Shift Four: Rejection

What happens when work stops making sense?

The Rhythm We Didn’t Know We Needed

It was Christmas Day, 1986, and 30 million people in Britain were all watching the same thing.

Thirty million. Back then, that was more than half the population.

And what were they watching? Not the Queen’s Speech. Not a blockbuster.

It was EastEnders. The one where Den Watts — the roguish landlord of the Queen Vic — reveals he knows Angie (his wife) has been lying about her terminal diagnosis. And, as he hands her divorce papers, he says with a smirk, “Happy Christmas, Ange,” — and half the country gasped at once.

Everyone saw it. Everyone talked about it because we were all there when it happened.

Back then, soaps like EastEnders or comedies like Only Fools and Horses weren’t just entertainment — they were part of our routines—anchors in the week. You didn’t need to explain who Del Boy was, or that Pauline Fowler was angry again. Everyone just knew. Even if you didn’t watch, someone in your house did. Your neighbours did. Your colleagues did.

And, when a show was on at 8:30, the evening shaped itself around it. The washing-up got done. Everyone was in place. And when the credits rolled, kettles clicked on across the country — so reliably that the National Grid had both a plan and a name for it: the TV Pickup Effect.

That was television. None of us had a personal feed or a private playlist. It was a shared schedule. You didn’t choose what to watch — not really. You watched what was on.

There was no pausing. No rewinding. No skipping. No bingeing. You either saw it when it aired or you missed it. That was the deal.

And because everyone watched at the same time, it wasn’t just background noise. It created shared context — something to talk about the next day. At school. At work. In the shops.

You didn’t just watch TV. You gathered around it.

And that mattered.

That was rhythm. A kind of cultural heartbeat that pulsed through our days and weeks. Not just in what we watched, but in how we lived. We didn’t just share programmes — we shared time.

And work moved to that same beat. Monday to Friday. Commute in the morning, tea break at eleven, pub on Friday if the week had gone well. Offices filled and emptied in unison. Emails weren’t answered at midnight. Meetings didn’t happen across five time zones.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was predictable. You knew when work started and when it stopped. You knew what it meant to have a job — and, for the most part, everyone around you knew too.

That’s changed. Not because people stopped watching, but because something else quietly took its place.

The Shock That Revealed the Cracks

The day the UK went into lockdown — Monday, 23 March 2020 — felt like one of those rare national moments when something bigger than ourselves cut through the noise. That evening, Boris Johnson appeared on television. Quiet, sombre, pre-recorded. Telling the country to stay at home.

For a moment, we tuned in again — different content, same cadence. It felt important. Shared.

It was a hinge in time — not just because of what it meant, but because of how it felt. In an age of fragmented viewing habits and endless choice, this was a return to schedule. Watching, waiting, absorbing the weight of it.

And then something unexpected happened.

For a short while, a rhythm re-emerged. The routines that cropped up — PE with Joe Wicks, banana bread, Thursday night clapping on doorsteps – weren’t mandatory, but they were shared. People stood outside with their neighbours, banging saucepans with wooden spoons. They streamed the same shows. They spoke the same cultural shorthand again. It didn’t last — but for a moment, we fell back into sync.

It reminded us how much our lives had become individualised — convenience replacing connection, personalisation fragmenting the social. For a while, lockdown made us separate and together.

But it didn’t hold.

As our offices closed and our cities fell quiet. Work moved into bedrooms, kitchens, and borrowed spaces. What had been physical and social became screen-bound and scheduled in half-hour blocks. The working day fractured, then reassembled into something that looked like continuity but wasn’t.

There were upsides. Less commuting. More flexibility. And a new honesty about how people lived — children in the background, dogs barking, lives glimpsed. For a brief while, we were granted an intimacy with colleagues that hadn’t existed before, and with it, we discovered a new level of empathy and kindness for one another.

But paradoxically, we also became more invisible to one another. There was no corridor to walk down, no glance across a desk, no sense of how the day felt for anyone else. We saw each other only at prearranged moments and only through screens. Every interaction required effort. The ambient connection that once softened work — the overheard chat, the passing comment, the unspoken understanding — fell away.

Trying to Put Things Back

When the dust began to settle, many companies and their leadership looked around and started to ask a new set of questions. How do we bring people back? What should the new normal be? How much flexibility is too much?

For some leaders, the answers came quickly. Return-to-office mandates were issued. Hybrid schedules negotiated. The subtext was often the same: we need to restore what was lost.

Jamie Dimon, the longtime Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was among the most vocal.

“Remote work doesn’t work for people who want to hustle,” he declared.

Others followed — Apple, Amazon, Disney — each issuing some version of a return-to-office mandate.

But the response wasn’t clean. There were petitions, leaks, op-eds, and attrition. Some complied. Others negotiated. Many left. What was missing wasn’t noise — it was coherence. There was no single story. No sharp moment of reckoning. Just discomfort, pushback, and drift.

And that ambiguity mattered. Rather than encourage a wave of imitation, it provoked hesitation. Other leaders watched the backlash — and paused. Not necessarily because they disagreed, but because the atmosphere had changed. The confidence was gone. This was a narrative that was no longer theirs to control.

It wasn’t about desks or commutes. It was about trust. And the quiet realisation that something had shifted — and couldn’t be unshifted.

In Erosion, I told the story of how the Aral Sea was drained. Not all at once, but slowly — the result of hundreds of decisions. And that was the metaphor for how our relationship with work was lost: a restructure here, a cost trimmed there. Gradual. Rational. Cumulative.

The detail I didn’t include was what happened next.

Years later, a dam was built to restore the Northern part of the Aral Sea. And in some ways, it worked. The water rose. Fish stocks reappeared. From a distance, it looked like the sea had returned. But the life around it didn’t.

The towns didn’t recover. The livelihoods were gone. The fishing boats had long since rusted on dry land.

The water was back — but the rhythm, the meaning, the reason for being there — wasn’t.

That’s the lesson that matters now. Not as a warning against recovery, but a caution against mistaking restoration for renewal.

Because many companies risk doing the same thing, they want to see people returning to desks, joining calls, being visible again —in the belief (or hope) that this will result in the resurrection of what was there before.

The idea that we could simply restore work assumes that this was the break. The pandemic, with all its disruption, caused the dislocation we now see in the workplace.

But perhaps that’s not quite right. The energy is different now.

What if the biggest impact of the pandemic was that it revealed something that had begun much earlier?

The Space Between Us

It isn’t solely our relationship with companies that have suffered over time. The connection to each other has also weakened because the conditions that once held us together have changed.

We brought in open plan offices to encourage collaboration — and found people wore headphones to get some peace. We rotated desks to break up cliques — and made it harder to form any. We streamlined processes to make work more efficient — and removed half the reasons people ever needed to speak to one another.

None of it felt like disconnection. Not at the time. Each change could be defended. Some were even improvements. But over time, the spaces where belonging used to live — casual encounters, shared rituals, spontaneous acts of care — got squeezed out.

Risk management played a part. So did technology. So did our obsession with productivity. No one said connection wasn’t important. It just got optimised out.

We turned social time into scheduled fun. Moved dialogue into messaging apps. Made emotional support a function of HR. The friction didn’t go away. It just got redistributed — into screens, calendars, and platforms.

And eventually, the felt sense of being part of something, of being known and needed, was just another thing we no longer prioritised.

Naming What’s Gone

Not everyone agrees on what was lost.

Some leaders are certain something’s missing — but when they try to name it, the words fall flat. “Watercooler moments.” “Serendipitous chats.” It sounds nostalgic. Slightly out of touch. But the instinct isn’t wrong. They’re reaching for something real.

What disappeared wasn’t a particular moment. It was a medium. A shared way of being in it together.

An invisible layer of care and coordination. The micro-adjustments. The offhand encouragement. The unspoken solidarity when things got hard. What psychologists call relatedness — one of three core ingredients in Self-Determination Theory, alongside autonomy and competence.

But something shifted in how we talked about motivation. In the public imagination, relatedness quietly gave way to purpose. Dan Pink’s Drive recast the core needs as autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Simon Sinek told us to start with why. These ideas caught on — not because they were wrong, but because they were marketable. Easier to promote. Easier to measure.

But purpose can’t replace people. It can inspire. It can align. But it can’t meet the deeper need to feel seen, supported, and part of something that matters to others.

Purpose can be printed on a slide. Relatedness has to be lived.

That’s the gap people are feeling now — especially younger workers, who often never experienced what older generations are trying to recreate. As Jonathan Haidt has noted, many came of age in digital environments, with less in-person experience of belonging. So when leaders talk about restoring cohesion, it often feels like control. Like being pulled into something they never chose.

And in that void, new terms have emerged — quiet quitting, resenteeism, acting your wage, bare minimum Mondays. Not as rebellion, but as attempts to describe something harder to articulate. People aren’t naming a behaviour. They’re naming a feeling — not apathy, but proportion. Not disengagement, but a shift in orientation.

We’re not in sync. We’re not even sure what we’re reacting to. The loss of relatedness isn’t just emotional. It’s epistemic. Without shared experience, we’ve lost shared meaning. And without shared meaning, even language starts to fray.

This Was Always Coming

What we’re seeing might not look like rejection.

There are no walkouts. No manifestos. No coordinated resistance. Just a slow, quiet shift. Not away from work altogether, but away from what work has become.

Some people leave. They start something of their own, take freelance paths, or move toward roles that feel more aligned. Not because they’ve lost their drive — but because they’ve lost faith in the structure they were working within.

Others stay, but redraw the boundaries. They do the job, but no longer try to outpace it. The extra effort, the discretionary stretch — it fades. Not out of spite, but because the return no longer justifies the cost.

Some drift sideways. Into side hustles, portfolio lives, creative work. If they’re going to be alone in their work anyway, they’d rather do it on their own terms.

Others remain in place, but shift their posture. They show up. But something has changed in how they engage. They’re not resisting. They’re adjusting. Quietly.

Across all of this, there’s a pattern.

It cuts across generations. Younger workers who question the climb. Older colleagues who’ve lived through wave after wave of restructure. Mid-career professionals who have done the overwork, the extras, the loyalty — and now find themselves asking: is this still worth it?

These aren’t acts of rebellion. They’re responses to something more fundamental: a loss of belief that work is still mutual.

There’s still effort. But it’s proportionate. Measured. Contingent.

And over time, that adds up. The job gets done, but the spark is gone. People pull back — not just from tasks, but from meaning. From mission. From the feeling that this matters, and that I matter in it.

We’ve been calling this all sorts of things — quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, resenteeism. But maybe those names are symptoms of something else: a collective attempt to describe a shift we don’t yet know how to talk about.

Because this wasn’t sudden. It didn’t begin with a trend or a TikTok post.

It’s been building. Quietly. Rationally. For years.

And maybe this is what rejection looks like now.

Not outrage. Not defiance. Just a steady stepping back from a version of work that no longer makes sense.

Back to the Schedule

What happened to television — the schedule, the shared experience, the centre that once held — wasn’t one thing. It was a series of innovations. More channels. Recording devices. A second TV in the bedroom. Then cable. Streaming. Smartphones.

Each one gave us something new, something better. More choice, more control, more convenience.

Until, before long, everyone was watching something different. Alone.

You didn’t have to sit down at 8:30 anymore. You didn’t have to sit with anyone. You could pause, rewind, skip, binge, or ignore it entirely.

Entertainment became personal. And something went missing.

The soaps noticed first. EastEnders. Coronation Street. Emmerdale. Shows that once carried the emotional load of the British week — grief, joy, awkward humour, long-simmering tension — began tackling harder themes. Addiction. Identity. Mental health. People weren’t watching together. They weren’t reacting together. And increasingly, they weren’t agreeing on what things meant.

Without the shared schedule, the sense of shared meaning began to slip.

That made everything harder to land. A storyline that once sparked national conversation now risked backlash or indifference — or both. When you don’t know who’s watching, or how they’ll hear it, it’s safer to say less.

So the messaging softened. Played safe. And the audience drifted anyway.

By 2021, EastEnders pulled just 1.7 million viewers — the lowest in its history.

Thirty million once watched Den serve Angie divorce papers. Now, more people scroll past a cat video in 30 minutes than tune in to watch an episode from Albert Square.

The shows weren’t cancelled.
They were ignored.

And that might be the most modern rejection of all. Not protest. Not outrage. Just disinterest. A collective turning away.

The sense that this no longer speaks to me.

And that should sound familiar.