It’s human nature.

Work has always been a central part of what it means to be human, from our survival to a sense of social cohesion. But over time, we’ve stripped meaning, connection, and agency from our work.

Our worth has become defined by what we produce; we’ve lost the idea that our value exists beyond how useful or productive we are.

It’s not just a crisis of work, it’s a crisis of identity. And the result? Over 80% of us are unhappy at work.

A shared responsibility.

No economic system can thrive if it burns out the very people it relies on. To build sustainable, productive economies, we need human beings to flourish at work.

But while companies and systems fail us, we internalise pressure to fix it ourselves.

We try to ‘set boundaries’ or ‘find our purpose’, and ‘bring our whole self to work’ - but we do so within environments that are designed to fragment and disconnect; reducing our identity to productivity and extracting relational from transactional.

Real change requires both:

• Individual agency and

• System-level responsibility.

We need to empower people within environments that are designed to support, not sabotage them.

We need to put the human back into work

The future of work will not be measured by efficiency or productivity alone, but through adaptability, creativity, resilience, and social cohesion.

It’s a profoundly human, relational, and contextual thing. We need to bring the human being back to work.