One of our learners, in higher education, wrote this after a module on workplace mental health:

“We should value good mental health because it is healthy, not because it is profitable. I’ve learnt a lot about how ‘the machine’ values our mental health. Enlightening, but also a little sad.”

They’ve noticed something we’ve been trained not to.

Richard Murphy argues that the loneliness crisis isn’t caused by phones, or by a generation gone soft. It’s caused by internalised neoliberalism. We’ve been taught to measure ourselves by income, status and what we own, and to compete instead of connect. The numbers track it. People who feel lonely often or always are rising. People who never feel lonely are falling. It’s worst among the under-30s, the ones who’ve never known anything else.

You can see the withdrawal everywhere. Young people out of work and education. Fewer relationships. People retreating into a screen and a feed rather than a room full of others. It gets read as fragility. A resilience problem. Something wrong with them.

I’d put it the other way round.

People aren’t withdrawing because they’re weak. They’re withdrawing from systems that only value what they produce. And the workplace is where that lesson gets taught most clearly. Ranked by output. Measured by job title. Always another target, never quite enough. Then we hand someone a wellbeing app and a mindfulness webinar and wonder why they’ve checked out.

You cannot app your way out of a culture that tells people they’re only worth what they generate.

Murphy’s antidote is a single word: enough. And a workplace can actually choose that one. Decide that people matter because they’re well, not because they’re useful. Make connection the point of the place, not a perk bolted onto it. Notice the person before the output.

That isn’t the soft option. It’s the most direct fix we’ve got for a problem everyone keeps calling complicated.

The learner who wrote that reflection wasn’t handed the word “neoliberalism.” They arrived at it themselves, sat with what the machine was really asking of them, and found it sad. That clarity is what I want more workplaces to be brave enough to feel.