The Workplace Crisis

It’s the very nature of modern workplace environments that McMindfulness targets, and this is perhaps its most compelling criticism — the fact that the movement claims a transformative quality without any hard evidence that workplaces have actually improved at all. A truly mindful lifestyle is almost completely at odds with most modern workplaces, and no amount of meditation, no matter how helpful to the individual, can solve larger cultural workplace issues.

If anything, the modern workplace culture is in crisis mode. A 2016 Gallup poll found that American workers are “unengaged and looking elsewhere,” and a recent Harvard Business Review article confirmed that 61 percent of Americans feel they have to cover in some way when at work. Our workplaces don’t reflect our authentic selves, and research points to the ineffectiveness of outdated practices like the forty-hour workweek (most Americans work forty-seven, actually). Long hours backfire, and managers can’t tell the difference between overworking and underworking employees anyway; some people (men especially) lie about how many hours they work in order to seem impressive. Dissatisfaction with workplace lifestyle has paved the way for a whole host of neo-gurus like Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) to capitalize on the discontentment by teaching new, faster, and more autonomous ways to earn income.

Our culture of overwork is killing us, maybe not through seizures, but through stress-related health conditions and a loss of life quality.

Is it really so surprising when articles like this scathing exposé on Amazon’s workplace culture bubble to the top of our news feeds? Or when we hear about the death of a twenty-one-year-old Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern who was killed by an epileptic seizure after a seventy-two-hour working streak? (New policies were adopted shortly thereafter to cap intern workdays at seventeen hours; feel free to take a moment to meditate on how ludicrous that is.) News bulletins like this should frighten us to pieces, because our culture of overwork is killing us, maybe not through seizures, but through stress-related health conditions and a loss of life quality.

Work/life balance has become a substanceless concept, and many argue that work should be our life, and so a delineation isn’t necessary. “If you love your job, then it’s not really work,” they counter, a rhetoric that only encourages the competition-based work culture that is mentally ruining us. Many of us have no choice but to engage in toxic workplaces, particularly if we have families or other dependents. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to walk away. If we won’t succumb to a work culture that we feel isn’t conducive to mindfulness, you can bet that someone else will. The only choice is to compete — you don’t want the distinguishing factor to be the working hours the other person put in.

Even a workplace as reputedly forward-thinking as Google does not fall outside the lines of hypercompetition and stress. “What balance?” scoffs one Glassdoor review. “All those perks and benefits are an illusion. They keep you at work and they help you to be more productive.” In an exposé on Google’s work/life culture, former senior account manager Joe Cannella dishes: “… you end up spending the majority of your life eating Google food, with Google coworkers, wearing Google gear … you eventually start to lose sight of what it’s like to be independent of the big G … You are given everything you could ever want, but it costs you the only things that actually matter in the end.”

Google is particularly ripe for scrutiny because it has been so actively engaged in the Mindfulness movement, going so far as to invite Thich Nhat Hanh (also known as Thay) — the celebrated Vietnamese monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — to lead a half-day workshop: “Mindfulness as a Foundation for Health.” But even a visit from a revered Buddhist monk does not immunize Google to misguided mindsets. Scroll down in the video description and you’ll read:

“Life at Google is fast, furious and fun, yet it can take a toll on ourselves and our loved ones. Through Thay’s specially crafted workshop, you’ll learn how to reduce stress, eat for health, sleep better, find emotional stability, improve concentration and sustain optimal performance.”

Google has unwittingly admitted to the same toxic philosophy that McMindfulness accuses: Your work/life balance is your responsibility. Your stress is your choice. If you are struggling, it’s you who needs to make adjustments. All you need is a little mindfulness.

Of course, if you do encounter Mindfulness in your workplace, you can simply not engage. After all, mindfulness trainings are optional. And if you’re presented with a mindfulness seminar that isn’t optional, well, you don’t need a meditation practice to realize it’s time to pack up your desk.

Let Us Close with the Sound of Om

“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”

— Joseph de Maistre

The sound of om (sounds how it’s spelled) is a sacred sound in Hinduism and a mantra in Buddhism. It refers both to one’s soul, and everything else (Wikipedia: “ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, knowledge”). It’s in the context of om’s inward/outward connectivity that one can begin to make sense of the Mindfulness debacle.

In the same way that workplaces won’t change without pressure from employees, workplaces won’t change without a culture that allows employers to make that shift. We live in a competitive, capitalist society, so why would employers encourage mindful lifestyles if doing so scrapes away at their bottom line? The problem is interconnected by one common molecule.

Organizations and governments are simply conceits; people are people. When employees complain about toxic workplaces, they aren’t referring to some nameless entity — they’re referring to other people, people who happen to be in leadership positions. In this way, responsibility for encouraging a more mindful existence does rest on the individual — all individuals, employee or CEO, congressperson or senator, whether they practice mindfulness or not. In Buddhism, no one arrives at liberation over anyone else’s back.

The challenge of mindfulness means pressing for a mindful quality of existence in every aspect of life — it could be that mindfulness is simply a synonym for social reform. Actually, the movement for a more mindful existence has already started, though it doesn’t don that moniker. In the case of overwork, multiple nations are reforming their workplace policies. (West) Germany cut the average working year from 2,163 days per year in 1960 to 1,363 days today; in 1993 it instituted a mandatory twenty days of vacation for employees who work a five-day workweek, and German employers commonly grant two weeks of vacation beyond that. Working remotely and flexible work hours are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. And no number of life hacks — mindfulness techniques or otherwise — can quell the unrest among millennials, who are the first generation to emphasize work/life balance over career progression. The overwork has to stop, and pressure for that change is happening both at the individual level and as a result of the neural network to which all of us are connected. These changes are occurring because of action, whether or not one claims that mindfulness is behind it.

But Grazier isn’t “… optimistic about the capacity for [mindfulness] to effect the change. I’m not a historian, but I can’t think of many times where that’s happened” — a sentiment that could be readily applied to a laundry list of practices, spiritual and secular, that claim the ability to alter human existence. If history has taught us anything, it’s that there is no Big Answer — there is only action and progress, and the prerequisite discomfort, strife, and relentlessness to see it through. Only the individual can decide whether a mindfulness practice will encourage these aims. In Mark Watts’s opinion, “The wheels of justice grind slow, but fine. And I think that these forces [internal change] will have, and do have a dynamic effect. It’s just that they’re far more subtle and less aggressive than the things that we’re faced with.”

A final lesson from Alan Watts, here. During the era of his teaching, nuclear holocaust seemed imminent, and yet the way Watts engaged Margaret Mead — who was vehemently advocating restraint and nonproliferation — is striking. Says Mark Watts: “He said, ‘You scare me. You sound like the kind of person who is worked up about this. And you might push the button first, to keep somebody else from pushing it.’ And of course, she was furious with him. But he maintained his position, which was, ‘Look at your state of mind.’ He didn’t get involved in these controversies, and all the vitriol around the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, because he saw that that state of mind was a problem.” Watts saw polarization as the bigger problem; in some ways, he did not engage. “When he saw people yelling, and screaming, and shouting down, and protesting, it just seemed to him wrong,” explains Mark Watts.

When asked how, then, his father chose to advocate for change in the world, he simply replied: “By doing it.”

The solution for suffering might not be a new technique or practice, but the quality of mind with which we approach conflict in the first place. That could be mindfulness’s ultimate role. It might better tune us in to reality, or it might be the gateway to a spiritual quest. But it will never fix modern suffering simply because we meditate before we check our emails, or fit in a quick meditation through our smartphones.