The Human Battery Crisis

After a video post I did yesterday, something surfaced that I think about often: how deeply we outsource our lives.

For many of us, our sense of worth was shaped early. We learned, often before we had language, that acceptance and safety came from being useful, achieving, pleasing, performing. And when we failed to meet those expectations, shame filled the gap.

So we learned to try harder.

Different stories, different details, but the same core wound. Worth became something to earn, not something to be. Over time, that internal pattern didn’t stay personal. It scaled.

Most of us are largely unaware of how deeply our biology, our need for connection, safety, and belonging — shapes our behaviour. And we are even less aware of how modern systems quietly exploit that biology to power the economic engine.

In a very real sense, we’ve become human batteries,  constantly discharging energy into systems that were never designed to recharge us.

We outsource:

• our intelligence to standardized education systems

• our value to performance reviews and promotions

• our health to systems that often know less about our bodies than we do

• our wealth to structures we’ve been taught we could “never understand”

And then we wonder why we’re exhausted.

Lack-based humans build lack-based systems. Fear becomes the engine.

Right now, many values-based leaders are trying to operate with empathy, trust, and integrity inside structures that are debt-dependent, volatility-intolerant, and quarterly-optimized. That tension is not personal failure — it’s "structural misalignment."

In my coaching work, I see this constantly: good leaders doing the inner work, leading with clarity and care, and still running headfirst into environments whose capital design makes people the first lever pulled when pressure hits.

To be fair, most CEOs and CFOs will tell you the truth:

They don’t structure this way because they want people to lose. They structure this way because capital markets reward them for doing so — and punish them if they don’t.

Payroll is adjustable. Debt is not. Cash buffers hurt short-term returns. Optimizing for human continuity is often career-ending inside the current model.

The system is internally consistent,  even if it is externally destructive.

Which brings us to the real question:

What kind of system allows care and continuity to survive downturns?

Because contraction is inevitable. Cycles are natural. What isn’t inevitable is treating humans as expendable shock absorbers.

Care must be designed into the capital architecture, or it will be overridden under pressure. No amount of resilience training, culture decks, or purpose statements can protect people when the structure itself is misaligned.

• The nervous system — "human and organizational" — always answers to structure, not slogans.
• A business is either extractive by necessity or regenerative by design.
• And I believe we have an opportunity — right now — to choose the latter.

So the question I keep asking is this:

What capital structures allow leaders to remain in alignment with their values — even during contraction?

That’s the work ahead.