By Daniel Whitmore
The numbers coming out of the American workplace right now are hard to ignore. Two-thirds of U.S. employees report feeling burned out in some form, according to a 2025 Gallup study. Over half say they feel lonely at work. Research published in the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness and separately cited by Cigna puts the annual cost of workplace loneliness to U.S. employers at $154 billion, driven primarily by absenteeism , lonely employees are twice as likely as others to call out sick and five times more likely to miss work due to stress. Burnout-related losses globally reached $322 billion last year. These are not soft, hard-to-measure problems; they are showing up on balance sheets.
What is less obvious is who gets left out of the conversation entirely. The burnout research focuses on employees, on companies, and on HR policy. It rarely looks at the independent professional , the creative director who left a big agency, the freelance producer, the solo operator , who is carrying the same pressures without any of the institutional support that larger organizations provide. And it rarely asks whether the structures producing these outcomes could be redesigned rather than managed around.
A handful of people are working on exactly those gaps, from very different angles.
Conor Firth has seen the independence problem up close. He started his career in the art world, galleries, auction houses, eventually his own gallery, and one of the first e-commerce platforms for contemporary art, before moving into financial leadership for mid-sized creative agencies, eventually serving as CFO across operations in three countries. What he kept noticing was what happened when senior creatives left those agencies to go out on their own.
“When creatives leave big agencies to go independent, they lose their entire financial support infrastructure overnight, the in-house finance teams, legal counsel, procurement support,” he says. “There was nobody out there built specifically for them.”
That observation became Art First Business Services. The work, as Firth describes it, is less about accounting and more about translation. “You can’t talk to a creative director the way you’d talk to a CFO,” he says. “I’ve learned to strip away the jargon, get to what’s actually keeping them up at night, and work from there.”
He compares the role to being a rock band manager , handling everything in the background so the client can focus on the actual work. The financial stress that contributes to burnout among independent professionals is rarely about the creative work itself. It is usually about the business side they were never trained for, and have no one to help them navigate.
Edward Garcia has been making a related argument at a much larger scale for the better part of two decades. Garcia grew up in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia and Ohio in a low-income household, where the connection between access to social networks and economic mobility was not an abstract concept; it was the daily reality of the people around him. That early observation shaped a career that moved through the U.S. Census, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee before landing him in the work he is doing now through the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC).
His argument, developed over years of building the evidence base alongside researchers in the field, is that loneliness and social disconnection are not personal problems; they are structural ones. The upstream conditions that produce disconnection, he says, are built into how communities are designed, how institutions create incentives, and how civic systems either support or undermine people’s ability to maintain meaningful relationships. He helped author the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on Loneliness and Isolation and has since built the SILC Coordinating Council, which includes the OECD, WHO, and the EU. The challenge he says still faces the field is a crowded landscape of apps and wellness products that treat disconnection as an individual issue to be managed rather than a systems failure to be corrected.
The physical side of wellbeing rarely enters these conversations either, but it belongs there. Samuel Owers built RYVL to address a specific gap in the fitness market: most training apps focus on a single discipline. They’re either running apps or strength apps. For the growing number of people training for hybrid racing, HYROX, in particular, is one of the fastest-growing competitive fitness categories in the world, and that fragmentation means cobbling together different programs that weren’t designed to work together. RYVL delivers a structured, periodized plan that integrates strength, running, and conditioning into a single program, with HYROX preparation built into the architecture rather than added on. Owers also runs hybrid.club and FindRox alongside the app, building out the broader infrastructure the hybrid training community needs. Physical fitness has a well-documented relationship with mental health outcomes, including reduced anxiety, lower rates of depression, and better stress management, which makes accessible, structured training programming a more serious wellbeing tool than it is usually treated as.
Dr. Manahil Riaz is working on the clinical end of what all of this produces. She founded Riaz Counseling in Houston in 2021 and has since built it from a solo practice into a team of more than 25 specialists, with offices in the Galleria area and Sugar Land and virtual therapy options across Houston, Spring, and The Woodlands. Her primary focus areas are trauma, parenting, and couples therapy, drawing on cognitive behavioral, Adlerian, and attachment-based approaches, with clients ranging from preteens through adults. The growth of the practice is itself a data point: the demand for accessible, competent mental health care in a major American city is outpacing the supply, and building a multi-therapist practice with a consistent clinical standard is one of the harder ways to meet it.
The thread connecting these four is not a shared industry or a shared solution. It is a shared diagnosis: the way most people work, live, and move through institutions right now is producing costs, financial, physical, and psychological, that are becoming impossible to write off as individual failures. Firth is working on the financial stability piece for independent professionals. Garcia is working on the structural conditions that produce isolation at a policy level. Owers is working on the physical infrastructure that supports a healthier, more connected daily life. And Dr. Riaz is working on the clinical consequences of what happens when all of these systems fall short.
The $154 billion figure will not come down because of better HR software. It will come down when people like these four get enough traction that the systems producing the problem start to shift.
