Noticing the blinking blue light of the notification is the first mistake, a digital twitch that signals the arrival of a polite threat. You’re already leaning into the screen, your neck 22 degrees off-center, when the invite for ‘Mandatory Fun’ lands in your inbox like a wet sponge hitting a windshield. It is a Saturday. It starts at 9:02 AM. There will be 52 of us. And for reasons that surely made sense in a mid-level manager’s fever dream, we are going to an axe-throwing range in an industrial park that smells like damp cardboard and the collective exhaustion of people who just want to do their laundry.

[The lanyard is a leash made of polyester.]

This is the modern corporate ritual: the artificial manufacture of ‘community’ through the medium of performative leisure. The subtext is never subtle. It screams that your personal time is actually company property, a 42-hour buffer that they have the right to colonize whenever the ‘culture’ metrics dip below an acceptable threshold. We are told these events are for us, a reward for our hard work, yet the reward looks suspiciously like more work, only this time we have to do it while wearing name tags and pretending that we don’t remember who stole our lunch from the communal fridge back in 2022.

The Boundary Leaks

I caught myself talking to the steering wheel on the drive to the venue. It wasn’t a sane conversation; it was a rhythmic chanting about the sanctity of the weekend, a desperate attempt to reclaim my own voice before it was drowned out by the forced cheer of HR-approved playlists. I’ve been doing that lately-talking to myself. It is a leak in the container of the self, a sign that the boundaries between who I am and what I do for a living are becoming as porous as a 12-cent paper towel. When you are forced to perform joy, the real joy retreats into the basement of your psyche and locks the door.

Humans are not that different from mountain lions in this regard. We require organic pathways to connection. We need the ‘brush’ of shared tasks and the ‘safety’ of mutual respect. You cannot throw 42 people into a room with plastic cups and a bag of ‘icebreaker’ prompts and expect a bridge to form. We just stand there, blinking in the harsh light of the axe-throwing range, waiting for the clock to hit 5:02 PM so we can crawl back to our actual lives. The resentment isn’t a side effect of the event; it is the event’s primary product.

The Trust Fall Betrayal

Take the ‘trust fall,’ the apex of corporate absurdity. There I was, standing on a folding chair, looking at the back of Dave’s head-Dave from Logistics, who has ignored my last 12 emails regarding the regional shipping delays. I am supposed to fall backward into his arms. This act is meant to signify that we are a ‘unit,’ a cohesive team that supports one another. But as I feel gravity start to take hold, the only thing I feel is a profound sense of psychological betrayal. I don’t trust Dave because we stood in a circle; I would trust Dave if he answered his damn emails. Real trust is built in the trenches of 2:02 AM deadlines and the shared weight of meaningful, difficult work. It isn’t something you can summon with a leap of faith into the arms of a man who is currently distracted by a tray of lukewarm chicken wings.

We spent 82 minutes throwing heavy blades at targets. Every time an axe thudded into the wood, I didn’t feel a sense of ‘team cohesion.’ I felt a strange, primal relief that I wasn’t the target. We cheered for each other because that is what the social contract of the office demands, but the cheers were hollow, echoing off the corrugated metal walls like the cries of birds trapped in a warehouse. There is a specific kind of silence that happens between the cheers at these events-a 2-second gap where everyone realizes they would rather be anywhere else. In that gap, you can see the cracks in the corporate facade.

This is the clumsy attempt to manufacture a sense of community that the day-to-day work culture fails to create. If the office were a place where people felt heard, valued, and autonomous, we wouldn’t need to throw axes on a Saturday. We would already be a team. But because the culture is often a desert of cold transactions and 12-layered hierarchies, the leadership feels the need to truck in ‘fun’ like it’s emergency water. They don’t realize that the water is salty. It only makes the thirst for genuine connection worse.

There is a deep irony in the fact that we spend so much money on these retreats while simultaneously stripping our physical offices of any comfort. We work in ‘open-plan’ deserts that feel like panopticons, and then we wonder why we need to go to a bowling alley to ‘get to know each other.’ We have designed our professional environments to be as hostile to human connection as possible, and then we try to fix it with a 32-dollar t-shirt and a round of laser tag. It is a cycle of architectural and emotional failure.

I remember one specific moment from the Saturday event. We were told to share a ‘fun fact’ about ourselves. One woman, who has worked in the billing department for 12 years, said that she likes to grow orchids because they are the only things in her life that don’t talk back. There was a 2-beat pause of genuine, awkward silence. For a second, the mask slipped. We all felt that. We all saw the woman behind the billing codes. But then the facilitator clapped their hands and shouted, ‘Great! Who’s next?’ and the moment was crushed under the wheels of the ‘fun’ machine. We didn’t want to know about her orchids; we wanted to get through the list so we could go home.

The Tragedy of the Itinerary

That’s the tragedy of it. These events actually prevent connection by forcing it into a schedule. They turn the mystery of another person into a checkbox on a 2-page itinerary. By the time the event ended at 4:02 PM, I was physically and emotionally drained. I didn’t feel closer to my coworkers; I felt like I had survived an ordeal with them. We shook hands, offered 52 variations of ‘see you Monday,’ and bolted for our cars like we were escaping a burning building.

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The most successful team building exercise is letting everyone go home early.

Genuine team cohesion comes from the work itself. It comes from the 22 hours spent solving a problem that actually matters. It comes from the moments where a colleague steps in to help without being asked because they actually give a damn about the outcome. You cannot manufacture that with a trust fall. You cannot buy it with a catered lunch of 42 soggy wraps. It is a slow-growing thing, like the orchids the billing lady loves, and it requires a specific kind of environment to thrive-an environment of respect, autonomy, and, most importantly, the recognition that we are humans who deserve our Saturdays to ourselves.