What Calm Cannot Contain

I often write when I'm tired. Not depleted, just quiet enough to notice what sits beneath the noise. That kind of tired brings things forward I might otherwise step over, and I worry it sounds darker than I mean. I promise I'm not trying to channel Poe. I don't see the world as a dystopia. What I do see is tension. Fracture. But also the possibility, if we're willing to stay with the discomfort long enough to name it. If you can read this all the way through, I already know you're more resilient than you give yourself credit for.

For years, I thought staying composed was a form of strength. Even when the deadlines stacked and the calendar blurred, I took pride in being steady. Unshaken. But over time, that steadiness began to feel less like resilience and more like disappearance. What I've learned, slowly, is that not all calm is grounding. Some of it is a performance you learn to survive. And yet, in rare moments, when someone listens without rushing or pauses without prompting, there's a different kind of calm. One that doesn't ask you to disappear to feel held.

The Branded Exhale

The campaign began with calm. Not the feeling, but its simulation, delivered through a polished internal portal, branded with soft gradients and scrolling invitations to "take a moment - deep breath." Beneath curated calm and corporate pastels, the initiative launched with scripted sincerity: "We care deeply about your mental health." It landed in inboxes like a sigh, a pause engineered for visibility. But in the open tabs of the overburdened, what it signaled was something else entirely. A performance, not a presence. And yet, for some, it raised a necessary question: What would it look like if this were real?

Window Dressing the Crisis

Even as the language of mental health has seeped into corporate parlance, the structures it implies remain untouched. "Well-being" sits adjacent to performance goals, encoded into annual reviews, quietly monitored by passive-aggressive surveys, and trotted out as evidence of progressive culture. This is wellness as window dressing, where initiatives untethered from organizational reality serve more as reputation buffers than as lifelines.¹ When care is strategically deployed, it ceases to function as care at all. It becomes optics. Still, within these staged gestures, the vocabulary of mental health has entered the workplace lexicon. For some, this has opened space for dialogue that didn't exist before. A few teams have used these words to shape policy, realigning expectations in subtle but meaningful ways.

Participation as Performance

In many organizations, wellness programs follow a predictable arc. A rise in burnout or attrition provokes concern. HR consults an external firm. Meditation apps are subsidized. A panel on stress resilience is held. Gratitude journals appear at each desk. Then, the metrics. Participation rates, feedback scores, and absenteeism trends. The goal is never openly stated, but unmistakably understood: retention, productivity, risk mitigation. As behavioral economist Jeffrey Pfeffer observes, workplace stress is often the byproduct of systemic factors like unrealistic workloads, lack of autonomy, and job insecurity, not personal deficiencies.² Yet wellness initiatives rarely target these roots. Still, some employees find in these programs a moment of reprieve, a signal that someone is trying, even if imperfectly. A breathing space, however brief, can sometimes lead to deeper questions.

The Responsibility Rhetoric

Instead, they redirect attention toward individual responsibility. The yoga class at 4 PM becomes an implicit prompt: Why aren't you managing your stress better? A therapeutic vocabulary overlays unchanged expectations. The same company that champions mindfulness in Slack posts may celebrate 60-hour workweeks in earnings calls. Employees are asked to find equilibrium in environments engineered for imbalance. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han warns, self-optimization becomes the neoliberal replacement for solidarity.³ You are your own wellness officer, your own burnout manager. And yet, the contradiction mounts. Self-care is championed most in places that structurally prohibit it. This creates not only stress, but shame, a sense that failure to thrive is a personal deficit rather than an institutional design flaw. But when spoken aloud, even this irony can become a gateway to clarity. It becomes an opening for collective conversations about what must change.

Misrecognition and Moral Injury

This performance of care is not without consequence. When organizations lean on wellness campaigns without altering structural conditions, they risk deepening cynicism. Employees feel not just exhausted but misrecognized. The disconnect between the rhetoric of care and the experience of disregard becomes a source of alienation. Organizational psychologist Christina Maslach identifies this as a key predictor of burnout: value misalignment between the employee and the institution.⁴ In such climates, even genuine efforts are tainted by association. A well-meaning workshop on anxiety management becomes another calendar burden, another checkbox. And over time, this persistent mismatch can erode professional identity. The worker begins to question not only their employer's values but the validity of their own exhaustion. Still, these missteps can catalyze more honest feedback loops, quiet refusals, blunt exit interviews, or restructured priorities that arise not in spite of frustration, but because of it.

The Recruiting Stage

Employers are not the only audience for these campaigns. Wellness optics have become a tool of talent acquisition. Job descriptions tout mental health days and resilience training alongside ping-pong tables and hybrid schedules. Culture videos showcase mindfulness sessions in sunlit atriums. The implication is clear. This is a place that cares. But recruitment framed through care-as-branding is unstable. It promises a humanity it cannot operationalize. Recruiters inherit the dissonance, tasked with defending a culture that may not exist, selling safety in atmospheres of surveillance. Care becomes a commodity, and every candidate, a potential consumer. Those who join hoping for sanctuary may discover a dissonance between the onboarding narrative and operational norm, where wellness is emphasized rhetorically but unsupported practically. Yet, when a recruiter names that tension aloud without euphemism, it can seed the beginnings of trust.

Care Without Contact

The shift from care to campaign flattens complexity. It assumes that wellness can be manufactured, managed, and measured without mess. But real care is inefficient. It demands presence, responsiveness, and relational depth. It cannot be automated into dashboards or distilled into wellness scores. As psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found."⁵ In performative wellness cultures, people are neither hidden nor found. They are exposed, counted, and yet invisible. Without proximity, wellness strategies become surveillance, attempts to map sentiment rather than meet need. And still, in some teams, a manager listens longer, cancels a meeting, or changes the deadline. A single human moment inside the machinery.

The Echo Chamber of Metrics

The data supports this erosion. A 2022 report by the American Psychological Association found that over 70% of employees felt their employer's wellness programs did not match the realities of their workload or organizational stressors.⁶ Another study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology highlighted that the presence of wellness initiatives, when perceived as insincere, correlated with increased disengagement.⁷ The veneer of care, when cracked, exposes a deeper absence. And yet, these insights are often buried beneath surface statistics, pulse surveys coded in vague optimism, engagement charts purged of dissent, dashboards that paint morale in gradients of green. Even metrics become participants in the performance. But sometimes, within these numbers, a note stands out. A verbatim comment lands. A follow-up is made. Someone doesn't just look, but responds.

Unscripted Interventions

There are exceptions. Some organizations have begun to interrogate the dissonance between policy and practice. Instead of launching new wellness apps, they adjust workload expectations. Rather than hosting resilience trainings, they revisit meeting norms and decision-making transparency. These are not the stories that make for polished branding reels, but they register in the everyday experience of employees.

As sociologist Arlie Hochschild might argue, true institutional care involves emotional labor not outsourced to employees, but shouldered by leadership.⁸ But this kind of care resists commodification. It cannot be scaled or marketed. And because of that, it rarely survives budget reviews or culture decks. Yet for those who've experienced it, a changed deadline, a policy revised after feedback, a leader who listens, it registers as real. These moments may be rare, but their resonance is long-lasting.

Contradictions at Scale

Still, even within these exceptions, contradictions persist. A manager cancels a wellness day to meet quarterly deadlines. A recruiter assures a candidate of flexibility that vanishes upon onboarding. A mental health speaker discloses burnout while corporate metrics demand acceleration. The echo is consistent. Wellness is voiced in the future tense, while pain is felt in the present. Leaders find themselves caught in the optics trap, expected to champion wellness while delivering efficiencies, to humanize strategy without human cost. In this tension, real care is often the first casualty. And yet, it is also where the most meaningful acts emerge. Not grand, but grounded. A check-in call. An honest all-hands. A budget line spared. Each small gesture matters more than it seems.

Compliance as Survival

And yet, people comply. They fill out pulse surveys. They attend webinars on psychological safety. They write "grateful for this community" in Teams channels, even as the community feels spectral.

Participation becomes a form of self-protection, a strategic alignment with the institutional narrative. To question it is to risk being labeled disengaged. The performance of wellness thus extends from company to employee, a mutual charade under fluorescent light. Over time, these performances calcify into ritual, words spoken out of rhythm, actions undertaken without conviction. And burnout, once named, becomes normalized. A permanent condition miscast as a temporary challenge. Still, in the margins, something persists. Jokes traded between meetings, IM threads turned vent spaces, resilience forged not in apps, but in mutual recognition. These quiet bonds often sustain where strategy cannot.

From Spectacle to Substance

The opportunity and burden of transformation lies in relinquishing the spectacle. Organizations must shift their axis from publicity to presence, from display to dialogue. To do this, wellness must become porous, open to criticism, shaped by lived experience, and responsive to what employees say they need rather than what leadership wishes they did. That means funding without fanfare. Listening without framing. Initiatives that risk being unphotogenic. It is in the messy rooms, where someone names a contradiction, delays a launch, acknowledges fatigue, that care quietly takes root. Such efforts may never headline a recruitment video, but they build trust incrementally, in silence. And if they are repeated, discreetly, sincerely, without reward, they might begin to hold.

What Remains Human

In the end, wellness as a campaign cannot substitute for wellness as a culture. Care does not scale easily. It resists scripting. It is most present in its unmeasured moments, in the colleague who quietly absorbs extra work, in the recruiter who names the hard truth, in the leader who postpones an initiative to listen.

When care is allowed to be inconvenient, unpretty, or unsellable, it begins to function again. Until then, curated calm remains a setting, not a solution.

Share your thoughts in the comments—what resonates? What would you add to this conversation? Where do you see strategy and human experience colliding?

Sources

1. Kelly, E. L., Moen, P., & Tranby, E. (2011). Changing Workplaces to Reduce Work-Family Conflict. American Sociological Review.

2. Pfeffer, J. (2018). Dying for a Paycheck.

3. Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society.

4. Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience. World Psychiatry.

5. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.

6. American Psychological Association. (2022). Work and Well-being Survey.

7. Karanika-Murray, M., & Biron, C. (2020). The health-performance framework of presenteeism. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

8. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart.

9. Deloitte Insights. (2021). Well-being and work.

10. Gelles, D. (2023). The Empty Promises of Mental Health Days. The New York Times.