You’ve received the email. Subject line: “Checking In”. Horror quickly spreads. You haven’t spoken to HR in months. You haven’t wanted to. But now Anna, Head of People (a title that always sounds faintly threatening), wants a “quick catch-up to see how you’re doing.”

Somewhere in your gut, a quiet alarm goes off.

Because here’s the thing: no one is ever “doing fine” when HR decides to proactively make contact. It’s like getting a message from a crocodile asking if you’d like to discuss your swimming technique.

HR—despite the soft lighting, the potted succulents, and the laminated pamphlets about mental health—is not your friend. HR is the company, dressed up in a cardigan and trying to make you feel guilty for crying.

Welcome to the Hive Mind

Let’s address the obvious: HR people are not people in the traditional sense. They are the distributed consciousness of the company—corporate drones operating as a collective. A hive mind in sensible shoes.

Speak to one, and you’ve spoken to them all. Their syntax is uniform, their empathy professionally certified, and their smiles precisely calibrated to suggest concern without ever offering anything resembling concrete help. You could swear they all attend the same retreat once a year to update their firmware.

Anna, Queen of HR, knows your name, your line manager’s blood type, and whether you opened the last “Workplace Wellbeing Update” she sent out. You didn’t? She knows.

The HR collective thrives on performance: the performance of support, the performance of inclusion, the performance of listening. It’s an artform—except instead of applause, the curtain call is a disciplinary review disguised as “constructive feedback.”

Therapy-Speak with Teeth

One of HR’s more impressive tricks is its seamless integration of therapy-speak into workplace control. They’ll ask how you’re “feeling,” talk about “safe spaces,” and encourage you to “bring your whole self to work.” That is, until your whole self starts pointing out glaring flaws in management structure or asking why you’re working through lunch for the fifth day in a row.

They are trained to mirror concern. To say things like “That must be really hard” with the same tone they use to reject your leave request. It’s a performance so well-rehearsed it should win awards—or at the very least, a BAFTA for Best Supporting Role in Pretending to Care.

They have empathy decks. Resilience strategies. Office yoga at noon. But try asking for something actually useful—like a reduced workload or fewer meetings that could’ve been emails—and watch how quickly the smile falters.

The Smiling Executioners

Make no mistake: HR’s primary function is not to support staff. It is to protect the organisation from staff. Everything else is just good PR.

They are the internal affairs of the corporate world—there to neutralise dissent, smooth over liability, and maintain the fiction that everyone is fine, happy, and highly engaged (despite all evidence to the contrary). The moment you express a problem, it is not logged as a concern—it is logged as a potential risk.

Their job is to listen just enough to say they listened. To document. To prepare the elegant paperwork that will later be used to demonstrate that the company did everything right before you eventually left “by mutual agreement.”

If you find yourself in a meeting with Anna and there’s a second HR rep in the room “just for support,” congratulations: you are already halfway into the spreadsheet titled Employee Relations: Active Cases.

Honesty Is a Red Flag

In any normal human interaction, honesty is good. Necessary, even. In HR-land, honesty is the corporate equivalent of a self-inflicted wound.

You tell them you’re overwhelmed. They hear “not a team player.”
You ask for clearer expectations. They hear “problematic.”
You say you’re struggling with your workload. They hear “future redundancy candidate.”

There is no safe way to say you’re not okay—only ways to say it that will be used against you later, with bullet points and timestamps.

Support Isn’t Meant to Work

The most maddening part is that the support structures HR touts were never designed to do anything. They exist to be seen, referenced, and pointed to in internal audits.

You were offered free mindfulness training. You declined. That’s on you.
You were given access to the “Employee Wellbeing Portal” (which consists mostly of stock images and dubious advice). You didn’t engage. Again, you.
You were encouraged to talk. You talked. They took notes. Those notes are now in your file.

The illusion of support is far more important than support itself. It’s a bureaucratic sleight of hand: if you burn out, it’s not because the system failed. It’s because you failed to thrive within it.

The Final Word (Before HR Revises It)

HR doesn’t exist to protect you. It exists to ensure the smooth running of an organisation that would replace you faster than you can say “unfair dismissal.” They may use the language of care, but it’s transactional. Instrumental. Cold.

Anna might remember your birthday. She might even remember that you like oat milk in your tea. But don’t mistake her politeness for compassion. She’s not here to help. She’s here to ensure the ship keeps sailing, even if it means quietly pushing you overboard.

So next time you’re called in for a “quick catch-up,” remember: you are not in a safe space. You are in The Room Where The Company Protects Itself.

And Anna’s already two steps ahead.

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AJ Wright

AJ Wright is a quiet yet incisive voice navigating the surreal world of sociology, higher education, and modern life through the unique lens of a neurodivergent mind. A tech-savvy PhD student hailing from South Yorkshire but now stationed in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, AJ writes with an irreverence that strips back the layers of academia, social norms, and the absurdities of daily life to reveal the humour lurking beneath.

As an autistic thinker, AJ’s perspective offers readers a rare blend of precision, curiosity, and wit. From dissecting the unspoken rituals of academia—like the silent war over the office thermostat—to exploring the sociology of “neurotypical small talk” and the bizarre hierarchies of campus coffee queues, AJ turns the ordinary into something both profound and hilarious.

AJ’s unassuming nature belies the sharpness of their commentary, which dives deep into the intersections of neurodiversity, tech culture, and the often-overlooked quirks of human behaviour. Whether questioning why university bureaucracy feels designed by Kafka or crafting surreal parodies of academic peer reviews, AJ writes with a balance of quiet intensity and playful absurdity that keeps readers coming back for more.

For those seeking a blog that is equal parts insightful, irreverent, and refreshingly authentic, AJ Wright provides a unique perspective that celebrates neurodiversity while poking fun at the peculiarities of the world we live in.  Also a contributor at Thinking Sociologically.

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