The hydraulic lift groans at 12 percent over its nominal capacity, a sound like a giant’s teeth grinding in a fever dream. I am standing beneath 2002 pounds of precision-engineered lead and glass, trying to guide a diagnostic imaging arm into a slot that feels 2 millimeters too narrow. My palms are sweating inside nitrile gloves that are supposedly ‘rated for high-impact industrial use,’ according to the 32-page catalog provided by the procurement department.

In the corner of the room, a safety officer is tapping his clipboard, making sure I’ve checked off the box that says I am wearing my mandated safety vest. The vest is bright orange. It is designed to make me visible to forklifts. There are no forklifts in an oncology ward.

That briefing was a ghost. It was a legal incantation meant to ward off the demons of litigation, a series of slides designed to prove that if I get crushed by this 2002-pound arm, it was my fault for not ‘maintaining a 32-inch perimeter.’ Corporate safety has become a performance, a piece of avant-garde theater where the actors pretend the script is the reality.

The Cost of Trivial Compliance

We spend 122 hours a year, collectively, watching videos of actors in pristine hard hats demonstrating how to use a fire extinguisher, while the actual hazards-the ones that actually kill people-go unmentioned because they are too specific, too expensive to mitigate, or too legally complex to admit into the record.

This is the paradox of modern labor: you can be safe, or you can be productive, but the paperwork is only designed to catch you when you choose the latter.

Erosion of Instinct

When we treat safety as a bureaucratic checkbox, we erode the natural instinct for self-preservation. Humans are remarkably good at spotting danger when they are allowed to look for it. But when you give a worker a list of 82 rules they must follow, their brain stops looking for the 83rd danger-the one that actually matters. They stop looking at the ground and start looking at the clipboard.

This is why specialized knowledge is the only real armor we have. Real safety is rooted in the soil, the steel, and the specific history of the site, not in a laminated card carried in a wallet. It is about knowing that the soil here behaves differently than it does 102 miles inland.

It is the difference between a contractor who reads a generic manual and the team at

Werth Builders who understands how 32 tons of water interacts with the shifting, high-salinity sands of the coastline.

Trusting Senses Over Systems

I remember a time when I made a mistake that nearly cost me my career. It wasn’t a failure of compliance; I had followed every rule in the book. I had the 2-point harness, the 12-gauge grounding wire, and the 22-step lockout-tagout procedure. What I didn’t have was the common sense to realize that the person who wrote the procedure had never actually stood in a room where the humidity was at 92 percent.

We are taught to trust the system more than our senses, even when the system is clearly a product of a legal department trying to lower insurance premiums by 2 percent. Iris J.-M. once told me that the most dangerous person on a job site is the one who has the safety manual memorized but can’t tell when a cable is fraying by the sound it makes.

Reclaiming Vigilance

We have replaced the ‘brother’s keeper’ mentality with a ‘lawyer’s witness’ mentality. If I see you doing something dangerous, I don’t stop you because I care about your life; I stop you because I don’t want to be deposed in a 502-day long lawsuit.

I turn it off. We spend the next 42 minutes actually fixing the problem-the real problem-that wasn’t mentioned in a single one of the 52 slides we watched this morning.

We aren’t safe because we followed the rules. We are safe because we finally had the courage to ignore them when they stopped making sense. In the end, safety is a conversation, not a monologue. When we prioritize the paperwork over the person, we aren’t protecting workers; we are just burying them in a more organized fashion.