I spend my days trying to make workplaces more humane, but recently I’ve been thinking a lot about why people would voluntarily choose to work in one that is dangerous, debilitating and often lethal. Actually, I have two in mind.
The first one is the National Football League. On the face of it, I understand why someone with sufficient athletic skills might want to play at the highest level of a sport, be lionized and revered and earn a great deal of money along the way. It’s pretty seductive.
What doesn’t make sense to me is risking severe and permanent brain damage, and even early death, in return for a short window of glory.
The parallels to cigarette smoking may not seem obvious at first, but they’re striking. Tobacco companies knew for decades that nicotine was addictive and that cigarettes were lethal. To preserve their businesses, they made vast efforts first to cover up the truth, and then to obfuscate and minimize the evidence once it began to get out.
The N.F.L. did much the same thing over the past couple of decades, denying and playing down health risks to their players, even as the evidence mounted that concussions were a fact of life in football and often led to brain damage. Now, as it becomes painfully clear that many retired players are suffering from severe symptoms, including dementia, the N.F.L. has shifted into obfuscating and minimizing, and the game goes on. For all the gruesome details, I refer you to Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada’s meticulously documented and endlessly chilling book “League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth.â€
Like boxing, football is at heart a primitive, violent game that speaks to our baser instincts. We can rationalize that it features extraordinary athleticism and it’s highly entertaining, but we can’t escape the fact that it’s ultimately about very large people running into each other at high speeds, often seeking to inflict maximum damage. “If you got hit just one time the way I get hit countless times every game,†an N.F.L. player once told me, “you’d be in the hospital for two weeks.â€
My argument is a simple one: Our fascination with football, and our acceptance of its costs, is a measure of the limits of our imagination and our infinite capacity for denial. And it’s scarcely just about what happens to a couple hundred professional football players. The damage begins far earlier. Pop Warner, a youth league, actually boasts on its website that the number of injuries to its players is only 11 percent that of the N.F.L.’s. How comforting is that?
The other workplace I’ve been thinking about is the military, in this case because I’ve just finished two heartbreaking books by David Finkel: “The Good Soldiers,†about the year he spent embedded with a battalion in Iraq, and “Thank You for Your Service,†about a group of those soldiers returning home, crippled by post-traumatic stress disorder and fruitlessly seeking to readjust.
The cost-benefit analysis for military service is more complex than it is for football. There is some percentage of young recruits who sign up because they want to serve their country, in Iraq or Afghanistan, and believe they are fighting for a just cause and a higher purpose. Far more often, Mr. Finkel makes clear, they simply needed a job.
The painful parallel with football is that few of these recruits were truly warned about the level of risk they were taking. Unlike in football, they obviously knew there was a chance of dying, but it seems fair to assume that few believed they would meet that fate. What almost none of them knew was how horrific a toll combat was likely to take even if they survived.
Nearly 300,000 veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, and many more have lost limbs and suffered severe burns. Beyond that, the Department of Veterans Affairs has estimated that 30 percent of injured soldiers returned home suffering from PTSD.
Mr. Finkel brings this array of disabling psychological symptoms vividly and horrifyingly to life, and he describes in painful detail the ways that PTSD takes its severe toll not just on the veterans, but also on their spouses, children and extended families.
Here’s a quote from a soldier in “Thank You for Your Service†that has most stuck with me: “How can anybody kill and function normally afterward? Or see someone get killed and functional normally afterward. It’s not the human response.†The more human response is to be disabled and undone by a job that is built around trying to kill people every day and avoid being killed yourself.
We’re not going to end wars anytime soon, and we’re not going to ban football either. What I am suggesting is that we go at least as far as we have with cigarettes. Let’s get real about the risks and build truth into the advertising about these workplaces.
Football, as it’s played now and at all levels, is brutal to the body, and especially to the brain. Serving as a soldier in a war obviously carries the risk of death, but also, for all of those who survive, the high likelihood of a difficult and painful life.
The truth is a starting place.
Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.†Twitter: @tonyschwartz
