Chapter 27: Mindfulness as an opiate for the employee?
As for the individual, it is my view that mindfulness can be a double-edged sword. I say this because being able to control your mind better enables you to respond to situations instead of reacting to them. Instead of your mind being cluttered with irrelevant thoughts and fears you can more clearly see the true issues. But it also enables you to deflect a certain amount of stress but note I say” a certain amount”. And if you manage stress for largecorp this means you can accept more responsibilities and tasks. In their eyes you are an endless receptor of stress. In effect you are being manipulated by largecorp should they offer you mindfulness training.
One potential problem with mindfulness is that there is a danger of accepting negativity and avoiding demanding situations by escaping to the present moment, so you can be with the calmness of your breath and body. Or you can end up accepting negativity under the guise of it just being caused by your “wandering mind” and then tuck it away and ignore it. I would not be full of praise for a way of thought that has you accept or avoid negativity which is not what mindfulness should be but this is what largecorp wants it to be. Mindfulness should not be about escapism but equip you to better deal with your environment.
Perhaps the biggest factor in mindfulness is that it is a highly individual practice. There is no call to arms and manning of the barricades. There is no social movement demanding societal changes perhaps many of which would alleviate the human suffering mindfulness sets out to cure. Mindfulness creates no threats for largecorp and to the delight of the Senior Management Team the effects of largecorp induced stress are attributable to the malfunctioning mind of the employee. The employee is the problem as the employee is incapable of bearing or “managing” a crushing load of stress.
I am not saying that mindfulness will transform you into the placid zombie like the pictures of people on mindfulness Facebook pages. There may be your own personal revolution and I hope there is one and that it is highly positive but again you’d need a huge part of the population to be mindful, so self-awareness, kindness and compassion replace greed, egoism and war. That isn’t going to happen at least in the foreseeable future.
From what I have read and participated in from an Up Up and Away Toronto mindfulness programme makes me feel that if you can’t handle, stress, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder or anxiety it is your personal problem. Therefore, if you are horribly stressed at work due to the fact the Senior Management Team needs to make a salary that is 209 times greater than yours which causes them to trim jobs and outsource putting unreasonable demands on you it is your fault that you could not manage the stress and ended up on short term or long-term disability with your brain and soul depleted.
It is ironical that the more humane largecorp wants to be perceived as caring and responsive while it ruthlessly outsources, squeezes employees and downsizes placing an enormous amount of fear and pressure amongst the survivors….” Am I the next one to go?”
Just imagine with stress reduction how much more stressful situations largecorp can heap on its employees. Up goes the profit and down go the disability claims. Largecorp can have its cake and eat it too. And a word to the wise. If largecorp offers you a mindfulness programme grab it. If you don’t it is evidence against you in any disability claim you make related to workplace stress, anxiety or depression.
Largecorps are introducing mindfulness programmes not so much for the well being of employees but to reduce disability claims from over stressed employees and an opportunity to place more work on the employee’s back. The reality of these mindfulness programmes for largecorp is that the individual needs therapy. There is something wrong with the employee that can be subject to a mindfulness fix.
The patient may be healed by mindfulness, but social and economic structures remain unchanged. Is mindfulness a secular religion under capitalism? Will it develop into a new form of ideological domination that encourages and enables people to endure the alienating conditions of capitalism without calling for material revolution, redistribution of wealth or institutional change?
As religion is both dwindling in adherents and in many cases, such as radical Islam, is perceived as threatening, is mindfulness a new form of secular religion? Have we capitulated to capitalism! Are the psychological casualties of our economic system maladaptive degenerates?
Do we add up all the mindful people decades from now and hope instead of zombies we have a population that sees how to change society to improve it? I certainly hope this will be the result of mindfulness but the hijacking of mindfulness by largecorps and its commodification as a for profit industry doesn’t give me much hope.
In the end it is up to you to derive whatever benefit you can from mindfulness and as for the rest of the world hope for the best.
A significant moral problem to be raised here is “Whose side is mindfulness on anyway? Largecorp or employee?”
Perhaps both benefit, particularly if the employee is mindful enough to realize mindfulness was never designed to exploit and increase the productivity of an employee facing jobs cuts and working under chronically stressful conditions. As a final parting thought and spoken from personal experience. Mindfulness can only go so far in stress reduction. At one-point chronic stress is incapable of being managed by mindfulness
Chapter 27
Largecorp mindfulness: Opiate for the employee?
As for the individual, it is my view that mindfulness can be a double-edged sword. I say this because being able to control your mind better enables you to respond to situations instead of reacting to them. Instead of your mind being cluttered with irrelevant thoughts and fears you can more clearly see the true issues. But it also enables you to deflect a certain amount of stress but note I say” a certain amount”. And if you manage stress for largecorp this means you can accept more responsibilities and tasks. In their eyes you are an endless receptor of stress. In effect you are being manipulated by largecorp should they offer you mindfulness training.
One potential problem with mindfulness is that there is a danger of accepting negativity and avoiding demanding situations by escaping to the present moment, so you can be with the calmness of your breath and body. Or you can end up accepting negativity under the guise of it just being caused by your “wandering mind” and then tuck it away and ignore it. I would not be full of praise for a way of thought that has you accept or avoid negativity which is not what mindfulness should be but this is what largecorp wants it to be. Mindfulness should not be about escapism but equip you to better deal with your environment.
Perhaps the biggest factor in mindfulness is that it is a highly individual practice. There is no call to arms and manning of the barricades. There is no social movement demanding societal changes perhaps many of which would alleviate the human suffering mindfulness sets out to cure. Mindfulness creates no threats for largecorp and to the delight of the Senior Management Team the effects of largecorp induced stress are attributable to the malfunctioning mind of the employee. The employee is the problem as the employee is incapable of bearing or “managing” a crushing load of stress.
I am not saying that mindfulness will transform you into the placid zombie like the pictures of people on mindfulness Facebook pages. There may be your own personal revolution and I hope there is one and that it is highly positive but again you’d need a huge part of the population to be mindful, so self-awareness, kindness and compassion replace greed, egoism and war. That isn’t going to happen at least in the foreseeable future.
From what I have read and participated in from an Up Up and Away Toronto mindfulness programme makes me feel that if you can’t handle, stress, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder or anxiety it is your personal problem. Therefore, if you are horribly stressed at work due to the fact the Senior Management Team needs to make a salary that is 209 times greater than yours which causes them to trim jobs and outsource putting unreasonable demands on you it is your fault that you could not manage the stress and ended up on short term or long-term disability with your brain and soul depleted.
It is ironical that the more humane largecorp wants to be perceived as caring and responsive while it ruthlessly outsources, squeezes employees and downsizes placing an enormous amount of fear and pressure amongst the survivors….” Am I the next one to go?”
Just imagine with stress reduction how much more stressful situations largecorp can heap on its employees. Up goes the profit and down go the disability claims. Largecorp can have its cake and eat it too. And a word to the wise. If largecorp offers you a mindfulness programme grab it. If you don’t it is evidence against you in any disability claim you make related to workplace stress, anxiety or depression.
Largecorps are introducing mindfulness programmes not so much for the well being of employees but to reduce disability claims from over stressed employees and an opportunity to place more work on the employee’s back. The reality of these mindfulness programmes for largecorp is that the individual needs therapy. There is something wrong with the employee that can be subject to a mindfulness fix.
The patient may be healed by mindfulness, but social and economic structures remain unchanged. Is mindfulness a secular religion under capitalism? Will it develop into a new form of ideological domination that encourages and enables people to endure the alienating conditions of capitalism without calling for material revolution, redistribution of wealth or institutional change?
As religion is both dwindling in adherents and in many cases, such as radical Islam, is perceived as threatening, is mindfulness a new form of secular religion? Have we capitulated to capitalism! Are the psychological casualties of our economic system maladaptive degenerates?
Do we add up all the mindful people decades from now and hope instead of zombies we have a population that sees how to change society to improve it? I certainly hope this will be the result of mindfulness but the hijacking of mindfulness by largecorps and its commodification as a for profit industry doesn’t give me much hope.
In the end it is up to you to derive whatever benefit you can from mindfulness and as for the rest of the world hope for the best.
A significant moral problem to be raised here is “Whose side is mindfulness on anyway? Largecorp or employee?”
Perhaps both benefit, particularly if the employee is mindful enough to realize mindfulness was never designed to exploit and increase the productivity of an employee facing jobs cuts and working under chronically stressful conditions. As a final parting thought and spoken from personal experience. Mindfulness can only go so far in stress reduction. At one-point chronic stress is incapable of being managed by mindfulness
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