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Performative Wellness and the Chasm Between Promise and Practice
Last week I shared a piece (below) about institutional nervous systems stuck in survival mode.
The thinking was in preparation for a talk I gave to close a Groundwork training at Big Bear Retreat Center.
That talk is today’s video embed.
I told the folks at Big Bear a short version of the story I’ve been sharing with you here on Substack: Capitalism is over, it just hasn’t been told yet.
We’re in the death rattle, the fast part of collapse and it is revealing itself at the individual and collective level.
I wove my story of transformational crisis into our collective crisis and back again to the relational practices we need to survive, heal, and maybe, ultimately, at some point, thrive.
Of most resonance for participants, I think, was the idea that it’s not your fault, that individual transformation can only take us so far if we are expected to daily operate in organizations and environments that are running urgency OS.
We are in a civilizational crisis and our institutions deny it; deny that they’re running urgency OS and stuck in Survival Mode as a result. By refusing to admit it, they cannot shift out of it.
And by refusing to shift out of it, they’re taking all their people down with them.
As I wrote last week:
Individuals can only do so much to transform their underlying pain, when there is an ‘overlying pain’ being inflicted from the organizational nervous system.
Individuals entrain to their environments so their efforts can only go so far.
This is why long term burnout leaves are paradoxically rising in tandem with workplace wellness initiatives.
The wellness initiatives are performative at best if they are not accompanied by structural change, by change to the practices of the organization, the ways of being and doing, the cultural codes that actually run the show.
Very few organizations have been brave enough to transform their cultural root directory, and so we continue to get more of the same.
This is the way of the corporate narcissist after all: the words and actions do not align.
This chasm between promise and practice creates a dangerous reality—one that some people are uniquely wired to perceive.
And ‘The Cassandras’ who we’ll meet next, are the perceptive ones who’ve fallen through the chasm, the ones feeling it first and worst, the ones already living collapse whether you believe them or not.
Millennials like Charlie Geller — played by John Magaro ^ in The Big Short —tried to tell us Capitalism was over. Like most Cassandras to date, no one listened, especially not his parents who, in this scene tell him to take more Prozac and Zoloft.
Meet The Cassandras
I got thinking about ‘Cassandras’ waiting to fly home yesterday while reading
‘s post on Sentinel Intelligence.It’s brilliant.
Or maybe it just feels that way to me because I relate to it. I think many of you who engage my work will as well.
She opens with the story of Cassandra, the cursed oracle of Troy who could hear the future but no one would believe her when she tried to tell them.
Jessica’s retelling was so inspiring I made it into a video with Veo 3. The production is mine, the words are hers.
The piece then moves from Cassandra’s story to her contemporary counterparts, the highly sensitive pattern seers, the sentinels, orchids and neurodivergents:
“These terms like orchid and sentinel describe the same overall group, and we find them throughout history. Psychologists sometimes describe them as highly sensitive. They’re often ignored, are even persecuted for speaking truth to power. Our culture dumps a lot of judgement on them, along with anyone who falls somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum.”
And interestingly, here we see that the Cassandras are also the Collapse Canaries.
It’s not just that we can sense and ‘hear’ the future, we are the ones who are living collapse and reformation first. We’re the ones both toiling for technofeudal lords and prototyping pathways to futures worth living in — whether we want to or not.
explains it well in the quote below: Collapse isn’t some singular, grand cinematic event, it is a process and we are living in it and we are all at different points in its unfolding.
Not all of us can language what we’re experiencing as clearly, but we know it intuitively and experientially.
It is written into our bodies and our bank accounts and the circumstances of our lives.
You can see it clearly in labour market data, too.
The most recent data (2023) I saw suggests that 36% of Canada’s workforce is now in non-standard employment — i.e.: entrepreneurship, gig work, self-employment, and all versions of non-T4 work.
That’s 7 million Canadians with no workplace protections, no employment rights, no insurance.
We are the precariat, I described in The Welfare Queen series.
When you add the ~10% of Canadians who are currently unemployed, the scale becomes staggering.
You’re looking at about 9 million Canadians.
That’s 46% of our workforce and 21.6% of our entire population already directly living the collapsing systems of work.
Relevantly, neurosensitive people are said to make up about 30% of the total population. It is not a coincidence that we are overrepresented in non-standard employment and unemployment.
It is also not a coincidence that women, minorities, and the disabled are also significantly over-represented in these segments of the labour market.
We are a 9 million strong signal this shit is not working.
We are the Canaries and the Cassandras and the Sentinels and the Orchids and the Divergents — or whatever else you’d like to call us.
After publishing this piece I went on a deep(er) dive into the numbers. Here’s a back-of-napkin visualization on the collapse of the Canadian workforce. Calculations here are slightly different than reported in-text due to re-categorization of the data.
Cassandras are Corporate Refugees
Sometimes I think of all of us like corporate refugees, the ones spit out by the corporate narcissist’s immune system without care or consideration.
We are literally too sensitive to survive in these urgency-based environments. Or, they outright reject us because we are not the right shape, size, colour or temperament to fit smoothly into the ever-faster churning machine.
Once spit out, in an effort to survive, we pursue ‘non standard employment’. We become entrepreneurs and uber drivers and gig workers and hustlers.
For many of us I believe this seeking and creating is a subconscious reaction.
Sometimes it can liberating — think of the creative entrepreneur — but even in those best-case, high-agency scenarios, life is unnecessarily unstable, insecure and wildly under-supported. We are laying the tracks with the train at our heels.
Then there is a whole other part of this population that are ‘corporate refugees’ in a truer sense, subsistence gigging and part-time juggling because that is the only choice.
Whatever part of this agency spectrum you fall on, what’s common is we’re on alternative paths because we have to be.
I’ve often described my professional history as ‘a classically millennial portfolio career’… but in hindsight, I have to wonder…did I choose it or was I spewing empowering spin as I walked the gang plank off a ship the other passengers refused to admit is sinking?
PS: If you listen to the talk, the listening meditation essay we skipped, is
‘s Visibility ≠ Liberation - When Systems Can’t Hold the Truth.***
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