We have spent decades asking what organizations need from human beings. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring productivity, performance, engagement, efficiency, retention, innovation, and growth. Entire disciplines have developed around understanding how to recruit people, motivate them, organize them, develop their talents, improve their performance, and keep them from leaving. We know how to measure what employees produce, how effectively teams collaborate, how customers behave, and whether workplace cultures are helping or hindering the objectives of the business.
We have spent far less time asking a different question:
What is participation in our organizations doing to the human beings inside them?
This is not simply about whether people enjoy their jobs. It is not reducible to job satisfaction, employee engagement, compensation, work-life balance, or even mental health. All of those things matter, and many employers have made meaningful progress in taking some of them more seriously. What interests me reaches beneath them. It concerns what happens to a person’s relationship with their own life when they spend a substantial portion of that life inside a particular economic and organizational system.
Work is one of the primary environments in which modern human beings experience existence. It organizes our days and claims enormous portions of our attention. It influences where we live, how we understand success, who we spend time with, what possibilities are available to us, and how much control we have over our lives.
Our occupations become part of our identities, and workplaces often become communities of a kind. Salaries affect security and freedom, while professional standing can shape status and self-perception. The rhythms and demands of work do not remain contained within the hours we are employed. They enter our bodies, relationships, homes, weekends, sleep, and even our imaginations of the future.
For this reason, organizational life cannot be separated neatly from the question of human flourishing. We do not cease being existential creatures when we arrive at work. We bring with us the same human needs and vulnerabilities that accompany us everywhere else: the need for meaning and belonging, the desire for agency, and the struggle to know who we are and whether our lives matter. We also bring our awareness that time is finite, our difficulty living with uncertainty, and our need for a trustworthy relationship with ourselves, other people, and reality.
Yet the dominant economic imagination has often treated human beings much more narrowly. The language itself tells part of the story. People become labor, talent, headcount, human capital, human resources, full-time equivalents. None of these terms is necessarily malicious. Businesses need categories and shorthand in order to function at scale. But abstractions have consequences when we forget what has been abstracted. A human resource is still a human life.
This tension has become difficult to ignore. Many organizations now invest heavily in employee wellbeing. Companies offer mental-health benefits, wellness initiatives, flexible schedules, mindfulness programs, generous leave policies, coaching, professional development, employee resource groups, and initiatives designed to increase psychological safety. These developments represent a genuine improvement over workplace cultures in which the inner lives of employees were considered irrelevant to the employer.
Still, something remains unresolved.
A person can have access to therapy through an employee assistance program and spend every working day feeling that their contribution has no meaning. Someone can practice mindfulness before entering an organization where they are afraid to tell the truth. An employee can have unlimited vacation while belonging to a culture that quietly punishes anyone who actually disconnects.
A company can celebrate authenticity while rewarding conformity. It can proclaim a compelling purpose while employees experience their own work as disconnected from it. It can speak constantly about its people being a family while making decisions that remind everyone exactly where power resides.
None of this means wellbeing initiatives are useless. It means they are being asked to solve problems that originate at a deeper level.
There is a significant difference between helping human beings cope successfully within an organizational environment and asking whether the environment itself supports a healthy relationship with being alive.
The first approach focuses primarily on the individual. How can this person become more resilient, manage stress, establish better boundaries, improve emotional regulation, avoid burnout, or find greater satisfaction in their work? The second turns toward the organization and asks what kinds of human experience its structures, incentives, values, hierarchies, expectations, and culture are continually producing.
This distinction is important to note because wellbeing can easily become another form of adaptation. If a workplace generates chronic anxiety, alienation, powerlessness, or self-betrayal, teaching people to manage those experiences more effectively does not necessarily address their source. Sometimes the problem is not that human beings have failed to develop sufficient resilience for the system. Sometimes the system is asking human beings to become resilient to conditions they should not have to normalize.
This is where the conversation about work needs to deepen.
The central question is no longer simply whether an organization is successful, whether its employees are satisfied, or whether its workplace policies are progressive. We also need to ask what participation in it requires of a person at the level of their humanity.
They may be required to silence parts of themselves, perform acceptable identities, surrender agency, compartmentalize their lives, or become someone they do not recognize in order to belong. Over time, this can shape their sense of meaning, their relationship with truth, and their ability to trust their own perceptions. It can alter their experience of belonging and dignity, their understanding of who they are, and their relationship with time and purpose.
These concerns point toward a dimension of organizational life that our existing language for workplace wellbeing does not fully capture. They lead into the territory I have come to describe as Existential Health.
And they bring us to a question that could change how we think about business itself:
What does participation in this organization do to a person’s relationship with being alive?
Existential Health begins with a simple recognition: human health involves more than keeping the body alive, maintaining psychological functioning, and sustaining healthy social relationships.
Human beings also have to find ways of living with the fact of existence itself. We have to navigate meaning and meaninglessness, identity and change, belonging and estrangement, agency and limitation, uncertainty and the desire for certainty. We live with the knowledge that our time is finite. We have to determine what matters without ever possessing complete information, construct lives without knowing exactly how those lives will unfold, and maintain some workable relationship with a reality that does not always conform to our expectations or desires.
I use the term Existential Health to describe the quality of our relationship with these fundamental conditions of being alive. It concerns how we relate to meaning, purpose, identity, mortality, belonging, agency, uncertainty, relationship, and reality itself.
Existential health does not mean that a person has resolved these dimensions of life or arrived at permanent clarity about them. A healthy relationship with existence includes the ability to live meaningfully without requiring life to become fully explainable, to experience belonging without surrendering oneself, to exercise agency while acknowledging genuine limits, to endure uncertainty without manufacturing false certainty, and to remain in contact with reality even when reality disrupts the stories through which we have organized our lives.
These concerns are often associated with philosophy, spirituality, therapy, or moments of personal crisis. We tend to notice them when someone experiences bereavement, leaves a religion, confronts mortality, goes through a divorce, loses a sense of identity, or reaches a point when the life they have constructed no longer feels like their own.
But this dimension of life does not emerge only during exceptional moments. It is present all the time, including during the hours we spend answering emails, sitting in meetings, managing employees, serving customers, negotiating contracts, making presentations, building products, meeting deadlines, and trying to earn a living.
Work is therefore not merely an economic activity laid on top of an otherwise separate human life. It is one of the places where our relationship with being alive is continually formed.
Consider identity. One of the first questions people often ask when meeting someone is, “What do you do?” The answer is rarely interpreted as a simple description of how a person earns money. Occupation carries signals about education, status, competence, values, lifestyle, social location, and achievement.
But this dimension of life does not emerge only during exceptional moments. It is present all the time, including during the hours we spend answering emails, sitting in meetings, managing employees, serving customers, negotiating contracts, making presentations, building products, meeting deadlines, and trying to earn a living.
The same is true of belonging. Workplaces are among the primary communities of adult life. People spend years alongside colleagues, develop friendships, share difficulties, celebrate accomplishments, experience conflict, establish rituals, absorb a common vocabulary, and participate in a collective story about who “we” are.
Organizations do not merely employ people. They create social worlds. Those worlds can offer meaningful connection, but they can also establish conditions of belonging that require conformity. When acceptance depends upon performing the right enthusiasm, suppressing disagreement, adopting the institution’s interpretation of reality, or sacrificing important parts of oneself, belonging begins to carry a human cost.
Agency is shaped there as well. Workplaces teach people what kinds of choices they are permitted to make, whose judgment counts, when they are allowed to speak, what happens when they challenge authority, and whether their perception of a problem will be taken seriously.
Over years, these experiences influence more than professional behavior. A person repeatedly rewarded for compliance and penalized for independent judgment can gradually lose confidence in their own discernment. Someone working inside an environment where obvious problems cannot safely be named learns to separate what they perceive from what they are permitted to acknowledge.
This is one reason organizational culture reaches much deeper than perks, policies, slogans, or employee satisfaction. Every organization creates an implicit human environment. Through its incentives, hierarchies, language, stories, rituals, expectations, and distribution of power, it communicates ideas about what a person is worth, what success means, whose voice matters, what can be questioned, what must remain unspoken, and what someone must become in order to thrive there.
These environments are, in this sense, meaning-making systems.
They tell stories about why the work matters, creating narratives of progress, competition, innovation, service, disruption, excellence, growth, or impact. Within these narratives are heroes and failures, measures by which people learn whether they are succeeding, and systems that distribute recognition and status. Certain sacrifices become admirable, while certain boundaries are interpreted as evidence of insufficient commitment.
Even the vocabulary of the workplace can shape how employees understand their own experiences. Sometimes these stories genuinely connect people with meaningful participation in something larger than themselves. At other times, they provide a sophisticated language for disguising extraction.
The distinction cannot be determined by examining the mission statement.
A company can declare that its people are its greatest asset while routinely treating them as expendable. It may proclaim a social purpose while creating internal conditions of fear, celebrate innovation while punishing dissent, or describe employees as empowered while concentrating meaningful decisions within a small circle of authority. Even the invitation to “bring your whole self to work” can conceal an unspoken condition: only certain parts of that self are actually welcome.
The existential question cuts through the rhetoric because it focuses on lived experience. It asks what happens to people through sustained participation in the system.
People may become more capable of meaningful agency, or learn to distrust their own judgment. Belonging can enlarge them or require conformity and self-erasure. Work can connect them with something genuinely worthwhile, or organizational purpose can remain little more than leadership language. Healthy cultures allow inconvenient realities, uncertainty, failure, limits, and mistakes to be acknowledged. Unhealthy ones reward conformity, performance, and the gradual reduction of human beings to useful abstractions.
These are not peripheral questions about employee experience. They concern the kind of relationship with life that an organization is helping to cultivate.
This also changes the way we understand responsibility for human flourishing. No employer can provide meaning for another human being, guarantee a person’s sense of purpose, resolve the uncertainty of existence, or manufacture belonging on demand. Nor should employers assume responsibility for the total wellbeing of their employees. That would give organizations an authority over human life they should not possess. Existential Health is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that institutions should become the ultimate source of identity, meaning, belonging, or purpose for the people within them.
The responsibility is more modest and, in another sense, more demanding. Organizations can examine whether the conditions they create support or undermine people’s ability to remain authors and participants in their own lives. They can ask whether their structures unnecessarily diminish agency, distort reality, demand self-betrayal, manufacture dependence, or turn belonging into a reward for conformity. They can consider whether the pursuit of their objectives requires forms of human adaptation that gradually separate people from themselves.
Once we begin asking these questions, another possibility comes into view. We have long understood that economic systems can extract natural resources from ecosystems and labor from human bodies. We are increasingly aware that modern economies also extract attention, emotion, creativity, personal data, and psychological energy.
There is another form of extraction we have barely learned to name.
It is possible for an organization to extract something from the human experience of being alive itself.
Extraction is one of the defining logics of the modern economy.
For centuries, economic development has depended upon taking something that exists in the world and converting it into something that can produce value. Forests become timber. Mountains yield minerals. Rivers generate energy. Land becomes property. Human effort becomes labor. Time becomes productivity. Attention generates advertising revenue. Behavior becomes data. Creativity becomes intellectual property.
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