No, the thing I hated the most about my desk job was that in the 18 months following my hire, I gained 30 lbs.
Thirty. Whole. Pounds.
An average gain of 3–4 lbs per month, or 13.6 kg of net gain in a year and a half if you’d prefer to read my pain in metric increments.
I’m not even rounding up for emphasis — just rounding out until I needed new pants.
This isn’t vanity — this is a health concern
My stomach pain was the worst it had ever been. My chronic back pain was the worst it had ever been. My triglycerides finally reached the threshold where my doctor stopped saying, “let’s keep an eye on that,” and started saying, “you need to make some changes.”
If this were just about buying new pants, I would have grumbled, bought the damn pants and gotten over it. But my health concerns won’t be fixed with a new pair of slacks.
My employer certainly won’t help. Ultimately the health and happiness of the employee is still the employee’s responsibility in most of the US. Some companies have decided they have a role or even the majority of the responsibility, but not so in my particular land of cubicles.
I am always fascinated by companies with on-site gyms or who pay health club memberships for their employees. Even the ones who do successful wellness programs with almost no budget have my awe. They create incentivized weekly team and individual challenges or similar. My former employer (I think) offers a discount to some commercial gym in town, but the discount is so pitiful that I’d probably get a better deal if I waited for a sales flyer to hit my mailbox. There’s a Weight Watcher’s discount. Again, a pittance. Oprah’s commercials present a bigger monetary incentive to join.
But discounts don’t create engagement. Discounts don’t encourage a culture of self-care or a community of activeness. Discounts don’t engender health accountability, not at the cubicle minion level and certainly not at the management level.
I (finally) took advantage of a free yoga class after 18 months on the job. But the pervasive office culture is that no one uses their free pass for a class. Come to think of it, I was the only person in my department to take advantage of the class waiver the entire time I was there.
My employer bought the entire office convertible standing desks. Yay. And sure, sitting may be the new smoking — but sitting isn’t the only way my workplace might have been trying to kill me.
I slid into this hole, feeling powerless the whole way down.
Stressed. Overwhelmed. Frustrated.
How did I cope? By opening a bottle of wine with my girlfriends. We did our cathartic Wine&Whine as many nights a week as we were able to. They tended to whine about men. I almost always whined about work.
Retrospectively, the wine probably wasn’t a good idea.
But I was desperately reaching out for something. If I were the hero in an action movie sliding down a deep ravine, I would have reached out and grabbed some conveniently placed root or tree branch. But I didn’t find a root. I reached out and found a bottle of wine — many bottles of wine. And I numbed out.
The numbing was my lifeline. It sucked as a lifeline, but since I couldn’t parse all the many facets of my work-related despair — the money, underwhelming office ethos, unfulfilled ambition, not doing something I valued, never being valued in my workplace — I took a big step back, a big deep breath, and a big full glass.
Vent. Numb. Sleep. Go back to work the next day and start the cycle again.
Why must we express ourselves through food?
I have a new theory. The toxicity of your workplace is in direct correlation to the kind of food coworkers bring in to share with everyone else.
If the only thing anyone ever brings in is “numbing out treats” like doughnuts, candy and cakes, you’re in a highly toxic workplace.
If your coworkers bring in store-bought but novel things — like apple cider in season or something special only made by the local bakery — then you’re looking at a nice middle of the toxicity-to-happiness scale.
If the majority of what your coworkers bring in is homemade or homegrown, or plain healthful and tasty, then you’re probably in one of the least toxic workplaces.
In my happiest jobs, I’ve brought in focaccia, homemade fermented pickles, spicy pork bulgogi and more, and enjoyed my coworker’s homemade fudge and old-school sugar cookie recipes hand-frosted in wacky colors. They’ve brought in fruit trays of berries and boxes of extra tomatoes and zucchinis when their gardens started overproducing. The kind of workplace that has amazing pot lucks and even a chili contest.
But the worse everyone feels at work, the worse the shared food becomes. The more incentivized you become to take a piece of cake to make the person who baked it from a Betty Crocker box mix feel vaguely appreciated for bringing it in because certainly, no one appreciates them for doing their job.
Please accept this lackluster, sugary consumable as a token of my regard. I ingest it with deep regret and add it to the ring of fat around my middle that simultaneously diminishes my quality of life and accelerates my mortality. Thank you for your thoughtfulness.
Having realized my workplace was trying to kill me, it still wasn’t easy to pivot. Oh sure, the advice is easy to give, hard to take:
- Pack your lunch
- Eat more salad
- Avoid office doughnuts
- Avoid office gossip
- Find time to exercise
But what no one emphasizes is that when you make the pivot toward health, you’re usually so unhealthy that you feel like shit when you make an effort. And you feel like shit when you don’t make an effort. And you feel like shit when you refuse to eat the office “treats” because exiting that habit is a social minefield.
No one else really wants you to get healthy. That’s all you. The only thing anyone in cubicle land wants is for you not to bother them. And I get it. A day when no one bothered me and I could just get my work done would have been a fricking miracle.
I climbed out of this hole, taking back my power the whole way up
I quit the Wine&Whine. I didn’t fully quit wine; I just quit the friend group whose existence was based on alcohol consumption and shared misery.
I bought a 32-ounce water bottle and took it with me to work every morning, emptying it twice at the office and at least once at home in the evening. I simply felt better for not being constantly dehydrated.
I started meditating. People like to get a bit woo-woo about meditation. I’m not one of them. To me, meditation is a giant fuck you to the world. I’m gonna close my eyes for the next 15 minutes, think only about myself, and pretend you don’t exist.
Every night after work, I got on the elliptical for at least twenty minutes, no matter how shitty I felt. It helped that the elliptical machine was in a grim room of my unfinished basement — I didn’t worry for one moment about what I was wearing, how I looked, or even if I had shoes on. My workout clothes no longer fit. I couldn’t hook my sports bra. But with no one looking at me but some spiders, I just slipped on a lounging bra and a giant ratty t-shirt and didn’t worry whether or not I was one of those women with crazy asymmetrical bouncing.
And I came to an epiphany that made me cry, down there in the basement while stepping away but going nowhere:
Twenty minutes on the elliptical each night was the place where I felt the happiest on any given workday.
And that’s when I quit my job
I drafted my resignation letter on my phone while chugging away on the elliptical one night. I didn’t send it from there, but maybe I should have. I wanted to do the more socially adept thing and have the letter ready but tell my manager face-to-face.
I didn’t say in the letter that the highlight of my day should not be a dark, gloomy room full of spiders where I briefly exercise next to the cat’s litter box. Nothing about that says joy. But that’s where I was.
Quitting my job as a cubicle minion was the most important step I took toward getting healthy. But it wasn’t the first step. If I hadn’t taken and stuck to a handful of smaller changes, I never would have had the mental clarity to get out of a job that was killing me.
Quitting wasn’t a magic bullet for weight loss (although my diet improved as my mental health took a turn for the better). Having quit prior to 2020, the pandemic lockdowns proved an unforeseen obstacle in taking off the 30 lbs. that I’d managed to pack on at the job.
The health of the cubicle minion is in decline
It’s been in decline for decades. We continue to treat employees as resources, not people. And as with other resources, the businesses that wring the most value out of the resource for the smallest price are the businesses that succeed and grow.
We may have better labor protections than we did a hundred years ago — the average cubicle minion is unlikely to lose a hand at work or be gravely injured by machinery — but the basic mindset hasn’t changed:
Employees are still treated by many companies and managers as replaceable, interchangeable cogs.
Employees feel threatened that if they don’t toe the line and give more and more, they will be denied raises that barely meet cost-of-living increases. Or that they may lose the job entirely. And so they embrace the mental and physical costs of deteriorating health as “just how it is.”
OSHA will cite a workplace for operations that can and do lead to the sudden death of an employee, but they aren’t going to do anything about the cubicle that is cumulatively taking years off your life.
That’s up to the employee. So is it any wonder that a year and a half into a pandemic that’s made many people realize how brief and fragile life is, employees are saying no more? That in August 2021, nearly 4.3 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs? Not to me.
But then again, I escaped my life as a cubicle minion two years prior. And I haven’t regretted it once.
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