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Everything in the working world fails people with mental illness, even at low levels that aren't especially problematic under less pressure. There are very few organizations that actually promote based on excellence. Most set up a war of attrition based on shared suffering and the mountain of pointless work generated by bike-shedding executives. People with depression (or anxiety, ADD, panic, etc.) are not intentionally excluded; they're just the first to crack. Ugly fact: it's how the system is supposed to work. Competition-on-suffering exists to filter out "the weak" and "the slackers". It's a millennia-old (wrong) mentality of work and only over the past 50 years have we understood the biological causes (not personal weakness) that actually make people drop. The idea is to assess character by generating artificial stress, but the result is that mild (usually treatable) biological problems are misinterpreted as character flaws. Depression is read as lassitude. (It's not.) Panic is seen as "not handling pressure well." (Actually, a panic attack is 3-20 minutes of hell but the disorder does not impair judgment.) Overwork-induced social ineptitude is interpreted as selfishness. Et cetera. This setup is sad, stupid, wrong, and counterproductive because the modern economy doesn't need pointless effort and tolerance of suffering. Slackers are no more harmful than misdirected hard workers (which is most, because the people providing direction in most organizations are clueless yes-men). What the world needs, now, are creativity, insight, and excellence, which turn out to be positively correlated with the propensity to depression. The conformist idiocy and pointless sacrifice of corporate life are unhealthy for normal people and debilitating for many with depression. VC-istan, a very volatile form of corporate life that looks meritocratic, is worse... because people work too hard and personalize their failures. What I'd like to see over the next 15 years is more of an ability for smart, capable people to start lifestyle businesses. Right now, it's not unreasonably hard to found a get-big-or-die VC-istan company if you have the connections, but there's a whole world of smaller businesses that's not being explored because the market to connect the resources with the talent doesn't exist yet. (Kickstarter is a step in the right direction.) |