Working in Captivity

It appears that the workforce has become the target of the American government. We are witnessing unprecedented human rights violations against workers in the US including deportations and mass firings that don’t appear to follow basic HR practices.

When exploring better ways to communicate what I feel in workplaces and what I see/hear from many business clients, I ran into a book called Horses and Stress written by Joe Camp (2013). Reading this concise and timely material has allowed me to glean useful information about the wisdom of horses plus learn more about the abuses that horses have had to endure at the hands of humans. Mr.Camp asserts that there is substantial causation between the freedom we have taken from horses by forcing them to live in captivity, and the health problems they are enduring. My topic for today’s article has been inspired by his findings that animals suffer heightened stress loads due to their forced confinement in one location; similar parallels can be drawn for humans and office-only lifestyles.

I want to express here and now that I do not agree with ‘back to the office’ mandates.

My perspective as a business coach, life coach, and analyzer of systems built on human labor, is that tone deaf Return To Office mandates will further enforce severe health issues for our working class. As a member of said working class, I push back on the demand by ‘leaders’ that positive work outputs are solely derived from enforcement of sub-optimal working conditions that damage the health and well-being of our work force.

During the pandemic we gained the term ‘essential’ as a reward. Post pandemic we’ve been stripped of our dignity, our value, and our rights. During the pandemic we proved across all industries that we can excel when given greater freedom to choose our working environments. Post pandemic the majority of workplaces have lept back as fast as they can to pre-pandemic “horse stall” working environments, despite proof that a stall is not needed. The heightened stress response in a horse’s body when forced to accept a stall compared to a pasture is life altering. This is because they are genetically designed to live a life of freedom, not to exist in captivity. The same can be said for humans.

I am very confused why workers who were just considered essential are being deported and fired. Recent examples involve Americans being deported while driving to work, being arrested while working to suppress active wildfires, and individuals being fired for doing the jobs they were hired to perform. Even if your family is not experiencing one of these scenarios, just seeing this happen to your coworkers is traumatizing. Being asked to perform the job of an effective co-worker who was there yesterday but is gone today can be debilitating. Trauma causes a heightened stress response. And a heightened stress response can cause compounding health issues. Why are we placing undue stress on the working class directly after we survived a pandemic?

As you begin to think more on the link between working in captivity and return to office mandates, I encourage you to notice more about your day to day office-only working environments. I’ve recognized that my body has been telling me something I could no longer ignore, when at the hint of my coworker closing their blinds to help us see the screen better, I would involuntarily cringe.

Yes, I care about that spreadsheet but I don’t care about it more than experiencing daylight.

I have a friend who works in the criminal legal system and has done so for over 20 years. Her team was called back into work during the height of the pandemic in offices with no windows. None. This was in a new building that they had just designed to be function better for their staff. No windows?! How can we do better? Why would workplaces be rationing light for people fighting for justice?

Do you remember when the pandemic first began and local and federal government officials were limiting group events to only 50 people? This was one of the first restriction I recall from the Spring of 2019. Then the restrictions grew to include public health officials directives on workplace call-ins of sick employees. If I had one employee who reported sick to work I was forced to call the county and report it to them.Then the directives included expanded settings such as our grocery store and Home Depot runs. Every week was a new ‘restriction’ and as human activities became hyper-regulated, the majority of Americans flowed with these new changes to daily life. A new rule would be set in place and although it was not easy we followed orders. We worked through it. Some days we lost hope, some days we gained it. During that time I led a team of 37 staff and our ability to adapt and outperform our competitors grew. When my staff demanded greater freedom to work from their houses, apartments, corner coffee-shops, I could not think of an argument that would hold water against their demands. I said yes, we formed hybrid policies that they helped me create. I worked harder to raise their salaries and cut down on turnover.

“Lessons learned” is a term we leverage in the outdoor education field when drilling risk management scenarios. In 2025, it seems that many lessons we learned across industries during the pandemic are being actively denied and ignored.

I cannot be the only one in this vast and complex world who wonders why it’s the responsibility of office workers to bring back the profitability of urban centers so that local governments can grow their tax base?

My clients are being rounded up and ordered back into their stalls despite what we learned between 2020-2024 so that property values don’t decline, despite the growing risks to their health; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. If you experience similar feelings in your body that I do, as if I am a horse that is being led back into its stall and the latch is being thrown shut again, you are not alone.

Physiological stress caused by working in an office setting compared to an environment where we have more control cannot be ignored. I recently visited a workplace where 8 out of 9 people I came into contact with during a 10 hour period all showed signs of diminishing health.This included either directly witnessing employees describe in detail their position specific health problems or directly witnessing their use of office adaptations to get through their day (i.e., different ergonomic equipment effecting typing, sitting, and standing). Wow! That’s 89% of people in a single day whose health has been affected by their in-person job setting. Health issues caused by our working environments have become the new uniform.

First, why is it necessary, post pandemic, that someone watch me at all times, as I:

• Think,

• Respond to emails,

• Read content,

• Type into Excel spreadsheets,

• Place my dry erase marker to my whiteboard to conceive of a solution to yet another ill -conceived policy by government entities that will cause consequences for humanity?

Or, why is your new boss giving you (2) 30-minute lunch breaks instead of 1 hour? What if you want to:

• Go for a run,

• Go for a walk,

• Call your kid,

• Sit outside and hear the rustle of the trees and listen to the birds,

• Meet a friend,

• Call ATT because your phone is broken…while your phone is broken,

• Call the support help line for your student loans,

• Drive home for lunch,

• Do anything else you want to do with the time you have earned, that fits into 1 hour?

But what if during the pandemic you enjoyed:

• Pacing up and down the stairs by yourself while you generated ideas,

• Making a cup of coffee while you checked transactions remotely from your organizations bank account,

• Stretching before Zoom meetings,

• Scheduling your day to match when your brain performs the best for clients?

It is wonderful if a standing desk helps you feel some semblance of control in your brick and mortar office space. However, the answer to the working classes demands for more freedom and greater well-being is not JUST the standing desk. It is to continue offering greater flexibility in work schedules, more freedom in remote and/hybrid work settings, and to offer substantial pay increases that reflect the value of their work to your organization. These are just some of the lessons we learned coming out of the pandemic, that somehow has gotten erased in less than 2 years of scouring every last centimeter of the earths surface for profit.

As employers care for their workers well-being decreases (financial, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual), the quality of service being delivered to customers has also decreased. If you don’t believe me, think about any one “service” you received 10 years ago. Now compare it to that same service but in 2025. I rest my case.

We’re stuck. Our workforce is demoralized, exhausted, and has no more to give under the current conditions. And the price of goods and services has jumped exponentially due to trade policies in the US (someone’s idea of a good time).

Despite everything I have written in this article up until now, I have managed to identify a solution that goes farther than your office furniture and that is to build your future for yourself. As a member of the working class we appear to be barely surviving but merely existing amidst a game of Seek & Hide. It can take the form of searching for positions that still offer a hybrid/remote schedule with any available time left after your office-only job. It can be played in those quiet moments where you are launching multiple Linked In job alerts for all positions that pay over what you are currently making and then have to manage the hundreds of job alerts you receive in areas you don’t want to relocate to and have nothing to do with the job alert you set. As you manage to architect your freedom and a viable escape route out of corporate driven schemes, it’s normal to lose confidence and gain second guesses. What if we could travel back in time and resuscitate the concept of one entrepreneur helping another entrepreneur which helps another entrepreneur and so on? Along the way, income can be generated, staff can be paid better, an office can once again magically shift back to your kitchen table, and all of this can allow sustainability to thrive (hold the mass firings of the educated and competent please).

Strive to squirrel away 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there and dream. You are capable of building what you want for yourself and you deserve a work environment that adds to your health and well-being. If the freedom of working from home or working in a hybrid setting wasn’t the antithesis of working in captivity, the ‘great’ majority wouldn’t be so adamantly opposed to the idea. But alas despite the proven results that individuals and teams can work effectively from environments that allow for greater freedoms, and even in catastrophic times such as global pandemics, we are being told: Return to the Office.

If you don’t want to return to your stall we can help support and boost your individual aspirations to include an environment that generates more health, wealth, and freedom over time. If even 1 more person gets to the bottom of this article using the mystical powers of Substack, my work is working.