Pushing the cursor across the screen feels like dragging a rusted sledgehammer through thick, wet cement at 11:03 PM. I am currently staring at a PDF titled ‘Optimal Resilience for the Modern Professional,’ which was sent out to all 3,153 employees by an HR department that seems to believe stress is a personal failing rather than a systemic byproduct. As a safety compliance auditor, my entire existence is predicated on identifying the root cause of a failure. If a pressure valve on a steam pipe bursts, I don’t suggest the pipe try a guided visualization of a mountain stream; I check the pressure settings and the structural integrity of the metal. Yet, here I am, being told that my 63 percent increase in cortisol levels is something I can simply ‘breathe’ away during a mandatory 13-minute webinar scheduled during my only free slot of the day.

We are being gaslit into believing that our exhaustion is a lack of ‘mental toughness.’ If we just downloaded the right app, if we just sat in the ‘Zen Zone’ beanbag chair for 23 minutes a week, then the crushing weight of a workload designed for three people wouldn’t feel so heavy. It shifts the burden of structural mismanagement onto the shoulders of the individual. They offer us a $103 stipend for a gym membership we don’t have time to use, and then they wonder why the attrition rate is climbing toward 43 percent. It’s a classic redirection tactic. By privatizing the solution to burnout, the organization absolves itself of the responsibility to create a sustainable environment.

I’ve spent 13 years looking at how systems fail. In every single audit I’ve conducted, from small manufacturing plants to massive logistical hubs, the failure is never the fault of a single component trying its best. It is always the system. When you push a machine at 123 percent capacity for 233 consecutive days, it breaks. This is an objective law of physics. Yet, in the boardroom, we treat human beings as if they are exempt from the laws of thermodynamics. We think we can just add a ‘wellness’ layer to the software of the soul and expect the hardware to keep humming. It’s a lie. A beautiful, lavender-scented, high-resolution lie.

I find myself clicking through the ‘Resilience Training’ slides-all 43 of them-wondering if anyone actually believes this. The graphics are clean, featuring people in soft-knit sweaters holding steaming mugs of tea. Nobody in these slides looks like they just spent 83 minutes arguing about a compliance oversight in a warehouse that smells like burnt rubber and despair.

The Digital Tether and Isolation

We are told to ‘unplug’ by the same people who have set our KPIs to a level that requires constant connectivity. I remember a time, maybe 13 years ago, when the end of the day was an actual ending. Now, it’s just a transition from a large screen to a smaller screen. My brain feels like it has too many tabs open, and several of them are playing music I can’t find the source of. That’s the problem with this culture-it blurs the lines until you can’t tell where your life ends and your ‘resource’ status begins.

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We are human resources, and the company is very interested in the ‘resource’ part but finds the ‘human’ part incredibly inconvenient.

I’ve started to view these wellness programs as a form of habitat management. It’s not about making us happy; it’s about making us more durable within a toxic environment. We treat these office spaces like sanitized habitats, much like how a Zoo Guide describes the careful curation of an artificial ecosystem, except the animals in the zoo get better regulated sleep cycles than we do.

Last week, they installed a ‘Gratitude Wall’ in the breakroom. I spent 3 minutes watching a colleague pin a note that said ‘I’m grateful for coffee,’ while her hand was visibly shaking from caffeine-induced tremors and 43 hours of sleep deprivation. I wanted to tell her that it’s okay to be ungrateful. It’s okay to be angry that your ‘wellness’ consists of a beanbag and a pat on the head while your salary hasn’t kept pace with inflation for 13 years.

The mental gymnastics required to participate in these programs is exhausting in itself. You have to pretend that the reason you’re stressed is because you haven’t mastered ‘deep belly breathing,’ rather than the fact that you have 63 outstanding tickets and a manager who communicates exclusively in passive-aggressive riddles. It’s a strategy of distraction. If they can get you to focus on your internal state, you won’t look at the external causes.

I’ve started making my own ‘safety reports’ on these wellness initiatives. My latest finding suggests that mandatory fun is the leading cause of morale-based incidents. When you force 83 introverted engineers to do a ‘team-building’ drum circle on a Tuesday afternoon, you aren’t building a team; you’re building a resentment that will last for 23 years. We don’t want drums. We want manageable workloads.

Management sees that 73 percent of employees have ‘engaged’ with the wellness app, and they mark it as a victory. They don’t see that most of us just open the app, let it run in the background while we work on spreadsheets, and then close it just to get the ‘participation credit.’ We are hacking the wellness system just to survive the actual system.

I think back to that waving incident from this afternoon. The courier, the guard, and me. We were all in the same space, but we were in completely different worlds. That is the corporate experience in a nutshell. We are all ‘collaborating,’ but we are actually just ships passing in a very noisy, very expensive night. If the company really cared about my wellness, they wouldn’t give me a subscription to a sleep-tracking app. They would give me the time to actually sleep. They would look at the 143 unread messages in my inbox and realize that no amount of ‘forest bathing’ imagery is going to fix the fact that I am drowning in data.

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I am Fatima T.-M., and I am tired of being told that my exhaustion is my own fault. I am tired of the ‘resilience’ narrative that asks us to be infinitely flexible while the company remains rigidly obsessed with impossible growth.

As I close my laptop-it is now 11:43 PM-I am not going to do a three-minute breathing exercise. I am going to stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that tomorrow, at 9:03 AM, there will be another email about ‘Wellness Wednesday.’ I will probably read it while eating a sad, cold salad at my desk, feeling the pressure in my chest and wondering if I’m the only one who sees the cracks in the foundation.