[didibus]

To me, toxic implies something that's bad for you but in insidious ways. That means it's slow and subtle, you wouldn't even believe it, at first you'd think this is great, these people are happy, this job looks great, but years later, you've got memory loss, needed to take physical disability, and the whole team quit... What the hell?

I feel it perfectly describes toxicity. What can cause such a thing? What's the root cause? It seems there are certain things about the human psyche we've yet to understand that somehow can be very damaging to it.

It means that if say there's a person whose the perpetrator, they might not even realize. If a manager causes the environment to make people feel crappy, they might not understand how, why, even if that's not their intent.

Malice can be toxic too, but malice describes the intent, someone could purposefully make the environment toxic, still toxic, but the intent was malicious. I find toxicity describes the environment, it's not because no one was purposely poisoning the well that it can't still be toxic.

Now if people are being abusive, psychologically or physically, in obvious ways, I would just call that an abusive workplace.

That's just the way I interpret those words.

Now if you're simply trying to say we should prioritize our efforts first to workplaces that are really bad in obvious and extreme ways, downright abusive, I wouldn't disagree, but is this really detracting?

That's why I said, if you know of worse offenders, bring them up, don't just deny this particular offense. I know that labor in other countries is much worse, but I can't as easily enact changes in other countries. I know that some jobs treat employees really poorly and pays terribly, and I'm not okay with that and support labor rights, higher wages, and would love to see more paid leave, shorter hours, better safety protocols. Simultaneously I happen to work in tech, so I'm also interested in seeing those jobs improve, they have different kind of issues that seem more insidious, they're also worth talking about in my opinion.

I would agree with you if somehow tech worker complaints was drowning out the voices of other workers who have more obvious abuses going on. I just don't think that's the case.

[015a]

By my memory; not researched, probably wrong, but: one of the early organizations to use the word "toxicity" to describe human behavior was actually (not a joke) Riot Games, in describing some League of Legends players.

I wish I could find the blog post, as it was at least a decade ago at this point, but it described their reasoning as: it's not just malicious behavior, but its malicious behavior which "spreads" between people. Malice creates Malice. Someone yells obscenities in chat, it tilts another player, and that player is now yelling obscenities in the next game; that's toxicity.

Which is only to say that I think it's a good definition and wholly applicable. Corporate politics flows down from the top; the behavior of managers affects the behavior of middle-managers, which can affect the behavior of line workers. Toxicity isn't just a bad apple; its a bad organization.

[question_away]

If you look up any articles about the Activision Blizzard saga you'll find the word toxic being used most often to describe their workplace. Is OP's situation comparable to Activision Blizzard?

[didibus]

We don't have a good way to measure harm, let alone be able to compare it between contexts. So we just don't know to be honest.

All I know is memory loss, and needing to take a 2 year work leave sounds pretty bad. You're only hesitant to recognize this because you don't understand the cause. If I told you it turned out there was lead exposure in the office, now you probably would find it terrible. One day we'll hopefully understand the cause and effect of such thing, and the behaviors or whatever it could be, still might be caused by actual toxins who knows, but when you do, you'll similarly go, I can't believe they allowed this to go on when we know it causes memory loss and traumatic brain disabilities. Even if it's only on certain individuals, you'd be appalled to know some restaurant willingly served peanuts to someone allergic wouldn't you?

[klyrs]

Is woodsorrel comparable to water hemlock? Kidney stones are better than death, but both are toxic. Sounds like the author was directly harmed by their work environment, so it sounds fair to call it toxic even if it could be worse.