This article is taken from the March 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Many reasons have been offered for the declining participation of the over-50s in the workplace. But perhaps the most important one — the fact that the modern office has become a madrasa for a cult of mindfulness — has so far been overlooked.

Hardly a week goes by without my salaried friends alerting me to a fresh atrocity. “Every Teams meeting now starts with a minute when we have to close our eyes in order to ‘visualise’ our goals for the call,” complains one pal who runs a successful little business recently acquired by a US tech conglomerate. “I normally take a little peek half way through and the terrifying thing is that everyone else seems to be in a genuine trance.”

Another friend, an executive committee member of a FTSE 30 company, told me how she had to play a five-minute game of stare-eyes in order to build a “deeper connection” with her colleagues. A dinner companion ruefully described a compulsory management course where he was instructed to unleash his “inner warrior” and his “inner lover” – though, one hopes, not both at the same time.

This weirdness is even creeping into the Boardroom. We are all now expected to have coaches — and, if we don’t play nicely, we risk the Black Spot in the next “board effectiveness survey”. These coaches — often from the same head-hunting outfit that conducts the Board survey — invariably peddle a “lite” version of the new theology (“Ned, you must understand that self-knowledge is the key to an impactful contribution in the boardroom…”)

The thinking that lurks behind all of this nonsense can be traced to the Hindu and Buddhist teachings which travelled to California in the ‘60s, fused with the Me Generation of the ‘70s and then more recently became laundered and legitimised by the so-called insights of behavioural psychology.

Of course you will never hear these corporate Yogis talk about “meditation” — too overtly spiritual. But you might be recommended something called “breath work” — much more practical and purposeful.

But let’s be clear, mindfulness is a secular religion, and the worrying thing is that in Britain’s businesses it is becoming a compulsory religion. You might might even argue that the freedom of worship we have enjoyed in this country since the Restoration is now under threat.

How did all of this happen? Well, at this point it is customary for a Critic writer to invoke the Wokerati, the Blob or some other liberal conspiracy.

However, the causation is rather more nuanced. 

Throughout history, founders have often been faddists, fond of inflicting their “improving” world views on their workers.

Lord Leverhulme, the Edwardian soap monopolist now invoked as a pioneer of purpose-driven capitalism, believed that ballroom dancing could save the soul and was a proponent of outdoor sleeping in all weathers. You really have pity the poor workers of Port Sunlight who, after a hard day wrapping bars of Lifebuoy, only wanted a quiet pint of mild and a warm bed.

It is only natural then that the CBD micro-dosers behind today’s tech giants should seek to impose their Bay Area sensibilities on their global workforces.

How the bland puddings who make up the managerial classes of our own quoted companies came to be captured by the mindfulness brigade is a different story. 

Like so many of the ills of early 21st Century Britain, part of the blame lies with Fred Goodwin.

The implosion of RBS et al led to an obsession among regulators and their fellow travellers at the Financial Times about culture. The collapse of these banks was caused by bad cultures, so the argument ran. Therefore, if you could find a way of monitoring and measuring culture you would prevent future financial crises.

Pretty soon Boards were mandated to take an interest in culture, and auditors, who previously confined their work to the  numbers in the back of the annual report, started asking questions about how companies measured the purpose and vision statements emblazoned on the cover.

Managements, predictably, panicked. They knew how drive marketing funnels, sales and earnings, but cultural metrics had never been part of their business school educations. And so, the gurus, the coaches and the Ted Talk charlatans who had hitherto occupied the margins of corporate life were invited in try out their ideas on whole companies.

Every business now seems to boast of “behavioural change” programmes with intricate processes, multi-year ambitions, and, of course, a seven- or eight-figure price tag. 

Perhaps we will look back on this time as a strange moment of collective madness, like the witch trials or the dancing plagues.

But for now, it is easier for most of us to keep mumbling the mantras or, as the data is now showing, to quietly shuffle to the door and join the carefree ranks of the “economically inactive”.