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As I sat with Meredith and watched the bike repairs happening all around us, I remembered what I had learned from Michael Marmot, the social scientist who carried out the research into British civil servants that showed the ways in which our work can make us sick, physically or mentally. He had explained to me: It's not the work itself that makes you sick. It's three other things. It's the feeling of being controlled--of being a meaningless cog in a system. It's the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you'll be treated just the same and nobody will notice--an imbalance, as he puts it, between efforts and rewards. And it's the feeling of being low on the hierarchy--of being a low-status person who doesn't matter compared to the Big Man in the corner office.