At the start of the Corona lockdown and remote work sessions, I said to my boss that while it is easy for us to go remote, our team is likely to suffer in ways that some other departments may not. My reasoning was that while we are technical trainers, we are also mostly people people and losing direct interaction with each other and our clients would take away a part of our work that is valued by us as individuals and is probably necessary to feel connected to what we do.
Based on a well-being survey that went out about 6 weeks ago, our department was selected as one of the pilot groups for a mental health service the company is testing to see if it is suitable for all employees. So, I am guessing that my concerns back in March weren't unfounded.
Personally and generally, I am not a fan of therapy as I find that people come to both rely on it and then also start to lower their resilience overtime. In some way, it feels like therapy enables people to become softer. I am not saying that it is never needed, but I also think that it is over sued in our society, kind of like opioids in the US.
In my own experience working across companies and my relationships with friends, the people who cater the most for their stress and see it as a negative, become increasingly unreliable in the workplace. They will often change jobs that cause them stress to something that offers less responsibility, but do very little to actually change themselves and their own capabilities to face the world. I think that often, there is a disconnect in what people see as the cause of stress - where they mistake the trigger for the bullet.
I think though, that similarly to the opioid abuse epidemic in the US, a lot of the increases in stress are caused by social dysfunction of some kind, where many people are no longer experiencing relationships where they feel the intimacy and support of a loving partner. This isn't just love relationships either, it is also the extension of friends and family, where in the past there was a lot of social depth of interaction, it has largely been pushed out to shallow transactions on social media and applications. And even the real life meetings center around what people have consumed digitally.
Talking with my wife last night, I was saying that the only reason I work is for the relationships it supports, I do not get much value from it personally. Yes, there is the money aspect, but what I mean is that I do not identify myself through my job other than for practical purposes. My sense of self comes through my personal relationships, as it is through these that I get a reflection of who I actually am as a human - a social being that is part of a past, current and future network of other humans. If that network didn't exist or I had no social ties of any kind, what is the point of having a job? It becomes meaningless.
I think without that social network, most of what we do in this world becomes meaningless very fast, meaning that there is no point to do it. With the way society is moving toward a breaking a down of social connections to be replaced by digital surrogates, I think that we are continually degrading the relevance of what we do and who we are, as we are no longer reflected be each other, we are projected upon by an algorithm. Whether people acknowledge this in themselves or not is beside the point, as we are all affected because like it or not, we are part of the network of humans and we are therefore, all bound together in some way to the outcomes of the group.
But, once we are pushed into cellular living, we start to act independently, but without the feedback from the social network that would align our goals and build trends born from the group. The strength of a decentralized network is in the ability for many to act independently, but there has to be a high level of transparency and feedback in order to inform the decisions and behaviors. Without that feedback, it becomes a weakness.
But, with the technology we have available to target engineered feedback with granular position, we can feel that we are acting according to the trends of the group, but rather than being born from the group itself, the trends are actually a dictation from some kind of centralized authority. I think that this is where it has been heading for a couple decades and, I think that we are seeing the weakness created in the system from the process. Rather than a strengthening of society, we have seen a weakening and fracturing along every conceivable line.
As this disconnection drives us into the sense of meaninglessness, we start to search for meaning and that sense of self that used to come through the reflection in our relationships. So, we join "social" movements which are actually another branch of the engineering department designed to fragment society in order to drive profits.
I think that we should be concerned at how "easy" it was for the world to lockdown, socially distance and for us to go remote, as it indicates that we have lost touch with the importance of the network of humans that have for millennia, advanced us through the building of relationships. But, most of us will adamantly take the stance that we do not need anyone, as we take medications to combat depression and disconnection; and take to the streets in protest to prove to a world designed not to listen, that we matter - all while neglecting the relationships that actually matter.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]