Team Severance: The True Price of Downsizing

 

“In most organizations, severance is calculated by a formula. But human pain isn’t math. And neither is the damage left behind.”

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💥 Introduction: What We’re Really Paying For

When companies downsize, the costs seem straightforward: a severance package, a press release, and a meeting to reassure the rest of the team. But this is an illusion—a corporate sleight of hand that ignores the invisible but real costs of human pain, identity disruption, emotional shockwaves, and institutional trust decay.

Layoffs don’t just affect the person who’s escorted out. They affect everyone who stays. And they leave psychological and social debris that can linger for years, eroding morale, creativity, and brand trust from the inside out.

What if we stopped pretending this damage was intangible?

What if we calculated it?

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⚖️ Severance for the Soul: Rethinking What’s Owed

Let’s begin with the person who’s let go—especially a long-term employee. Take the example of someone with 23 years of service. Traditional severance formulas might give this person 2–4 weeks per year of service. In Canada, this often means 6–12 months of pay, depending on province, contract terms, and age.

But that’s only financial. What about psychological?

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📊 Table 1: The Hidden Emotional Costs of Being Laid Off

Category of Harm	Description	Estimated Pain & Suffering ($)
Loss of identity	For many, work is core to self-worth	$15,000
Shame / social stigma	Especially for men over 45, or long-timers	$10,000
Disruption of family stability	Anxiety, lost routines, strained relationships	$12,000
Mental health decline	Depression, anxiety, insomnia, increased medication use	$18,000
Loss of professional community	Loss of daily connections, mentorship roles, status	$9,000
Economic insecurity	Threat to housing, long-term savings, retirement dreams	$20,000
Gag orders / forced silence	Inability to speak openly about what happened	$6,000
Legal confusion / stress	NDAs, severance negotiations, fear of blacklisting	$5,000
Missed opportunities	Stalled career arc, identity misalignment in future work	$10,000
Subtotal – Psychological Severance		$105,000

💡 And that’s in addition to financial severance.

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👥 But What About the Survivors?

Downsizing affects everyone who stays. The coworkers, the ones who watched it happen, often silently grieve the loss of a teammate—and brace for the possibility they might be next.

The literature calls this Layoff Survivor Syndrome. Symptoms include:

• Increased anxiety and stress

• Decreased trust in leadership

• Survivor guilt

• Loss of psychological safety

• Reduced productivity and morale

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📊 Table 2: Estimated Emotional Severance for Surviving Team Members

Category of Harm	Description	Estimated Per Employee ($)
Shock and trust erosion	Especially if the layoff was unexpected or sudden	$6,000
Guilt and helplessness	“I got to stay, but they didn’t”	$4,000
Future dread	"Am I next?" loops, constant rumination	$6,000
Team disruption	Loss of routines, broken working rhythms	$3,000
Internal censorship / silence	Fear of saying the wrong thing, asking hard questions	$3,000
Grief for a colleague	Especially if it was a respected or well-liked teammate	$3,000
Subtotal – Survivor Severance		$25,000 per person

🔁 Multiply by the number of coworkers directly affected, and the invisible cost multiplies rapidly.

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🔄 A Better Model: The Team Severance Model

Here’s the proposal:

1. Psychological Severance should be calculated and paid out to laid-off employees, not as pity, but as justice.

2. Team Severance Bonuses should be given to each surviving team member, recognizing the emotional and functional toll of a layoff.

3. Legislative Reform could mandate higher costs for layoffs, not to prevent necessary restructuring, but to ensure it’s done ethically—with gravity, not convenience.

4. Companies will still profit, but they will think much harder before optimizing at the expense of their own humanity.

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🧠 “But That’s Too Expensive!”

Yes. It is.

And that’s the point.

Downsizing is an amputation. And amputation should be expensive. It should not be optimized. It should not be a reflex. And it should never be the first option on a spreadsheet.

If we lived in a society that treated human beings with the same reverence we treat trademarks and stock prices, the above numbers wouldn’t feel outrageous.

They’d feel obvious.

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🔚 Final Thoughts: What Justice Would Feel Like

• If you’ve ever been laid off, maybe now you can put a number to the pain. Not because money solves everything—but because money proves that pain was real.

• If you’ve ever survived a layoff, maybe now you know why it haunted you.

• And if you’re in a position of power, maybe now you’ll pause the next time someone whispers “cutbacks.”

You don’t optimize humans.

You invest in them.

You honor them.

You let them go only when there is no other way—and when you do, you pay the real price.

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Written with urgency and care, in memory of all who have been quietly erased by optimization.
And for those of us still here, learning how to feel again.

The Psychological Chemistry of Layoffs

There is no supervillain. No dark boardroom cloaked in shadow. No one twisting a waxed mustache and laughing at the suffering of employees. And yet, suffering is happening. Good people are being quietly discarded. Whole departments vanish with barely a ripple. Long-tenured staff, once respected and relied upon, are suddenly gone — silenced by corporate necessity and, often, by severance agreements that reward silence over truth.

The culprit, it turns out, may not be a person at all. It may be something far harder to detect. Like radiation before we knew what Geiger counters were. Like radium glowing harmlessly in the dark until it slowly destroyed the health of the women who painted it on watches. The danger is subtle, systemic, and plausibly deniable.

The danger is optimization.

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The Hidden Harm of Optimization

On paper, every step of an optimization plan makes sense. A department is restructured. Redundancies are identified. Tasks are redistributed. Fewer people do more work. Efficiency goes up. Profit margins stabilize. The stakeholders applaud. What’s not to like?

But optimization, like any powerful force, has side effects. And when it is applied too broadly, too coldly, and without moral limits, something happens — not just economically, but psychologically. People start to become numbers. And once they’re numbers, they’re easier to move. Easier to delete. Easier to ignore.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s an emergent property. It’s what happens when organizations grow too large, and the language of metrics replaces the language of meaning. Once a person’s value is reduced to a cost-benefit analysis, it becomes mentally efficient — even emotionally necessary — to dehumanize them, just a little. Because how else could you justify amputating someone’s livelihood while calling it a win?

That word — amputation — is not an exaggeration. A layoff is not the quiet reassignment of a task. It is the severing of a living limb. The person who is laid off is not just a bundle of job functions. They are a web of connections: clients they reassured, coworkers they mentored, energy they brought into Zoom calls on hard days. They are part of the body. And when they’re gone, the organism doesn’t just lose productivity. It loses morale. It loses history. It loses safety.

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The Ripple Effects on the Survivors

Here’s what rarely makes it into the reports: everyone who remains after a layoff is also affected. One person gone means their work is redistributed — that’s the first new weight. But worse is the fear. A psychological fog sets in, thick with unspoken questions: Who’s next? Am I safe? What does my loyalty mean here?

Fear does something profound to the brain. It narrows focus. It reduces creativity. It encourages compliance, not innovation. The workplace becomes quieter, less joyful, less generous. People start to conserve their energy. They stop raising concerns. They stop helping one another quite so freely.

This is the secondary dehumanization: not of those who are laid off, but of those who remain.

And it’s here that the threshold is crossed.

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The Phase Change: When Optimization Becomes Something Else

Chemists understand thresholds. Water is water until it reaches 100°C — then it becomes steam. Add a little more heat, and it’s not “more hot water.” It’s something else entirely.

The same is true for workplaces. A few rounds of sensible optimization may be survivable. Even helpful. But past a certain point — one that’s difficult to measure but unmistakable when crossed — the workplace is no longer a place of purpose and people. It becomes a machine. A cost center. A battlefield of passive fear.

And from that point on, mistreatment is no longer just possible — it is inevitable. Not because anyone intends to harm. But because the very systems in place no longer register human costs. Optimization, by design, discounts them.

If someone is laid off and is not allowed to speak about it — if silence is part of the severance — then we’re not just cutting off their paycheck. We’re cutting off their voice. Their ability to process. To warn others. To mourn.

Expression is not optional. It’s not a luxury. It’s not a danger to brand reputation. It’s mental exhaust — necessary to keep the engine from exploding. If we block the pipe just because we don’t like the smell, we are creating a pressure chamber that will rupture somewhere else.

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Redefining the Costs

The legal system has at least some mechanism for recognizing human suffering. Pain and suffering damages, while imperfect, try to place a dollar value on emotional harm.

But in the corporate world? Layoffs are calculated in severance weeks and salary savings — as though what’s being lost is merely a labor unit. There is no budget line for grief. No spreadsheet cell for social trauma. No KPI for the shrinking of the human spirit.

We are underestimating the cost of each “strategic realignment” by orders of magnitude. Not because we’re heartless — but because the system we’ve built is designed not to see the full human picture.

This is not sustainable.

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So... How Much Optimization Is Too Much?

That’s the question this essay leaves hanging.

Not every efficiency drive is evil. Not every layoff is unjustified. But the moment we begin treating people like replaceable circuits in a motherboard, we start slipping down a slope that leads to real harm. Not just to the laid-off, but to the soul of the organization itself.

So what if we asked different questions?

• What safeguards are in place to preserve human dignity during restructuring?
• What conversations are being silenced by non-disclosure agreements?
• How are we accounting for the emotional cost borne by those who remain?
• And finally: at what point does optimization cross a threshold — and become something else entirely?

We may not know the exact temperature yet. But we can feel the steam rising.

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What If ADHD Is a Chronic Pain Disorder?

 

The Story of the Hot Stove

A few months ago, I heard a TED-style speaker say that asking people with ADHD to “try harder” on boring tasks is like asking them to put their hand on a hot stove.

She explained that boring, repetitive tasks, the very kinds that people with ADHD tend to struggle with, may not just be uninteresting to us. Neurologically, they might actually hurt. As in: lighting up the brain’s pain centers, just like touching a hot burner.

At the time, I thought it was a compelling metaphor. It certainly matched my own experience, and the experiences of many people I know who live with ADHD.

But what if it wasn’t just a metaphor?

What if she was exactly right?

What if the core of ADHD isn’t a motivation problem at all — but a problem of chronic, unrelenting, non-physical pain?

 

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The Current Model of ADHD: A Motivation Problem

For decades, the most widely accepted explanation of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been what we might call the Motivation Model — built largely on our understanding of how the brain processes dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward, pleasure, and attention.

In this model, people with ADHD struggle because they have lower levels of dopamine or altered dopamine receptor function, especially in areas of the brain tied to motivation, executive function, and self-regulation. Tasks that provide immediate stimulation or feedback may engage the ADHD brain effectively, while tasks that are repetitive, routine, or abstract often fail to activate the reward system enough to spark action.

From this perspective, ADHD behaviors — like procrastination, disorganization, forgetfulness, poor follow-through, emotional outbursts, and impulsive decisions — are explained as failures of motivation. The system simply doesn’t find certain tasks interesting or urgent enough to trigger engagement. Hence the long list of suggested workarounds: novelty, gamification, accountability buddies, alarm systems, “body doubling,” and of course, stimulant medications designed to increase dopamine activity.

This model has helped many people understand part of their experience with ADHD. But for others — especially adults with ADHD who have lived through repeated failures, broken relationships, and crushing shame — it doesn’t tell the whole story. And more importantly, it doesn’t explain the emotional cost of those failures.

It describes the engine. But it doesn’t explain the pain.

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The Hot Stove Question

So what if that old metaphor, about how boring tasks feel like putting your hand on a hot stove, isn’t just an exaggeration?

What if it’s neurologically true?

There’s precedent for this line of thinking. In his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, psychologist and researcher Matthew Lieberman shares fMRI research showing that the brain processes social rejection using the same neural circuits as physical pain, especially the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The pain of being excluded from a group, insulted, or criticized isn’t just a metaphor. The brain treats it like a wound.

One study even found that taking Tylenol, a physical pain reliever, could reduce the emotional sting of rejection by dampening activity in those same brain regions.

This suggests a larger principle:

Not all pain is physical, but the brain may still experience it as if it were.

So let’s ask the question.

What if people with ADHD aren’t just bored or lazy when they avoid certain tasks?

What if they are experiencing non-physical but very real pain — triggered by environments and expectations that flood the brain with distress signals?

What if ADHD isn’t primarily about motivation deficits…
but about chronic, invisible pain?

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Let’s Play “What If?”

We don’t yet have brain scan data comparing how people with ADHD and people without ADHD process repetitive, boring, or socially pressured tasks. But we could.

Future studies might explore:

• Whether people with ADHD show increased activation in pain-related brain areas (like the ACC and insula) during exposure to routine tasks
• Whether these responses mirror social rejection or physical discomfort
• Whether pain relievers — physical or emotional — impact the ability to engage with certain types of work

Until that research is conducted, this essay invites a thought experiment.

Let’s play “What if?”
Let’s consider what might happen if we view ADHD through the lens of pain, instead of motivation failure.

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The Pain Model of ADHD

In the Pain Model, the symptoms of ADHD are not rooted in a lack of motivation or effort. Instead, they arise from a sensitivity to environments and demands that cause persistent, non-physical pain.

For a person with ADHD, this pain may be triggered by:

• Boredom (which feels like suffocation)
• Overcontrol (which feels like entrapment)
• Routine and repetition (which feel like sensory or cognitive distress)
• Social disapproval (which activates the rejection system)
• Internalized shame from repeated failure

The result is a system caught between two pain sources:

1. The pain of doing the task
2. The pain of disappointing others

And this loop becomes unbearable.

It erodes relationships, self-confidence, and quality of life.
People with ADHD often try very hard to comply with expectations, only to fail again and again — not because they don’t care, but because the mental cost becomes intolerable.

Attempts to help (“Let’s get you a new planner!”) may backfire, as the person with ADHD agrees in good faith — only to hit the same wall again. They begin to lose the trust of others… and of themselves.

This is not a failure of character. It is a neurological trap.

Let’s look at how the Pain Model compares with the Motivation Model in terms of explanatory power.

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Table 1: Core Symptoms of ADHD

Symptom	Motivation Model	Explanatory Strength	Pain Model	Explanatory Strength
Procrastination	Task not rewarding enough to initiate	Medium	Avoidance of cognitive/emotional pain	Strong
Emotional outbursts	Impulse control failure due to low dopamine	Medium	Overload from unresolved internal pain and stress	Strong
Time blindness	Failure to sustain attention on time-based cues	Medium	Dissociation from pain; shutdown of time awareness	Strong
Inconsistent performance	Fluctuating motivation levels	Weak	Pain threshold varies; some days are more tolerable than others	Strong
Forgetfulness	Attention drift due to under-stimulation	Medium	Pain hijacks working memory bandwidth	Strong
Avoidance of boring tasks	Not enough dopamine to engage	Medium	Task activates pain system, triggering fight/flight	Strong
Burnout and fatigue	Failure to manage time or energy	Weak	Cumulative toll of constant distress	Strong
Rejection sensitivity	Rarely addressed	Weak	Social pain circuits highly active, similar to physical pain (Lieberman)	Strong
Masking/overcompensation	Not addressed	Weak	High cost of hiding pain responses; effort to appear functional	Strong

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Table 2: Quirky or Confusing Traits

Trait	Motivation Model	Explanatory Strength	Pain Model	Explanatory Strength
Hyperfocus on special interests	Dopamine surge from novelty	Strong	Pain temporarily suppressed by immersion and meaning	Strong
Interrupting / blurting	Poor impulse control	Medium	Internal tension seeking release from holding thoughts/pain	Strong
Cleaning at 2am	Urgency finally activates motivation	Medium	Pain threshold lowers; task becomes momentarily bearable	Strong
Saying yes then ghosting	Over-enthusiastic dopamine surge	Medium	Pain avoided during commitment; resurfaces when action is due	Strong
Emotional crashes after socializing	Not well explained	Weak	Pain from masking, effort, and sensory overload	Strong
Struggling to ask for help	Not well explained	Weak	Shame and fear of being misunderstood or judged	Strong

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The Unexpected Twist: Strengths of ADHD

Even people who live with severe ADHD often show remarkable strengths — creativity, empathy, improvisation, insight, humor, pattern recognition, and deep emotional intelligence.

Let’s see how each model accounts for those gifts.

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Table 3: Strengths of ADHD

Strength	Motivation Model	Explanatory Strength	Pain Model	Explanatory Strength
Creativity	Seeks novelty and stimulation	Medium	Necessity of finding alternative paths around pain and pressure	Strong
Empathy	Not explained	Weak	Lived experience of invisible distress heightens attunement to others	Strong
Humor under stress	Not explained	Weak	Humor as a coping strategy to reframe or release pain	Strong
Improvisation	Fast dopamine responses	Medium	Habitual rapid-response adaptations to avoid pain	Strong
Sensitivity to injustice	Not explained	Weak	Pain system highly attuned to subtle threats or unfairness	Strong
Pattern recognition	Engagement with novelty	Medium	Constant scanning for meaning and relief from discomfort	Strong

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So… What If?

What if ADHD isn’t primarily a disorder of low motivation?

What if it’s a condition in which people are constantly navigating a world that overstimulates their pain systems — even when there’s no visible injury?

What if the pain of control, boredom, rejection, and shame explains not only the failures associated with ADHD…
but the complex behaviors, the quirks, and even the gifts?

If this is true, then we’re not just talking about a new metaphor.
We’re talking about a different frame — one that may explain more of the picture and offer better questions for future research.

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Closing: A Question Worth Studying

We’re not claiming certainty.
This essay is not a diagnosis or a prescription.
It’s an invitation.

An invitation to look again.

If the Motivation Model explains about 35% of the ADHD experience —
and the Pain Model explains over 90% —
then perhaps the time has come to ask:

What if the core of ADHD is not a failure to be motivated —
but a constant, invisible struggle to avoid pain?

Let’s study it.

Let’s talk about it.

Let’s see what we learn.

 

 

A Final Note: To Anyone Struggling With ADHD

If you’ve lived most of your life believing you were lazy, undisciplined, unreliable, or broken — this theory might feel like oxygen.

What if you’re not lazy at all?

What if the things you’ve been calling “boring” aren’t just uninteresting — but neurologically painful?

What if every time you’ve sat down to do a task that others handle with ease — filling out forms, organizing a desk, answering an email, folding laundry — you’ve been bracing yourself for a kind of pain that others don’t feel?

And what if your “procrastination” isn’t a moral failure or a bad habit…

But a completely reasonable act of self-preservation?

Because avoiding pain — even invisible pain — is what any nervous system is designed to do. You weren’t wrong to avoid it. You weren’t making excuses. You were trying to survive.

Maybe this theory doesn’t remove the struggle.
But if it’s even partly true, then you have every right to stop blaming yourself.

And you are not alone.

Many people with ADHD have been walking through life like this — enduring invisible heat, quietly believing they are weak, while actually being incredibly strong.

If this model turns out to be true, even partially, it could change the kinds of questions we ask… and the kinds of support we offer.

But long before the studies are done, you can begin right now with one idea:

Maybe you’ve been in pain — not failure — this whole time.

And maybe, just maybe, that means you deserve relief… not judgment.

That’s what this theory could mean.

Hope doesn’t always come from a solution. Sometimes it starts with a more accurate story.

And if this new story feels true to you — keep going. Keep learning. Keep asking questions.

And please, whatever happens next: be kind to yourself.

Psychological Safety Is the Best Productivity Hack

If you believe that we need great new ideas to solve the major problems in our society and grow as a species and as individuals, then I propose that feeling Psychologically Safe at work, and having trust in our Public Systems and Institutions, is vital.  We may be able to survive without safety and trust, but we will never thrive without them.

Why is trust important?  Especially public trust?  When you trust a person or a system, you get to turn off your internal “virus scanner”.  When we can turn that off, we can use that freed up mental energy for better things.  We need to be able to turn off our internal virus scanner because some of the things that we’re going to need to do to move forward as a species will require 100% of our brains in a complete flow state as often as possible.

This is why Psychological Safety is the single most important factor in a workplace and, as I’m coming to see, in virtually any other type of relationship.  Trust and psychological safety are central and vital because some things in our lives require “100% of our brains” to solve, so to speak. Which means our full focus and attention in a relaxed state.  Anytime that we feel unsafe it means that some of our brain and body power is devoted to looking for threats and watching our back.

While this is good for survival, it means that we are a lot less creative and productive mentally, and it leaves us feeling drained and exhausted and unpleasant at the end of the day. So really it attacks both the experience and the point of being at work.  When we have safety, and we feel like we can let our guard down, we can then activate the “Broaden and Build” mental system, which means solving problems in creative ways that help more people with fewer drawbacks or sometimes even no drawbacks if the idea is particularly elegant.  (Think of the great ideas you have when you’re relaxing in the shower.  That’s the Broaden and Build system at work.  Quick, write those ideas down!)

But this system isn’t activated until I feel completely safe. If I even have to devote one percent of my energy to watching my back or watching what I say for any reason, it shuts down that system. Are you like this as well?

It’s like a sewage analogy I heard recently:

If you add 1 teaspoon of soup into a bucket of sewage, what do you call it? Sewage.

If you add 1 teaspoon of sewage into a bucket of soup, what do you call it? Sewage.

And you don’t eat it.  You reject it.  Safety and trust are like that.

Perhaps this is why the Public Trust is so important and so fragile as well. You can’t treat trust and mistrust like a ratio with an acceptable limit. It’s all or nothing.  Either you feel safe, or you do not feel safe. And the results are also all or nothing. Either you lower your guard and relax and all the wonderful gifts you have come flowing out, or you’re watching your back and watching what you say and second-guessing everything you do before and after you do it, and the Broaden and Build system is completely deactivated.

It is sometimes useful to measure the intensity of a fight or flight or anxiety reaction. (In a toxic work environment one might feel “95% unsafe and anxious”). There is great value in finding ways to calm down these anxieties.  If I can bring my anxiety from 95% down to 40% that represents a great deal of relief for me. But relief from pain and attainment of pleasure are two different things.  Avoiding harm and attaining growth are two different things.  Reduction in anxiety and feeling safe are related, but not exactly the same thing.

The Broaden and Build system is necessary if we are going to solve the major problems of our society and our own personal lives and have the best relationships we possibly can. We need the Broaden and Build system activated more often as a society so that we can solve the problems of life and experience the purpose of life, (certainly one of the purposes!)  To connect and experience pleasure and excitement and a have feeling of growth and progress.

Fight or flight helps us survive in hostile environments.  Broaden and Build helps us create environments with less hostility. And they feel good and they’re fun and they make you look forward to getting up in the morning, which I think might be another point of life.

Since Broaden and Build is vital for growth, it’s important to know that a little bit of distrust or non-safety is enough to completely shut down that system. The door to that world of ideas and solutions just blinks out of existence in an instant.  Like blowing out a candle.  Can you relate?

If I’m in a staff meeting and I feel very safe, lots of great ideas will likely start coming out, ideas that perhaps no one else had thought of.  If we’re stuck on a problem, this is just what we need.

Then I go “too far” and end up saying something really “out there” or wildly inappropriate (usually as I seize an opportunity to make a joke, an irresistible urge sometimes!).  People shoot me looks.  Strange looks, concerned looks, annoyed looks, and that’s it!  The safety disappears, The flow of ideas gets cut off, and I immediately start backpedaling.  Stammering out an apology or rapidly changing the subject, all the while feeling shame. And honestly, that is usually the last time that I’m able to come up with ideas for that group, or, if I do come up with great ideas, I keep quiet about them.

A teaspoon of sewage turns any amount of soup into sewage.

Another (less yucky) metaphor for feeling unsafe is that of a poorly designed virus scanner. One that takes up too much of the computer’s resources to look for threats.  You’ve all used them.  We won’t name names, but we all know which ones we’re talking about here.  J

Virtually everyone who has worked with computers, especially older or less expensive computers, has experienced a slowdown of their whole system once a virus scanner was either installed or upgraded. More than once in my life I was looking for an antivirus program for an older computer, and I found that commercial antiviruses slowed that computer to a crawl.  (Think clicking an app and then going to make a coffee because you know you have time before the computer responds.  Might as well make some toast too!)

The virus scanner was so concerned with looking for threats that it ended up destroying the very thing that it was there to protect; my productivity and my easy use of the computer. Because complete online safety is still impossible (lots of malware out there), I would look for the most basic, lean version of a virus scanner and combine with wise browsing and email habits. In the case of our computers, the best that we can do is to minimize the impact of the virus scanner.  And maybe this is why we accept a margin of unsafety and mistrust in our workplaces and public institutions and officials.

And this is my point about trusting our systems. If we could trust that our doctors weren’t trying to push pills on us, we would see them for more preventative care. But there’s no money in prevention. If we could trust that 100% of our tax money was being used for great things and to markedly ease the suffering of people and advance our country, we would more happily pay taxes, instead of disgustedly.  However, we have no idea if the money is being used for good, or if we’re helping the friend of a politician land a contract and buy a 3^rd yacht.

Imagine how much time, energy and stress could be freed up if computer malware ceased to exist.  The computing power saved alone could be significant.  Think of how much more productive and happier you are when you feel safe.  Better performance with less cost, mentally and emotionally.

The benefits of trust and safety are enormous. Anything less than complete trust leaves us fighting each other in survival mode. It’s very easy to lose trust, as an individual or an organization, and there is no “losing it just a little bit“. You either got it or you don’t. And if you don’t got it, you should work hard to try to get it back. Because without trust, nothing great is possible.  With trust…completely relaxing and letting the ideas flow, what could be possible?

Maybe I’ll have a nice long shower and think about that.

AI and Automation: People Make Terrible Robots

It’s not just “what jobs will be lost?” but what lives will be found?

We’re Not Just Bad at Robotic Work — We’re Built for Something Else

Humans make terrible robots. We’re inconsistent, emotional, easily distracted, prone to fatigue, and we absolutely hate doing the same thing every day. Compared to a machine, we’re not just inefficient — we’re inevitably inefficient.

Even the most focused among us break down under the weight of sustained repetition. And when we fail in these roles — as receptionists, customer service agents, warehouse pickers, even paralegals — it’s not just a matter of poor performance. It’s a misuse of human hardware. We’re not wired for this. Our cognitive design is exploratory, adaptive, and improvisational. That’s the opposite of what repetitive jobs require.

And here’s the kicker: the people in these roles know it too. You can hear it in their voices. Stress. Frustration. Miscommunication. Burnout. That’s not personal failure — that’s a systemic mismatch between role and species.

Work That Demands Robotic Consistency Damages Us

There’s a kind of job that asks humans to suppress their very nature. These are jobs that reward mechanical repetition over creativity, consistency over insight, and endurance over intuition. Whether it’s typing, lifting, copy-pasting, fielding calls, or endlessly scheduling — this isn’t human work. It’s simulation. And the cost is real.

Physically, repetitive work breaks down our bodies. Mentally, it leads to disassociation and chronic stress. Emotionally, it disconnects us from meaning. Even resilience has a cost — just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

We put humans into these roles because, for decades, there was no better option. Now there is.

Let the Robots Be Robots

AI and automation are not just better at robotic work — they want it. Not in the way that people want things, of course, but in the sense that they were designed for it. Their ideal day is repetition. Their nature is consistency. They are the hammer that never misses, the clock that never slips, the operator who never sighs or gets sick or needs to pee.

Letting AI do these jobs is not surrendering something precious — it’s returning an unnatural burden we never should’ve carried. These jobs were always a mismatch for our species. They made us smaller, meaner, more tired, and — in some ways — less human.

Handing these roles over to AI isn’t just an upgrade. It’s a mercy. For them, it’s a task. For us, it was a trap.

 

And now, the inevitable next question:

 

What Will We Do When the Machines Take Over the Work We Were Never Built For?

This is the question trembling under every debate about automation. It’s not just “what jobs will be lost?” but what lives will be found?

Because if we stop forcing humans to act like robots… we might actually remember how to be human again.

Will we learn? Will we play more? Connect more? Will we create, invent, support, heal, laugh, explore? Will we finally have the time and space to do what humans do best — everything except act like machines?

Or will we panic at the loss of structure and productivity metrics, and flail in the silence?

No one knows. But I believe this much: the work we were never built for is collapsing. And that’s not just inevitable. It’s necessary.