Why We Devalue the Humanities... and Ourselves

In a world of global turmoil, it can be hard to see how the future is brighter. There is a path, and it begins and ends with humanity. One part of the solution is valuing humanities acumen at work. By leveling up our collective understanding of how humans work, what makes us tick and what a brighter future means, we bring a new level of sophistication to our wayfinding.

The Hidden Curriculum: Worth Must Be Earned

From the first report card to the latest performance review, we’re taught that human worth is something to earn, display, and defend. Grades, rankings, titles, targets—these become our shorthand for value. Over time, we learn to override basic signals from the body and heart. Rise earlier. Sit longer. Push harder. Don’t feel. Produce.

When we normalize self‑constraint, we come to believe emotions don’t belong, that logic should rule, and that disciplines concerned with meaning, ethics, and belonging are luxuries. Discounting humanity becomes policy disguised as professionalism.

The contradictions are everywhere. Organizational excellence is carrying out mass layoffs with crisp efficiency. Leaders praised for community philanthropy yet find living wage and equity concerning initiatives. Individuals applaud composure, then privately absorb the fallout: stress, anxiety, depression, addiction (the functional injuries of top performers).

I've long witnessed this pattern with grief in my heart, while striving to create workplace communities where people can thrive. My efforts were awarded and recognized, yet a source of sadness. Beneath the accolades and Best Employer plaques, the system continues to beat, "You are what you produce. Even if you produce, there is no safety. You are expendable. Caring about people is not on the agenda."

Conditioned Worth, Predictable Fears

When worth depends on output, a set of fear stories follows: I won’t be safe. I won’t have enough. I won’t belong. I won’t be respected. I won’t be heard. To survive, we get good at self‑suppression. We trade sleep, health, time, and relationships for compensation, status, and an elusive sense of security. Emotions reroute into overwork, burnout, numbing, or the kind of quiet despair that looks like “fine.”

This isn’t a failure of personal resilience. It’s a rational adaptation to systems that reward endurance and punish vulnerability as selfishness or weakness.

In a competitive system, you can't show weakness, even though we are all human.

How Business Culture Reinforces the Loop

Modern management principles often treat dispassion as a virtue. Decisions are objective. People impacts are regrettable. Performance problems are fixed quickly, even when outcomes were largely shaped by leadership planning, job design, or context instead of capability.

Stress gets individualized as a “resilience gap” instead of recognized as a predictable response to chronic uncertainty and cultural stressors. Organizations talk earnestly about collaboration while people walk into rooms bracing against the fear of being wrong, exposed, replaced, or diminished. Under that threat, collaboration collapses into defensiveness and position‑taking.

As noted by Bessel A. van der Kolk in relation to how trauma is inflicted, "Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating." All workplaces may be toxic sources of trauma to more or less degree.

What looks like ego is insecurity. What looks like rigidity is fear freeze response. What seems like indifference is emotional numbing. What looks like offense is a wounded core protecting itself.

Why the Humanities Are Easy to Dismiss

In a climate built on certainty, control, and output, the humanities ask uncomfortable things of us: sit with ambiguity, examine power, face emotion, grapple with meaning, acknowledge interdependence. That can feel threatening when our status depends on having answers and moving fast.

So we downplay psychology, philosophy, literature, art, ethics as “soft,” “subjective,” or “impractical.” Ironically, that dismissal is itself a psychological maneuver: the more fragile our inner sense of worth, the more we defend it with certainty or dominance.

Cultivating emotional acumen as a core leadership capability is more sophisticated than any metrics or reward.

Technical fields mirror this pattern. Brilliant clinicians, engineers, and operators still struggle when the real problem isn’t measurable with an instrument: that's unaddressed fear, misaligned incentives, and chronic overload.

Emotional Acumen Is a Strategic Capability

The smartest response isn’t suppression. It’s building emotional awareness, regulation, ethical reasoning, and meaning‑making at scale. These are the foundations of sound judgment, trust, governance, and durable value creation.

Emotional acumen enables leaders to perceive events in context, weigh risks and trade‑offs fully, exercise power with alignment, and anticipate the ripples of their decisions. It’s how strategy grows up.

What Valuing the Humanities Looks Like in Practice

• Rehumanize business decisions. Keep the numbers; add the narrative: What is the human cost of this outcome? What capacities do we need that are undermined by this decision? How are we affecting the community and society?

• Make psychological safety a standard, not a poster. Teach leaders emotional regulation and promote leaders who demonstrate it. A senior leader needs to have a vision for the community and society in which they operate.

• Design for dignity. Job design, workload, decision rights, and incentives need to reduce chronic threat and moral friction so people can contribute fully.

• Build reflective muscle. Short, regular forums for sense‑making help teams surface meaning, tensions, and a learning mindset before conflict arises.

• Take action on measures that matter. Engagement is an ethical business imperative.

Closing the Loop

We value love, respect, dignity, and compassion -- yet find these elusive at work. Our systems can be designed to reflect our values by taking an informed, balanced approach. The humanities don’t slow us down: instead, the humanities can steady us so that our business rigor is more humane and sustainable.

Inner work creates the leaders, teams, and institutions capable of holding differences without turning to conflict. That’s not softness. That’s strength. And in this moment, it’s strategy.

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In the spirit of respect and truth, I honour and acknowledge that I live and work within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

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