The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

"All that behavior will do is paint you as naive. Sure there's room for honesty and responsibility, but only when used appropriately (strategically). Strikes me as acutely inhumane every time my career is rewarded for suppressing those behaviors."

The corporate world is only a reflection of the society that makes it up. There are plenty of people who are dishonest and manipulative. There is no real way to "fix" the corporate world.

Ergo there are only two ways to fix it, both of them only involving yourself:

I see a number of comments here opining that the current workforce health crisis is driven by a "money is happiness" society. You know what money buys you in this case? Freedom. The freedom to act how you wish and not care about this game.

Once you are free from that, it is a matter of perspective:

"The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

- "This is Water", David Foster Wallace https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf

"Natural" is not good. Life in nature is nasty, brutish, and short.

Some other things that aren't natural include eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, vaccines, antibiotics, air conditioning, cooked food, and electronics.

I worship artifice, and I find the idea that natural things are laudable to be repugnant in every possible way.

I'm also a proud trans woman, and that's sure as hell not natural either. I utterly detest nature.

Take, for example, Crusader Kings II, a game released in 2012 that's still getting DLC and free patches subsidized by DLC sales to this day.

And there's also this infographic about day-one DLC that's been going around for a few years now: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DLCWor...

Has nothing to do with the OP's comment, and it attempts to shift the conversation to justification.

>For all human history, the conditions of people were dire. Today people might be stuck in an office in their "best year", but people in the past had to toil all day to barely scrape by and didn't even have that many years to live.

Again, why are you doing this?

>It's only now that we live these comfortable lives with houses, heating, electricity, technology and a sea of information at our fingertips. These things all exist and keep functioning because people work.

Who is arguing against work in general? The article and the OP are discussing working conditions. Work doesn't have to be torture. America has a very unhealthy relationship with the idea of work and what it means. No pain no gain, right?

>And yet some think that "society has gone wrong", as if the past was paradise.

In the last 40-50 years, American society has taken some significant steps backwards, and the workers have felt it. If you're comparing conditions to hundreds or thousands of years ago, why? What is your goal?

>Work has been a human universal through history. There is surely an argument to be made about the fact that now we are so productive that we might not need to work as much as we had to.

At the same time I think we should be grateful that we live in the best life conditions ever seen by humanity.

You finally brushed against the point in your penultimate paragraph.

I know it's hard, but I think you have a responsibility to step in when you see things like this.

I've been severely depressed before, and if someone, even if I didn't know them very well, had done something to indicate that they knew what I was going through, it would have helped. Sometimes people who are suicidal are convinced that if they did eat a bullet tomorrow, no one would care.