This is the midweek edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Before the pandemic, I’d frequently go to Seattle, where my closest friends live, and camp out in one of their guest rooms for a week. Some days I’d go work in a coffee shop for most of the day. Sometimes I’d go work
I’ve been working remotely for a year now. It has revolutionized everything in my life. I’ve rediscovered my passion for swimming laps, I do Zoom yoga with high school friends 7 days a week and I’ve done the best, most meaningful work of my career. Post-pandemic, I can’t wait to stretch this lifestyle further. There was definitely a transitional period in late spring-early summer 2020 when I felt neurotic about needing to LARP my job. Then a period of sadness/depression when I realized literally no one at work was paying attention to my productivity. And THEN an intense thrill when I realized the power to fly under the radar and work on my own terms was priceless. I no longer am plagued by worries that I’m underpaid or underappreciated - my job has gone from an entire identity to one, average-size piece of the pie that is my life. WFH freedom almost feels equivalent to a $50,000 raise. I hope the flexibility lasts forever.
I’m a full-time child care worker who can only fantasize about this life. Good pay and benefits at my center (rare for this field), but I spend nine hours of my day at work, giving my all to the little ones. I wish we better took the very real tolls of emotional labor and care work into account, and rethink what a reasonable number of hours (and $$) for this type of work should be. Or, if I didn’t have to worry about health insurance, I would go part-time and take up something remote/creative on the side. Because this isn’t sustainable!
Slight tangent, I know, but your depiction of ideal WFH life made my lip wobble and I’m trying to reconcile my desire for flexibility and time for creative pursuits with my passion for working with young children.
What I think would be amazing is the ability to temporarily move somewhere and work remotely. I actually knew a consultant who did this - she would "move" to a country for 4-6 weeks, work during US business hours, and then spend the rest of her weekdays and weekends exploring. This worked out really well for her visiting Europe - She'd have the mornings to herself and then work from 1-9 pm. She could check out new restaurants or eat at favorite more than once. Visit a different museum every day. She was able to take vacation time and see the world without taking any time off (which was especially critical for her since any days off were unpaid). She basically figured out how to live a study abroad lifestyle in her adult life.
I have a friend who lives and works in Arizona and she is excited about being able to do work remotely for part of the year in Virginia to be near her kids. Currently she takes a week of vacation time every six months - now she will be able to spend upwards of half a year on the east coast with them on evenings and weekends! It's a huge quality of life game changer!
I've been saying that I miss "quiet company." Working in a crowded coffee shop, those little interactions with the shopkeeper and other patrons. After spending all my working life 100% in the office, I've been home for the last year. I never thought I would like working from home but going back to the office 5 days is something I don't want to do. The hybrid model seems best, but I could work from home forever if I had my normal social life going and could end the day, as you said, with a beer with my friends, or a workout with my rowing team.
Actually, Arthur Brooks was until recently the president of rightist think tank AEI, and before getting into think tank world was a professional French horn player. But he's got this ongoing agenda about unhappiness being the outcome of the liberal experiment. It's the nail and he's got the hammer. I like him, but if anything his actual resume underscores your point better than were he a hard-boiled Hahvahd wonk.
I started a new job about a month ago, and remote onboarding, along with the need for time and space to focus on learning and performing new tasks, does have me a little excited to think about collaborating with my new team onsite.
As for my ideal hybrid schedule, I would love the option to have a hybrid work *day.* My dream is to drop the kids off at their respective schools, head downtown to the office where I can be 100 percent engaged and amazing, then head out at 2:30 to pick up those same kids from school and finish out my day completing work tasks while the kids do homework, snack, etc. together at home instead of paying for after-care and worrying about my tween navigating his way home alone after school. It's not fair to my kids that they have to be away from home from 8-6 just because my husband and I have to be at work until 5 (because Corporate America says so.)
I would to have to have two afternoons a week in the office during which I would schedule meetings (remember when meetings were a break from the screen) and spend the rest of my time working from my apartment, the library, and cafes. Changing my environment really helps me and I’d love to have a routine that incorporates it.
I have also been fantasizing about a coworking space in my neighbourhood where I could meet up with friends to work remotely, so that all the little social interactions that add up over a day could be with people I choose to be with (introvert here, don’t miss office small talk).
I work in a creative agency, and I am almost frantic at the opportunity this situation has presented to industries like mine. To unshackle creative people from specific geographic locations and allow them to work from anywhere for your company unlocks a mind-bending amount of potential, both for the company and the individual. And not having to LARP my way through a work week is freeing in ways I couldn't have anticipated.
To be a totally honest buzzkill, reading this kind of stuff just makes me depressed because it's so unlikely. I've never worked under an upper management group that was even slightly receptive to this kind of flexibility.
And even within white-collar non-care work, I think this could introduce equity issues. Let's say you switch to a management system based on output, not ass-in-chair time. What if two people have similar roles but one of them works much more slowly than the other--does that person deserve to work twice as many hours as the other person?
Minor, tangential point, because I've got an axe to grind -- lecture as performance is a bad way to teach, regardless if it is in person or virtual! Studies in STEM fields show that student learn much more if they are actively engaged during class period (anecdotally, they also enjoy class more). I'd bet a lot that this is also true for non-STEM fields as its a basic aspect of cognition. Anyways, I know this isn't the point of the article, but take every opportunity that I can to grind this particular axe.
I worked remotely pre-pandemic, but my work experience absolutely changed bc I was no longer spending about 50 percent of my time on the road visiting offices. A fraction of that travel was unnecessary business nonsense, but a lot of it was important for my work and helped me do my job more effectively. I really liked that split where I saw my work friends in various cities or countries, pulled some long days in face-to-face sessions and shadowing, read books on airplanes to and from, and then came home and hid behind a laptop attending remote meetings and doing errands during the day for a week or two before heading out again.
I also need that time away to miss my husband! I am really independent and pretty introverted and weirdly loved just sitting in a rental car eating sushi from Whole Foods for dinner at the end of the day without anyone to coordinate with for anything.
I’m a bit of an outlier here, I think: my ideal situation would be to spend most of my time working on-site, but with the flexibility to work from home or in some other place whenever I want/need.
Part of it is that I work in the arts, where so much of what we do is about conversations and hands-on experiences with works of art. Yes, it can be done through technology, but its power is greatly diminished. It is nice to be able to work remotely when I have a grant proposal to write or a program or talk to prepare and I need to concentrate without interruptions, but for the most part I have a people-facing job and I generally like it that way.
Part of it is that I need to set very clear boundaries between work and the rest of my life, otherwise my mental health suffers tremendously: I can think of several times in my life where I could not enjoy something I was really looking forward to because I could not stop thinking about work. This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and while I admire those of you who can toggle back and forth more easily, I don’t know that a life with just guardrails is possible for me.
And part of it is that I have actually found a lot of community through my work — community I haven’t really been able to find elsewhere. Maybe it’s because I tend to be very shy around strangers, or maybe it’s because I live in famously standoffish New England, but I haven’t had very good luck getting to know people who live in my town or my neighborhood. However, I have managed to find a lot of friends through my various workplaces, and while some of these friendships faded away once we were no longer colleagues, others have flourished and deepened long after our working relationships ended.
I know my reality isn’t the same as everyone’s, and that’s okay: I really appreciate the fact that your work acknowledges the fact that not everyone can work remotely, nor do they necessarily want to. So much of the conversation about the future of work focuses exclusively on the subset of “knowledge workers” who work remotely and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but the entire system needs to be rethought for all of us.
I think where work-related loneliness comes in for me, a person who has worked remotely since 2015, is missing the opportunity to be in the same room with my closest collaborators on a regular basis. I'd never want to go back to the office full time (LARPing the job was one of the reasons I left it to begin with), but I also don't think you can replace in person contact with your team. There's just so much nuance you miss in virtual settings. It's harder to read the room, pick up on the subtleties that might be the real drivers of whatever is going on.
So maybe it depends on what kind of work you do, and how much you actually collaborate with people as opposed to just coexisting with them? I totally share your optimism in general, for the record!
Before the pandemic, I'd been teaching at a community college and running my private accent reduction coaching practice on Zoom. I'd been gradually adjusting my lifestyle to support a heart condition that made commuting and being in a crowded, noisy city untenable. The silver lining to the health challenge is that it was oddly like pandemic boot camp, in that I was partially sheltering in place anyway and the move to running my business full time was pretty seamless because I'd gotten myself set up already. After 1 semester of teaching a large college class on Zoom, I devoted my energies to my business. I'm one of those quietly happy people who doesn't mind working on Zoom at all. In fact, I really enjoy it.
I'm comfortable in my home, teaching in my yoga pants with my kitty nearby. No exhausting commute or any of the other stressors of my recent past work life. While I don't have colleagues nearby to chat with, it's actually less lonely than teaching in institutions in which I barely ever saw any colleagues at all. I'm an introvert and an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) and this set up, that's cut out the overstimulation of my past work life, is actually what I've needed for a very long time. I teach one-on-one, so I'm spared the awfulness of trying to keep track of a large number of students at once on Zoom. Without all the stressors and distractions, I think that I've been able to get even better results from my clients. And if I'm hungry, I just go to the kitchen and eat. I love being able to do what I need to do.
I feel fortunate that I can work and that I have lovely clients, with many in other countries. They're not commuting, either, so they generally have more time for our work. I like that occasionally a 3-year-old pops in to say hello or a cat joins us. Early in the pandemic, it was like having a front row seat to the responses of different countries, like Taiwan, which was so much more effective in managing COVID than the US.
Overall, this arrangement has worked out rather unexpectedly well for me. Having spent pre-pandemic time in the nightmare of Bay Area commuting, I'm grateful. I can't imagine going back to it.
I worked remotely from 2009-2013 and discovered how productive I can be when I honor my own body’s rhythms. Handling east coast biz before the kid wakes up...taking her to school...hitting the gym for an hour...10am meal...4-5 hours of alone working time and then, yes, a final spurt of screen-based productivity at our corner bar while noshing on an afternoon snack and a glass of wine like I’m in Spain instead of Arizona. It was heaven. In 2013, for good reasons, I took an ass-in-chair M-F job. I wasn’t prepared for the depression, the weight gain, the claustrophobic nature of no longer controlling the rhythm of my day. I almost quit after a month. In many ways this last year has allowed me to reclaim some of my old life (except peloton instead of gym and Vinho Verde on the lawn instead of the bar...). We are repopulating our office now and were just informed (with great and grandiose fanfare) that we will be “eligible to select one remote working day per week, which must be consistent on a week to week basis.” For a construction company run by a CEO who has never truly believed people can be productive outside a traditional work environment, this is a big deal and I’ll take what little agency over my own time that I can get.
For me (as an academic), I would like one day of teaching (pretty normal in the UK), 2 days in the office, and 2 days at home. I was anti WFH for myself pre pandemic but now I've got the set up to make it work, and I have been enjoying wearing leggings every day and going for a leisurely cycle ride at lunch which I can't do in the office because Edinburgh is super hilly and drivers are terrible.
I’ve been working remotely for a year now. It has revolutionized everything in my life. I’ve rediscovered my passion for swimming laps, I do Zoom yoga with high school friends 7 days a week and I’ve done the best, most meaningful work of my career. Post-pandemic, I can’t wait to stretch this lifestyle further. There was definitely a transitional period in late spring-early summer 2020 when I felt neurotic about needing to LARP my job. Then a period of sadness/depression when I realized literally no one at work was paying attention to my productivity. And THEN an intense thrill when I realized the power to fly under the radar and work on my own terms was priceless. I no longer am plagued by worries that I’m underpaid or underappreciated - my job has gone from an entire identity to one, average-size piece of the pie that is my life. WFH freedom almost feels equivalent to a $50,000 raise. I hope the flexibility lasts forever.
I’m a full-time child care worker who can only fantasize about this life. Good pay and benefits at my center (rare for this field), but I spend nine hours of my day at work, giving my all to the little ones. I wish we better took the very real tolls of emotional labor and care work into account, and rethink what a reasonable number of hours (and $$) for this type of work should be. Or, if I didn’t have to worry about health insurance, I would go part-time and take up something remote/creative on the side. Because this isn’t sustainable!
Slight tangent, I know, but your depiction of ideal WFH life made my lip wobble and I’m trying to reconcile my desire for flexibility and time for creative pursuits with my passion for working with young children.
What I think would be amazing is the ability to temporarily move somewhere and work remotely. I actually knew a consultant who did this - she would "move" to a country for 4-6 weeks, work during US business hours, and then spend the rest of her weekdays and weekends exploring. This worked out really well for her visiting Europe - She'd have the mornings to herself and then work from 1-9 pm. She could check out new restaurants or eat at favorite more than once. Visit a different museum every day. She was able to take vacation time and see the world without taking any time off (which was especially critical for her since any days off were unpaid). She basically figured out how to live a study abroad lifestyle in her adult life.
I have a friend who lives and works in Arizona and she is excited about being able to do work remotely for part of the year in Virginia to be near her kids. Currently she takes a week of vacation time every six months - now she will be able to spend upwards of half a year on the east coast with them on evenings and weekends! It's a huge quality of life game changer!
I've been saying that I miss "quiet company." Working in a crowded coffee shop, those little interactions with the shopkeeper and other patrons. After spending all my working life 100% in the office, I've been home for the last year. I never thought I would like working from home but going back to the office 5 days is something I don't want to do. The hybrid model seems best, but I could work from home forever if I had my normal social life going and could end the day, as you said, with a beer with my friends, or a workout with my rowing team.
Actually, Arthur Brooks was until recently the president of rightist think tank AEI, and before getting into think tank world was a professional French horn player. But he's got this ongoing agenda about unhappiness being the outcome of the liberal experiment. It's the nail and he's got the hammer. I like him, but if anything his actual resume underscores your point better than were he a hard-boiled Hahvahd wonk.
I started a new job about a month ago, and remote onboarding, along with the need for time and space to focus on learning and performing new tasks, does have me a little excited to think about collaborating with my new team onsite.
As for my ideal hybrid schedule, I would love the option to have a hybrid work *day.* My dream is to drop the kids off at their respective schools, head downtown to the office where I can be 100 percent engaged and amazing, then head out at 2:30 to pick up those same kids from school and finish out my day completing work tasks while the kids do homework, snack, etc. together at home instead of paying for after-care and worrying about my tween navigating his way home alone after school. It's not fair to my kids that they have to be away from home from 8-6 just because my husband and I have to be at work until 5 (because Corporate America says so.)
I would to have to have two afternoons a week in the office during which I would schedule meetings (remember when meetings were a break from the screen) and spend the rest of my time working from my apartment, the library, and cafes. Changing my environment really helps me and I’d love to have a routine that incorporates it.
I have also been fantasizing about a coworking space in my neighbourhood where I could meet up with friends to work remotely, so that all the little social interactions that add up over a day could be with people I choose to be with (introvert here, don’t miss office small talk).
I work in a creative agency, and I am almost frantic at the opportunity this situation has presented to industries like mine. To unshackle creative people from specific geographic locations and allow them to work from anywhere for your company unlocks a mind-bending amount of potential, both for the company and the individual. And not having to LARP my way through a work week is freeing in ways I couldn't have anticipated.
To be a totally honest buzzkill, reading this kind of stuff just makes me depressed because it's so unlikely. I've never worked under an upper management group that was even slightly receptive to this kind of flexibility.
And even within white-collar non-care work, I think this could introduce equity issues. Let's say you switch to a management system based on output, not ass-in-chair time. What if two people have similar roles but one of them works much more slowly than the other--does that person deserve to work twice as many hours as the other person?
Minor, tangential point, because I've got an axe to grind -- lecture as performance is a bad way to teach, regardless if it is in person or virtual! Studies in STEM fields show that student learn much more if they are actively engaged during class period (anecdotally, they also enjoy class more). I'd bet a lot that this is also true for non-STEM fields as its a basic aspect of cognition. Anyways, I know this isn't the point of the article, but take every opportunity that I can to grind this particular axe.
I worked remotely pre-pandemic, but my work experience absolutely changed bc I was no longer spending about 50 percent of my time on the road visiting offices. A fraction of that travel was unnecessary business nonsense, but a lot of it was important for my work and helped me do my job more effectively. I really liked that split where I saw my work friends in various cities or countries, pulled some long days in face-to-face sessions and shadowing, read books on airplanes to and from, and then came home and hid behind a laptop attending remote meetings and doing errands during the day for a week or two before heading out again.
I also need that time away to miss my husband! I am really independent and pretty introverted and weirdly loved just sitting in a rental car eating sushi from Whole Foods for dinner at the end of the day without anyone to coordinate with for anything.
I’m a bit of an outlier here, I think: my ideal situation would be to spend most of my time working on-site, but with the flexibility to work from home or in some other place whenever I want/need.
Part of it is that I work in the arts, where so much of what we do is about conversations and hands-on experiences with works of art. Yes, it can be done through technology, but its power is greatly diminished. It is nice to be able to work remotely when I have a grant proposal to write or a program or talk to prepare and I need to concentrate without interruptions, but for the most part I have a people-facing job and I generally like it that way.
Part of it is that I need to set very clear boundaries between work and the rest of my life, otherwise my mental health suffers tremendously: I can think of several times in my life where I could not enjoy something I was really looking forward to because I could not stop thinking about work. This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and while I admire those of you who can toggle back and forth more easily, I don’t know that a life with just guardrails is possible for me.
And part of it is that I have actually found a lot of community through my work — community I haven’t really been able to find elsewhere. Maybe it’s because I tend to be very shy around strangers, or maybe it’s because I live in famously standoffish New England, but I haven’t had very good luck getting to know people who live in my town or my neighborhood. However, I have managed to find a lot of friends through my various workplaces, and while some of these friendships faded away once we were no longer colleagues, others have flourished and deepened long after our working relationships ended.
I know my reality isn’t the same as everyone’s, and that’s okay: I really appreciate the fact that your work acknowledges the fact that not everyone can work remotely, nor do they necessarily want to. So much of the conversation about the future of work focuses exclusively on the subset of “knowledge workers” who work remotely and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but the entire system needs to be rethought for all of us.
I think where work-related loneliness comes in for me, a person who has worked remotely since 2015, is missing the opportunity to be in the same room with my closest collaborators on a regular basis. I'd never want to go back to the office full time (LARPing the job was one of the reasons I left it to begin with), but I also don't think you can replace in person contact with your team. There's just so much nuance you miss in virtual settings. It's harder to read the room, pick up on the subtleties that might be the real drivers of whatever is going on.
So maybe it depends on what kind of work you do, and how much you actually collaborate with people as opposed to just coexisting with them? I totally share your optimism in general, for the record!
Before the pandemic, I'd been teaching at a community college and running my private accent reduction coaching practice on Zoom. I'd been gradually adjusting my lifestyle to support a heart condition that made commuting and being in a crowded, noisy city untenable. The silver lining to the health challenge is that it was oddly like pandemic boot camp, in that I was partially sheltering in place anyway and the move to running my business full time was pretty seamless because I'd gotten myself set up already. After 1 semester of teaching a large college class on Zoom, I devoted my energies to my business. I'm one of those quietly happy people who doesn't mind working on Zoom at all. In fact, I really enjoy it.
I'm comfortable in my home, teaching in my yoga pants with my kitty nearby. No exhausting commute or any of the other stressors of my recent past work life. While I don't have colleagues nearby to chat with, it's actually less lonely than teaching in institutions in which I barely ever saw any colleagues at all. I'm an introvert and an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) and this set up, that's cut out the overstimulation of my past work life, is actually what I've needed for a very long time. I teach one-on-one, so I'm spared the awfulness of trying to keep track of a large number of students at once on Zoom. Without all the stressors and distractions, I think that I've been able to get even better results from my clients. And if I'm hungry, I just go to the kitchen and eat. I love being able to do what I need to do.
I feel fortunate that I can work and that I have lovely clients, with many in other countries. They're not commuting, either, so they generally have more time for our work. I like that occasionally a 3-year-old pops in to say hello or a cat joins us. Early in the pandemic, it was like having a front row seat to the responses of different countries, like Taiwan, which was so much more effective in managing COVID than the US.
Overall, this arrangement has worked out rather unexpectedly well for me. Having spent pre-pandemic time in the nightmare of Bay Area commuting, I'm grateful. I can't imagine going back to it.
I worked remotely from 2009-2013 and discovered how productive I can be when I honor my own body’s rhythms. Handling east coast biz before the kid wakes up...taking her to school...hitting the gym for an hour...10am meal...4-5 hours of alone working time and then, yes, a final spurt of screen-based productivity at our corner bar while noshing on an afternoon snack and a glass of wine like I’m in Spain instead of Arizona. It was heaven. In 2013, for good reasons, I took an ass-in-chair M-F job. I wasn’t prepared for the depression, the weight gain, the claustrophobic nature of no longer controlling the rhythm of my day. I almost quit after a month. In many ways this last year has allowed me to reclaim some of my old life (except peloton instead of gym and Vinho Verde on the lawn instead of the bar...). We are repopulating our office now and were just informed (with great and grandiose fanfare) that we will be “eligible to select one remote working day per week, which must be consistent on a week to week basis.” For a construction company run by a CEO who has never truly believed people can be productive outside a traditional work environment, this is a big deal and I’ll take what little agency over my own time that I can get.
For me (as an academic), I would like one day of teaching (pretty normal in the UK), 2 days in the office, and 2 days at home. I was anti WFH for myself pre pandemic but now I've got the set up to make it work, and I have been enjoying wearing leggings every day and going for a leisurely cycle ride at lunch which I can't do in the office because Edinburgh is super hilly and drivers are terrible.