[motohagiography]

The issue with these workplace wellness themes to me is that they violate normal personal and adult boundaries as if to try to access the psyche of employees, and this dismantling of personal boundaries is precisely what creates the psychotic and abusive relationships that appear in business environments. It is the lack of personal boundaries, and not the presence of them that creates harmful interactions and relationships.

The worst possible way to create a 'safe' environment is to infantalize people and direct them like emotionally dependent children because by treating people as non-adults, it removes their basic dignity. Without this, people act out without normal boundaries, and think personal observations and other bizarrely inapproapriate behavior is acceptable or warranted. Corporate yoga and pseudo religious mindfullness probably often has the opposite effect. "Asking" people to submit to religious activities like meditation, smudging ceremonies, ancenstral acknowledgements, mindfulness, hypnosis, yoga, and others is not relating as normal adults. Sometimes I wonder what the conversations on an HN for HR people would look like.

The most successful wellness programs I have seen came in the form of a self-improvement/hobbies bonus, and the 10%-20% open research/dev projects in some tech companies.