Remote Learning Damaged the Nation

Doubtless, you have heard about onshoring. You know that the administration enacted legislation designed to bring the jobs back home. It sounded like a good idea, even if it did not work quite as well in practice. 

And yet, as I have occasionally suggested, this assumes that we have the human capital that can do the work. We have already seen that Taiwan Semiconductor has cut back plans to build factories in Arizona, because it cannot find qualified personnel. It might even have to import workers from Taiwan or from China.

Unfortunately, the problem is not just linked to high tech. Across the workplace spectrum companies are having trouble finding and retaining qualified employees. One reason is simple. Young people joining the workforce today suffered a couple of years of remote learning. They did not go to school, and did not learn to function in groups with others.

We know that children who did not go to school suffered learning loss. At times, the learning loss was so severe it cannot be recovered. And yet, older children also suffered. And their new managers are having a devilish time teaching them basic work skills.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the problem.

The knock-on effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills. 

This is very bad news indeed. The fall in productivity will hurt the economy. The inability to do basic jobs will gum up production lines and supply chains.

Since 2020, when the pandemic began and remote learning moved students out of schools and into virtual classrooms, the pass rates on national certifications and assessment exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen.

Let’s see. If we are going to onshore, we certainly need more engineers. We also need better military recruits and more nurses. Unfortunately, for all the talk about how we are going to do this, the obstacles are formidable:

Among the approximately 40,000 candidates taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for work as professional engineers, scores fell by about 10% during the pandemic, said David Cox, CEO of the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. 

The result:

That means fewer engineers on the job and a lower degree of competency among those who make it, he said.

As for nursing, the problem is the same:

During the pandemic more than 100,000 nurses left the field, the largest decline in four decades of available data, a study in the journal Health Affairs showed. That has placed tremendous strain on hospitals and increased demands on programs to graduate more nurses. But students taking entrance exams to study nursing are scoring an average of about 5 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, limiting the number of students eligible to enroll in nursing programs. 

The problem is pervasive, especially among underachieving and minority students. But, most graduates of America’s educational system have been rendered dysfunctional:

Janet Godwin, chief executive of ACT, the nonprofit organization which administers the college admission test of the same name, said more high-school graduates today lack the fundamental academic skills needed for college and the workplace, with low-performing students facing the steepest declines. 

At times, the problem can involve elementary people skills. Workers in call centers now need to take special instruction to learn how to be polite and courteous on the phone. Apparently, not going to school damaged their ability to function in social situations:

Jerrica Moses, national recruitment manager for Senture, a London, Ky.-based call-center company, says new workers have problems with soft skills, such as an inability to deal with frustration. Senture, which employs about 4,200 customer-service representatives, has adopted a new set of tests to determine which prospective employees will be able to keep their cool under stress from angry or rude callers.

And also,

In Grand Rapids, managers at the John Ball Zoo are coaching seasonal workers in their teens and early 20s on basics such as why it’s important to look visitors in the eye, and how to make change at a cash register. 

And, of course, the vaunted American work ethic has fallen into disuse. Young people who studied remotely do not have a work ethic.

They are also trying to instill a work ethic in their employees that includes taking some initiative, getting off their phones and engaging with visitors, said Laura Davis, the director of strategy and organizational development at the zoo. Her young employees haven’t been held accountable for things like finishing homework assignments, and Davis believes that has led to a decline in motivation.

So, working from home, not going to school, these have damaged large numbers of American workers, and have made them barely functional workers. One trusts that you did not imagine that it would be easy to bring the jobs back home.

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Readjusting to the Office

You would think that going back to the office would be a simple process. Memory would serve you and would show you how to adapt to the new working conditions. The joys of collaborating with colleagues would quickly tamp down your nostalgia for the time you spent at home, working in your pajamas.

Apparently, such is not the case. Once you have lost the habit of working in the office, you will have a devilishly difficult time recovering it. You cannot just re-establish old routines or recover old habits by waving your magic wand. It takes time and effort to recover it all. It's like what happens when you do not use your muscles for an extended period of time, and then call upon them to do some work.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Some workers have lost the muscle memory in their minds required to get jobs done in an open-office setting and, like flabby biceps, that muscle has to be exercised to strengthen, says S. Thomas Carmichael, professor and chair of the neurology department at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

After years of remote work, our brains’ selective attention skills and ability to block out distractions is weakened, Carmichael says. Those who prefer to work from home might not like one of his remedies: Make yourself work from the office more often.

“The brain is really good at understanding contingencies, so if we just say ‘I’ll just get this done when I’m at home,’ we don’t learn it as well,” he says.

Analogies are rarely useful, but I find this one apposite. When you lose the habits, of thought and even of movement, that you developed while working in an office, they do not just come back once you sit down at your old desk.

That means, if you want to recover your good work habits you should force yourself to go to the office more often. The important word is, to force, because an activity that once felt perfectly normal will now feel abnormal.

And, the researchers say, do not overthink the situation. If the office seems strange and alienating, if co-workers seem like a distraction, suck it up and understand that it is not going to feel normal right away. For a time it will not feel as it felt.

When people start to ponder what life would be like if their circumstances were different, they can rapidly end up drowning in a sea of “what ifs,” a psychological concept known as counterfactual thinking.

And naturally, when the office starts feeling like an alien environment, you will be thinking of how wonderful it was to work from home:

It’s hard to un-remember how nice it was to take the dog for a walk midday, or how helpful it was to log out at 4 p.m. to get dinner started and log back in later. Running through scenarios of how time could be better spent takes up precious brainpower, distracting us from the real work at hand, psychologists say. 

It’s all about making new habits. And that is the key concept-- habit. It is not about discovering the meaning, but about getting back in the rhythm of office work.

 “We have to habituate ourselves to all those distractions all over again in order to get any good work done,” says Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University. She points to research that shows it takes 20 minutes to get used to background noise, but five minutes of silence before bringing back the noise forces the brain’s process to start over again. 

If that is useful information, try making use of it. At the least, use it to derive some perspective about why you are having trouble acclimating to the office.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, if your father is president and if you have a rather sketchy past ,you would naturally think that you should be on your best behavior. You do not want to make your father look bad, or better, to look any worse than he normally looks.

If you are Hunter Biden, however, you do not care about how anything looks to anyone. You can go out and rent a multimillion dollar beach house on Venice Beach and trash it. You can leave the house in disarray and disrepair. And you can walk away from tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent.

If such is your m.o., you are suffering from pathological arrogance. You trashed the place because you know you can get away with it, because the rules do not apply to you. It may not be illegal, but it is certainly a sign of a deep-seated and intractable character flaw.

But then, if your cohabitant is your wife and if you are bringing up a very young child, you would think that one of the two of you would take responsibility for the state of your rental. 

Now, if there was ever any doubt, we know that Hunter Biden is completely lacking in moral character. Apparently, his new wife presents herself as rude and entitled.

I trust that no one needed this extra evidence to learn that Hunter Biden is trash, but seriously.

Second, on the political front, famed emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz commented on the indictment of Donald Trump. According to the professor, Jack Smith might well be targeted for federal prosecution.

Dershowitz said:

You know the worst thing about this indictment, under the terms of this indictment, Jack Smith can be indicted. Let me explain to you why….The statute says the following, two or more persons conspire to injure and deny somebody the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured him by the constitution. What if a court ultimately rules that Donald Trump had a right under the First Amendment to make his Jan. 6 speech and to do what he did? Then Jack Smith will have conspired to deny him of that right. That’s how serious this is.”

The theory was this, as Dershowitz explained to Megan Kelly: 

He told a direct lie in this indictment. He purported to describe the speech that President Trump made on January 6th. 

And he left out the key words, when President Trump said, ‘I want you to demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.' You know, a lie by omission, under the law, can be as serious as a lie by commission.

I trust that that will brighten up your day.

Third, meantime, over in the Middle Kingdom, the authoritarian autocratic government has discovered that children are spending too much time on their phones. The solution, according to the Associated Press:

China’s internet watchdog has laid out regulations to curb the amount of time children spend on their smartphones. The Cyberspace Administration of China says minors would not be allowed to use the internet on mobile devices from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. 

Fourth,  we might not have reached terminal stupid, but we are well on our way. Or at least they are in Canada. 

A journalism professor by name of Katya Thieme declared that we should expose children to adult genitals, because then they will be more prepared to greet transgendered athletes in locker rooms.

So, the idiot professor wants to traumatize children in order to ensure that they not be traumatized.

In most jurisdictions exposing children to adult genitalia is a felony, but perhaps such is not the case in Canada.

Fifth, the mayor of Chicago, during a news conference about a mob looting of a Seven Eleven store, corrected the reporter who called the actions of hundreds of youth mob violence.

“We’re not talking about mob actions. I didn’t say that,” Johnson barked back. “These large gatherings … it’s important that we speak of these dynamics in an appropriate way.”

So, another sign that we are fast approaching terminal stupidity.

Sixth, on the Bud Light death watch… the parent company of what used to be the nation’s best selling beer, Anheuser-Busch just reported that it lost $390,000,000 in the second quarter. 

Apparently, going woke has just about destroyed the brand. Good job, marketing execs.

Seventh, Fitch organization reduced the United States credit rating, from AAA to AA+. Need we say that the Biden administration was outraged. And yet, he did not blame it on Bidenomics. Senile old Joe immediately blamed it on the Trump administration.

Eighth, the wit and wisdom of Vice President Kamala Harris. Any time our veep deviates from the script she manages to produce a pile of mumbo jumbo that makes her look like a complete idiot.

As in this:

It's expensive when you, when all your tires, you know, when you lose your, your, your tires are ended up being flat because of those roads and bridges.

Kamala never fails to disappoint. 

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Hating Trump

As is normal, yesterday’s David Brooks column is an embarrassment. Presumably, Brooks is talking his book. Speaking for the educated elite that despises Donald Trump he pretends to explain their irrational hatred. 

Throughout his column, he divides the world into uneducated rubes who support Trump and overeducated elites who know that Trump is guilty.

The trial has not yet begun in Washington, D. C., but Brooks and his ilk already know the outcome.

Brooks ignores the possibility that Trump might not be guilty of the charges that Jack Smith brought. And he does not consider that intelligent people might feel some empathy for a man who is, as Shakespeare put it, “more sinned against than sinning.”

Besides, whiners like Brooks, people who wallow in their superior capacity for empathy, have largely failed to notice that many people feel empathy for a man who has been constantly under political and judicial attack. The anti-Trump rhetoric has been so unhinged that any sensible individual will feel empathy for their target.

As usually happens, we expect something simple minded from Brooks, and in that we are not disappointed. Even so if his first observation rings true.

During the Vietnam War, the nation was divided in two. There was the group that fought the war and the group that received deferments. As it happens, Brooks ignored the simple fact that those who did not fight often signed up to diminish, demean and defame those who did fight.

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

It must have been a slow day, because Brooks then takes out after the notion of meritocracy. Apparently, the nation does not have fair competition. It allows the children of the rich to gain advantages that the children of the middle class and the poor are not allowed.

In principle, this is gibberish. From the time they were instituted in China a millennium ago, standardized tests have been designed to allow everyone a fair chance at success and advancement. 

In truth, the children who do best on these tests are of Asian ethnicity. Many of them are not rich and do not have parents who went to Ivy League schools. The same applies to the groups that are the most successful in America.

Of course, Brooks ignores reality here:

The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation….

Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

And Brooks ignores the role of affirmative action and diversity programs. More than a few people owe their careers to the movement against meritocracy.

Brooks is happy to belong to an intellectual elite, the kind of people who work at the New York Times and other elite media organizations. But, we must notice, the tech staff in Silicon Valley most often was educated in China. Those companies are kept afloat by people who are in the country on immigrant visas. Again, Brooks ignores reality:

Over the last decades, we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession; we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.

Of course, journalism is not indicative of much of anything. Those who undertake careers in it are most likely the products of the indoctrination mills that are considered to be America’s best universities. They could not do math and science but had to settle for Humanities and Social Science degrees.

So, the problems are considerably more complex than an elite intellectual like David Brooks thinks.

One reason why journalists and academics today tend to suffer from groupthink is that they did not gain their positions by merit, and that, even if they did, they did not learn much of anything in America’s greatest academic institutions.

They are so insecure about their positions and their credentials that they adopt coded language that shows them to be members of an elite group. They are horrified that people will figure out that they are not as smart as they think they are. Oh, and they maintain their position by having the right feelings about certain people. Hating Trump is one of the passwords to enter their world.

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Our Ongoing Cultural Revolution

Here are a couple of multisyllabic words for today. Michael Lind has written an essay comparing iconoclasm with antinomianism. Both words contain many syllables. We can only regret that we cannot ask our mentally challenged vice president to explain the difference.

Clearly, both are at war with tradition. Iconoclasts want to tear down statues and to revise history in order to replace it with another version. No more czar; Lenin and Stalin.

Antinomians, Lind explains, believe in rebellion for the sake of rebellion. They thrill to lawlessness and want simply to tear things down, for the thrill of it all. They are against what the Greeks called nomos, meaning that they oppose rules and norms. 

In both cases, they oppose tradition, and thus consider conservatives, those who respect past traditions, their enemies. They are especially opposed to patriotism, to nationalism, and to the nation’s heroes. And, of course, they reject traditional Western religions:

Everywhere we see our political, cultural, and financial elites bankrolling activists to dismantle traditions. While flags and slogans celebrating racial or sexual identity are proudly displayed by Western governments and corporations, overt displays of national patriotism are regarded by establishmentarians on both sides of the Atlantic as vulgar and distasteful. Religions tend to be viewed with distrust and contempt by the trans-Atlantic elite, unless their premodern teachings have been modified into alignment with the views of the campus left. The Western canon, instead of being enlarged to include unjustly excluded authors, has been jettisoned, and liberal education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Lind suggests that the antinomians do not want to set up a new tradition, with new heroes and new villains. They have preferred to censor and to recreate traditional works of art, to reconstruct them with multicultural characters:

But the cancellation of the Great Books curriculum has not led to a new consensus canon featuring minority, female, and nonbinary authors along with a smaller number of “dead white males” who are deemed acceptable. Instead, much of the energy of woke jihadists goes into purging or censoring existing works of art and thought—rewriting the novels of Roald Dahl, for example—or randomly parachuting nonwhite or “queer” characters into movie remakes instead of creating something new.

Antinomianism feels a lot like anarchy. It pretends to liberate people from rules and laws, the better to allow them to express their inner truth:

Unlike iconoclasm, antinomianism is not a temporary campaign of destruction of older iconography and traditions to clear the way for the imposition of new canons and orthodoxies. Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy.

Today’s antinomians are at war with the West. They want to ensure that the system does not function, that people cannot think clearly and that rebellion will prevail over the forces of order.

At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and “anti-fascism” as a catchall category. Upper-middle-class young men and women who throw paint at artistic masterpieces or glue themselves to trains claim they are defending the earth’s environment, but they could just as well say they are fighting white supremacy or patriarchy. They are acting out the ethos of a Western elite culture that believes the act of transgression itself is virtuous; the alleged goal of the transgression is merely an excuse.

One might add the epidemic of smash and grab robberies that has inflicted America’s blue cities. 

So, antinomians reject all societal norms, beginning with patriotism and including gender norms:

 The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms—the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.

Now, this is not a rebellion by the masses. It does not see the proletariat rising up against capitalist oppressors. In truth, the leaders of the antinomian attacks on tradition and custom often belong to our intellectual and business elites:

The members of the credentialed corporate-government-nonprofit-academic-media oligarchy, along with billionaire entrepreneurs and bankers who themselves are usually born into managerial-professional families, are almost all modernist in their aesthetics, libertine in their views of sex and recreational drug use, and dismissive of nationalism and patriotism and religion, which they regard as mental diseases of the lower classes. They work in offices designed by trendy “starchitects” decorated with abstract art, and often live in postmodern homes designed to be sterile, off-putting, and the very opposite of petty bourgeois comfort.

It has become a rebellion against the proletariat:

What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?

The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat. Instead of shocking the bourgeoisie, our post-bourgeois managerial overclass now delights in shocking the working class. Most working class people in the U.S. and Europe of all races and classes live in suburbs or exurbs—therefore our elite pundits and academics constantly denounce suburban “sprawl,” idealize life in high-style micro-apartments and expensive designer tiny houses, and call for the replacement of cars by mass transit. Many working class people like to cook with natural gas, so naturally our elite seeks to ban gas stoves. Gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers? Forget it. California will ban gasoline-powered lawn equipment in 2024. Rising incomes that accompany development allow the masses to eat meat; therefore meat is redefined by the oligarchy as unhealthy and harmful to “the planet.”

Antinomian elites are strongly opposed to populism. You see, populism opposes the new establishment; it opposes the new elites; it wants, however clumsily, to return to traditional values. And, it does not feel contempt for people who love their country and who attend religious services:

To add insult to injury, when the multiracial working class rebels at the ballot box against this unrelenting and unprovoked bullying by the overclass and casts protest votes for demagogic and usually ineffectual anti-establishment politicians like Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, the elite denounces the protest voters as irrational and bigoted cretins who threaten to overthrow democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law. 

Of course, human societies abhor anarchy. They will default to order, one way or another. According to Lind, people will eventually rise up to rebel against rebellion. They will discard the purveyors of anarchy, but that will mean that they will need to replace it with something old, something that they can pretend is really new.

When the current rebellion by the managerial elite against the proletariat is exhausted, as the rebellion against the bourgeoisie was exhausted generations ago, there will be nothing left to rebel against except rebellion itself.

Most people in Western countries might welcome a revolution against revolution with relief.

You may agree or disagree with Lind. Surely, his ideas are worth a post.

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Wednesday Potpourri

First, on the Bud Light death watch. Ever since some idiot marketing executive decided to try to sell to the transgendered, sales of what used to be the nation's most popular beer are down 30%. For the period between April and June this year, sales of Miller Lite and Coors Light were 50% greater than sales for Bud Light.

As the old saying goes: stick a fork in it; it’s done.

Second, on the Schadenfreude watch, we have the case of a Russian woman named Zhanna Samsonova, aka Zhanna d’Art was living in Malaysia. Being a vegan influencer with followers around the world, she had spent the last few years eating only raw fruits and vegetables. Rumor has it that she even foreswore drinking water.

As for the consequences of her uber-healthy diet. She died, sick and emaciated.

R.I.P.

Third, in the world of news that no one cares about, Joe Biden’s daughter wrote a diary about growing up with Joe as her father. In it she recounted how she was traumatized when her father forced her to take showers with him. She attributed her sexual and drug addictions to her father’s abuse.

She had to take showers late at night in order to reduce the chances that he slip into the showers with her.

The story has been around for some time now. Recently, sources have confirmed the validity of the diary. 

Naturally, no one really cares.

Or else, as the saying goes, where are feminists when we need them?

Fourth, one suspects that no political figure is quite as pathetic as climate czar John Kerry. His solution to what he imagines to be a climate crisis is, quite simply: eat less.

So, he wants to declare war on food. In his words:

“Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world. And we can’t get to net zero—we don’t get this job done—unless agriculture is front and centre as part of the solution." "You just can’t continue to both warm the planet, while also expecting to feed it. It doesn’t work. So we have to reduce emissions from the food system."

Now, if you limit your diet to raw fruits and vegetables, you can help save the planet.

In a country that respected itself John Kerry would not have had a career in politics. 

Fifth, the political movement against gender reassignment clinics has produced some good news. In states that banned child mutilation, clinics are closing. 70 out of 271 such clinics are now shut down.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 30% of transgendered children live in states that have such bans. The number, for your edification, is 81,000.

True enough, some parents have moved across state lines to find places where they can mutilate their children, but hopefully that number will be declining.

Sixth, $640,000,000. That is how much California and New York have lost in tax revenue as their citizens have decamped for warmer and more tax-friendly climes.

Seventh, Michael Shellenberger offers a Tweet about environmentally friendly solar panels. We will ignore the fact that bad weather has at times destroyed these panels. And we will ignore the fact that cloud cover can render them useless.

Shellenberger offers this:

People think solar panels are good for the environment but they’re not. They’re made with toxic heavy metals and aren’t recycled. Most are made with coal in China and produce produce 3x more CO2 than IPCC thought. And they require 300-600x more land than other energy sources.

Eighth, in Germany, a Green Party member of Parliament, one Johannes Wagner, has recommended that wealthy German citizens give up their wealth. It is their moral duty, the better to save the planet.

As I posted a couple of days ago, Europe and Germany are declining economically. Germany is deindustrializing; inflation is rising; real wages are declining. And the Green Party is promoting radical income redistribution.

Keep in mind, Angela Merkel shut down German nuclear plants, the better to impoverish and immiserate her nation. We note in passing that the government of China has just announced plans to build another half dozen nuclear power plants. Surely, it is better than blackouts. 

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Girl Bosses

At the risk of sounding sexist, or worse, I present the latest reflections on Girl Power. Or better, on Girl Bosses. I assume this risk because the theories are not mine. They come to us from one Charlotte Cowles, via a site called Bustle.

Cowles argues persuasively that when women are in charge, when they are managers, their staff tends to consider them as either therapists or mothers or both. Staff members, especially those who have XX chromosomes, tend to confide in their female managers. They share their feelings and request, if not require, emotional support.

Female staff tend not to be quite so emotionally needy when they work for male managers, and we can extrapolate to say that certain female managers, think Margaret Thatcher, did not have female staff whining about their emotions.

Perhaps this is why Thatcher notably surrounded herself with male staff. She did not want to risk having young women take her for a mother figure or a therapist.

Cowles reports the case of Alice, a manager who does not live in Wonderland:

Since Alice became a manager over a decade ago, she has frequently struggled with the emotional investment that her direct reports — particularly some of the younger ones — seem to expect from her. “I often wonder whether it’s because I’m a woman, and a Millennial, or both,” she said. “I’ve thought about saying, ‘This is not the time or place to talk about these matters.’ But there’s a risk with that, especially as a woman, of being labeled as an insensitive bitch.”

Cowles is nothing if not fair and balanced. She points out that a Girl Boss can produce considerable loyalty by allowing herself to be used as a therapist-mother:

Conversely, Alice knows that her approachability can be a strength. “I think it made my team loyal to me,” she said. “And they may have been willing to work harder because they felt a personal bond and connection.” Still, it was exhausting to be everyone’s dumping ground. “Especially when I became a mom, dealing with so many emotional dynamics with my team was particularly draining,” she said. “On some days, I felt like I had a toddler at home, and eight more at work.”

And yet, private feelings, not to mention private parts, have no place in the workplace. Sharing them distracts from the task at hand. 

So, Alice chose to quit her job, and found another where she only manages one person:

She recently quit for a job where she only manages one person. "It's a big relief," she said.

In a strange way, companies now have a more therapeutic workplace, and perhaps, given the psychological deformities that characterize Gen Z, this is necessary. Anyway, therapy culture is invading the workplace.

Now mostly in their 30s and the largest generation in the American labor force, Millennials have developed a reputation for bringing sensitivity and compassion to the workplace, a stark contrast to the more authoritarian bosses of the Gen X or Boomer eras. It’s a byproduct of the “bring your whole self to work” ethos that many corporate cultures have tried to adopt in recent years, and that Gen-Z workers have come to embrace. (On TikTok, they extol the benefits of Millennial bosses as “the mom and dad we wish we had.”)

Respondents also said that their managers have just as much influence on their mental health as their spouse, and even more than their therapist or doctor. 

Of course, this is mostly limited to Girl Bosses. No one really expects an aspiring alpha male to be willing to sit around listening to you whine about your boyfriend’s bad behavior, or even his good behavior.

What’s more, the emotional labor of tending to employees’ mental well-being often goes unrecognized, especially from women. A 2022 report by McKinsey found that female leaders “are doing more to support employee well-being but face higher stress levels as a result.” That extra work has a cost: Women leaders reported higher levels of burnout, and were 1.5 times more likely than men to have switched jobs because their workload was unmanageable. To that end, the UKG survey found that 70 percent of managers would take a pay cut right now for a job that “better supports their mental wellness.”

Of course, corporate managers are not trained to deal with such situations. And they find it difficult to function or to respect their staff when they have been brought into staff’s more personal private matters. Again, sharing your private thoughts is one step toward sharing your private parts, and there is already far too much of that in most workplaces.

Then there’s the problem of getting emotionally enmeshed with her employees. “I’ve learned to not directly ask about people’s feelings, because sometimes that isn’t received well,” she said. 

“For example, I once asked a direct report if she was okay, because she seemed angry. And she told me that she didn’t want to be characterized as an angry person. That was a real learning moment for me — I was trying to be sensitive, but I needed to observe people’s boundaries, too.”

Like Alice, Girl Bosses who feel distracted by everyone’s emotional needs tend to abandon their managerial roles. 

This type of overwhelm, and the resulting exodus from managerial roles, is inevitable in organizations that don’t have clear boundaries, said Holly Howard, a business consultant who helps companies navigate management challenges as they grow. “It’s great that workplaces are acknowledging that mental well-being is important,” she explained. “But there’s been a pendulum swing towards managers assuming the role of therapist for their employees, and that's not healthy either. Most managers are not qualified for that, nor should they feel like they need to be.”

She sometimes fantasizes about going back to the days when people weren’t expected to be so emotionally present at work. “I know that there are upsides to being authentic with our teams, but it puts a lot of pressure on everyone to be transparent even when they don’t want to be, and that takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth.”

For now it’s an open question. Or perhaps it’s an open wound, designed to provide emotional support to GenZ, a group of people that has suffered from therapy culture and that cannot function in a workplace environment without having emotional support animals.

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