

In this video, I go deeper into dissecting why the series is so telling -and implicitly terrifying- for most of us. One of the story's twists is that the double entendre behind the concept of "break room" that I mention in this video hasn't occurred to me but to my super perceptive and hyper-empathic 11-year-old Dara who pointed it out the other night!

https://youtu.be/-pekR_fiCbI?

The very fact that we all recognise the premise of this is shocking. That we relate. That we intrinsically fear it.

Think about the monstrosity of the fact that no one reading the premise goes “Wait, so why would they want to remove their personal-life self? Don’t people need that at work to be a whole human?”. No one. They don’t, because it makes sense. The “Work needs robots, not humans” corollary.?Sadly. Deplorably.

We have come to expect that. We all feel it. That our humanity was never welcomed at work. Cast your mind back to most places that fancy themselves “serious” and “professional” where at least before the pandemic forced us into this much more human place, even smiling or cracking jokes could easily harm someone’s reputation in the company. Or where people had worked together for years without knowing anything about each others personal lives and while never mentioning it.

As far back as 4 years ago, I was putting it to us all that it is irresponsible not to “Stop Doing the Robot at Work” and saying that we have to go the other way and cultivate and encourage “the feels” but little has changed. ?

This isn’t about turning work into a chummy goss sesh (although those are so sorely needed at times too!) or about “wasting company time” but about the fact that we force humans who have big life events, worries, joys, news, niggles, news and generally lives outside of this common work activity we undertake together to pretend that entire dimension of themselves doesn’t exist. Or else risk losing face by chatting about these topics as if they were frivolous or unimportant when they are nothing if not the opposite.?

Cast a critical view on the fact that by preventing or at least discouraging us from being “too personal” work is thusly placing itself at the forefront and declaring itself to be more important than the very motivation that led us to enter the contract of providing it anyhow - our private lives.?It’s utterly outrageous and we are only going along with it in virtue of unexamined inertia.

We are therefore all too comfortable with how much closer we are to a terrifying dystopian future of slavery than we are to the utopia of happy and engaged employees that like Jeff Bezos shun the delimitation of private life versus work life and simply live. Doing so in ways that are unapologetically full of personal bits should be urgently normalised not further shunned.?

Thankfully, the pandemic’s effects of closeness and humanity shining through most interactions, means that we are a smidge further than we were from this “human-nature-denier” future and away from “doing the robot” and everywhere, people feel a lot more entitled to show they are real people and speak about their lives, share with colleagues, lean on them or gain their empathy to feel seen and understood and enable real collaboration but it's not a given and not everyone has the luxury with many of us still stuck into horrendous patterns in their own work lives that thrive on the climate of fear, silence and humanity-denying.

This topic of being or not being human at work and the implied effects on our performance, is obviously a lot more complex than this discussion on Severance allows, but I hope it makes you think and it makes you wonder how come we are ever so comfortable with the outrageous position that sees us “feel” Severance’s premise in our bones aka the mass of HumanDebt that normalised the borderline abusive demand of separation between the “personal-life you” and “professional-life you” in lieu of just seeking the real, complete, complex and intensely human “you”.

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