The Lonely Office Is Bad for America

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lonely-office-is-bad-for-america-work-from-home-polarization-professionalism-ambition-mentorship-unity-friendship-zoom-11659033821

by toomanyrichies • 4 years ago

21 69 4 years ago

wsj.com

toomanyrichies• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/Y1SKw

catchnear432112• 4 years ago

“People starting out need offices to learn a profession, to make friends, meet colleagues, find romantic partners and mates.”

Pretty sure that said people would respond with “ok boomer.”

All evidence I have seen is that the youth are more prepared than ever to navigate these matters with or without lots of close proximity.

Culture changes before our eyes. Change isn’t always bad, even when we struggle to keep up with it.

planarhobbit• 4 years ago

All evidence I have seen is that the youth are more prepared than ever to navigate these matters with or without lots of close proximity.

Can’t say I agree with this. I’ve seen too many cases that lead me to believe we are closer to a society-scale neurosis given the scared shitless attitudes displayed by the younger generation over the past 2 years.

Less and less people can navigate their way out of bed with a clear mind, Nevermind ascend and accomplish the aforementioned matters.

catchnear432112• 4 years ago

Oh I agree with what you’re observing. But maybe not the cause. Or not the weighting.

It isn’t just the younger generation that’s afraid, or upset, paralyzed with anger, fear, sadness, etc.

Shit’s on fire, yo.

But the youth is still talking about it together, whether they can leave the house, or the bed, or not.

warning26• 4 years ago

My mind goes first to the young. People starting out need offices to learn a profession, to make friends, meet colleagues

This is what I think remote work advocates miss -- pure remote makes work 100% work, 0% percent anything else. This is probably fine if you work at a horrible finance firm where this was the case anyway, but for people in creative/tech professions where fun stuff / offsites / happy hours were the norm? Remote is such a massive downgrade in that case.

Daishiman• 4 years ago

I derived zero pleasure from the social interactions in the office for the first five years of my career. Zero real mentorship either.

Making for a good social environment is a deliberate choice. You can do it online or offline. The best interactions at work I’ve had when we instituted brown bag lunches and made the first and last ten minutes of our weeklies into a space just for idling.

pram• 4 years ago

Oh no don't worry they weren't missed. Now I have to spend late Friday logged into Zoom while people awkwardly drink alcohol and talk about their dogs.

icedchai5• 4 years ago

Heh. We have some non-mandatory "virtual happy hour" events. I usually skip those.

catchnear432112• 4 years ago

Sounds like it is awkward because nobody brought a thing to do.

At a bar, you are “going to a bar.” “Going to happy hour.” Something along those lines. Drinking and talking about dogs at happy hour is still happy hour. A zoom meeting with no activity beyond drinking is just drinking on the job.

gbear605• 4 years ago

My experience in tech has been that we’ve had a lot more positive social interaction online than in-person. In-person, everyone feels like they have to be productive for the full eight hours in the workplace, while working remotely people feel more free to spend some time being social.

icedchai5• 4 years ago

I miss the simple things, like finding a new restaurant and trying it with coworkers. It sounds cliche, but I liked "getting out of the house" and having more of a work-life separation. I have kinda accepted that that era is gone and is not coming back. The last time I worked out of an office was March, 2020.

spywaregorilla2• 4 years ago

have you considered finding a new restaurant and trying it without coworkers

rektide• 4 years ago

I miss a lot about in office life. The parent talking about the newcomers i think really nails it the most/worst, not just because work is now 100% work, but because most people are totally isolated, heads down on their tickets, and dont see so much of whats going on. There's no serendipitous learning: few random exchanges, little chance to see someome beaming & hear them brag/explain, rarely chance to see someone struggling & have somone step in.

Anyhow. On food in specific, for the last decades I've dreamed of trying to get people trying & exploring new things. But wow, it felt like folks were absurdly attached to their staples.

That said, in my 20's, I was crazy dollar-conscious. I still ate out for lunch a lot, but the thought of paying $2 or $4 more than any of the abundant quality high-value local shops for something more upscale or just more elaborate was super hard to swallow. $13 buffet at Majer House Kabob was like the pinnacle of richness. So I get some of it. But also, it was still disappointing feeling unable to rally for a good exploration.

samcheng2• 4 years ago

Unless you moved to Boise or wherever when the pandemic started, it's still perfectly reasonable to meet your coworkers for lunch. Try it!

EddieDante5• 4 years ago

for people in creative/tech professions where fun stuff / offsites / happy hours were the norm?

I was one of those people, and I declined every invitation to mandatory fun, offsites, and happy hours. I was there to work, to do the job and get paid, and I wasn't getting paid to do extracurriculars. I left that bullshit behind when I graduated from high school.

Remote is such a massive downgrade in that case.

Speak for yourself. Remote work has been an upgrade for me.

catchnear432112• 4 years ago

If there was money for happy hours and off sites before covid, where did it go?

Meeting in person may be difficult, but if the money is still there, someone isn’t thinking of how to use it creatively.

If it isn’t still there, the company is cutting costs by defunding morale. And hoping nobody noticed because “you can’t meet in person anyway.”

brycelarkin• 4 years ago

Remote work for finance is way worse than tech. There’s an expectation that you’re on 24/7. This is opposed to in-office for finance jobs where there’s a little differentiation between being in the office and being at home.

rayiner5• 4 years ago

I’m quite perplexed at how many people depend on work for their social network. Don’t they have neighbors and friends?

therm0• 4 years ago

What I think in-office advocates miss -- You can still do all of these things with _actual_ friends and family who will be around after you get shitcanned, laid off, whatever.

The unfortunate reality is that the discourse around the remote vs. ass-in-seat style of work must be all or nothing. Some workplaces take a hybrid approach, but they often don't have a mix of 100% in-person and 100% remote employees. You're usually in the office 80% of the time with the allowance of a day at home. So complaints like yours get heard by middle management types and they use them to justify the "welcome back to the office" bullshit. It is worlds easier to live my life when I don't have a two hour commute and when I have the ability to get mundane responsibilities fulfilled on my breaks, and when I don't have to rely on others to take care of my pets and family. When your need to pursue an ephemeral relationship with your coworkers becomes an imposition on my need to nurture the people I love, that's a serious problem and I'm not going to politely respect your "preferences".

Go play ping-pong with your friends.

togs• 4 years ago

Nope. It’s bad for property owners and leasers.

I don’t work to have fun, I work to have a paycheck. Don’t insult me by pretending the deal is anything more.

syntheweave• 4 years ago

It's worst for banks, since they hold a lot of the financial strings to the property. The pressure rolls downhill from them onto debtors. If their property investment business fails because people are using developed land more productively than they anticipated, they are in huge trouble. That's a whole business model and class of assets effectively stranded.

There's a reckoning coming forth in these back-to-the-office articles. Short of blowing up the internet, the market is going to do whatever it wants with or without the banks, and it doesn't matter how much avocado toast snark is put forth.

9999000009994• 4 years ago

I work for money.

Money.

Not to make friends, not to build culture.

Considering how offended everyone is now, work isn't the place to socialize.

RichardCNormos• 4 years ago

Considering how offended everyone is now, work isn't the place to socialize.

Remote work is a safeguard. There is a record of every Slack interaction, and with minimal equipment, you can keep your own record of every video chat conversation, too.

If someone chooses to take offense at something you've said, then seek vengeance by way of the HR department, you can go back to the record to exonerate yourself.

HWR_14• 4 years ago

Recording audio/video without all-party consent is legally perilous in the US. I recommend not doing that subtly.

It's at the very least illegal if any of the parties are in California or several other states.

catchnear432112• 4 years ago

You can socialize without sharing everything.

I too work for money. I could do a lot of the same things without a job. But some asshole won mega millions when it was my turn.

If office culture sucks, I want it to improve, because that’s where I make money. It means I can make money with less stress. Less stress, more productivity. More productivity, more recognition, more opportunities for money.

You can look at things as cold and calculating as you want. That’s fine. If I try to do that, it sounds like you aren’t being very efficient at how you make your money. Money. Money.

And missing out on other benefits that come from said efficiency. Like potentially socializing, or friends. Or culture.

9999000009994• 4 years ago

That's your problem.

If you have difficulty making friends then go to concerts or something.

I can't imagine any office culture worth the time I waste commuting.

For the record, I'm still friends with multiple co workers from previous jobs. But that's just not the point of work.

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

At some point in the 20th century, America invented big-scale office life. We were the envy of the world for it.

And so it would have continued, had not certain ideas about the shape of the world turned out to be disastrously wrong.

gumby• 4 years ago

At some point in the 20th century, America invented big-scale office life. We were the envy of the world for it.

Definitely "citation needed" on both points.

EddieDante5• 4 years ago

Peggy Noonan has failed to justify the continued existence of "office culture" and "national culture". As somebody else mentioned, I work for a living. I am not there to make friends. I am there to make money. I am not there to build community. I am there to build software that makes rich assholes even richer, in exchange for pennies on every dollar of value I create.

kweingar• 4 years ago

Why not go it alone, or with a small team? Then you can keep every dollar of value you create, minus overhead

EddieDante5• 4 years ago

I have all of the business acumen of a turnip, and the social skills of a Dalek with a hangover. Besides, 1099 contracts are close enough for my liking.

throwaway59593• 4 years ago

Peggy Noonan has failed to be relevant for decades and is now a total waste of space. She was recently on Meet the Press where she said Republicans could use their “victory” as an opportunity to go after women voters by changing their tune. She should retire already.

What a ghoul.

https://www.rawstory.com/peggy-noonan-abortion/

rayiner5• 4 years ago

While I agree Peggy Noonan is a Reagan era holdover, this is a poor example of that.

Your average “woman” isn’t a college educated white liberal in a big city. There’s a large number of conservative women who oppose abortion, and the majority are squeamish about it and support making it illegal after 13 weeks. That’s especially true of minority voters. Just 29% of Hispanic households that speak Spanish at home think abortion should be legal. And half of Black people in southern states like Georgia also oppose abortion. But these women, whether they vote democrat or Republican, also tend to support more social programs for mothers and children.

Noonan is absolutely correct that there’s an opportunity for republicans to kneecap democrats looking to keep Arizona and Georgia blue by appealing to socially conservative women who also reject small government orthodoxy. I’m skeptical republicans can do that—I think they’ll fold as soon as the Chamber of Commerce set comes running back now that Biden wants to raise taxes—but she’s correctly identified the path forward for the GOP.

tmaly• 4 years ago

This was an opinion article

terminatornet• 4 years ago

write as many of these opinion pieces as you want, I'm never going back to working in-person

mycentstoo• 4 years ago

The reality of my personal situation - and I'm sure others are at the same point - is that remote work offers the biggest chance we have to fight (in my opinion) two of the most important issues of our time - cost of housing and climate change.

First - housing. The cost of housing is hugely tied to location and being remote offers a chance to fight back against that. There's not more land in San Francisco and New York and building has become politically untenable. This has and will have tremendous consequences for my financial future. Being remote offers a way to fight against that both because workers can expand their horizons for other locations that are building housing but also because in the future we potentially have an opportunity to re-zone commercial real estate into residential, higher-density real-estate. Rather than needing to provide an individual with two places (house, office), in the future a lot of jobs would only require an individual to have one place (house).

Second - climate change. The environment cost of commuting everyday is high since many cities functionally require a car. Traffic and pollution wreck real, tangible havoc on our habitat. Reducing the need to commute coupled with another opportunity to redesign urban landscapes into greener landscapes offers at least some pushback against climate change.

In my opinion, both of these concerns massively outweigh any intangible benefits such as workplace community.

harryh• 4 years ago

I suspect that whatever climate benefits generated by eliminating commutes will be counteracted by the urban sprawl fostered by your first point.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

IMO I think we need to create new ways to meet people.

I definitely understand and feel firsthand the lack of social interaction from our post-pandemic society. A lot of stuff are online now, like grocery shopping, college classes, and of course work. This is a lot more convenient but it leaves out social interaction.

That being said, the social interaction you get from shopping college and work, mandatory interaction with random people, is less than ideal. If we replace it with something like meetups and clubs, where you a) meet with people who actually share common interests and b) are able to not interact with people you don't like, that would be much better.

rayiner5• 4 years ago

During the pandemic, I’ve been able to see my kids and neighbors more while working just as much, by eliminating my commute. There’s no reason to have these white collar workers go downtown every day (and concomitantly no reason to have all the service workers that support them go downtown every day). We can leave that thinking in the Reagan era where it belongs.

frazbin• 4 years ago

Humming and thrumming down 60 percent, bubbling and burbling at all time lows. Oh dear! I think she has us confused with fish in an aquarium?

Kon-Peki• 4 years ago

I was in downtown Chicago today, taking my kids to the museum and zoo. The Lollapalooza music festival is happening, so the downtown streets were overflowing with young adults having a wonderful time.

If we can hold out a little longer, and the corporate landlords go bust, and some office buildings are auctioned off, and we can cheaply convert them to residential… It would be like a huge shot of adrenaline to America, making the cities affordable enough for young adults again. It would be good for America

The Lonely Office Is Bad for America

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