Thanks for writing this. I think about it all the time. Right now, the aspect of this phenomenon that troubles me the most is that my middle schooler is still doing school on an iPad. That is, he goes to an IRL school with IRL teachers where he spends 75% of the day staring at a screen. It feels like everyone’s just given up.
I don’t necessarily think the reliance on screens - in and of itself - is a problem. I don’t know any workplace that still uses significant amounts of paper.
The outsourcing of thought / teaching to low quality digital tools is a larger concern than the devices themselves.
Schools are not “workplaces” for students. They are places of learning. And study after study shows that kids can’t learn as well on screens as they can through tactile in person instruction. Digital distraction is an enormous problem — particularly for people with underdeveloped frontal lobes.
I'm thinking in the context of high school / university, where digital tools for note taking, organization, etc were super useful for my learning; especially as someone with Dyslexia. In the high school context I view the digital distraction problem as something to be solved (both with good UX design and with skills an 18 year old needs to develop anyway (hence my comment about workplaces)) rather than an intractable problem with computers.
In the context of elementary or even middle school just staring at computers all day is a bigger problem. I agree that young kids should be running around and engaging with physical things.
My main point is I'm hesitant to view this in a "screens are bad" sense as I think this leads to perverse policies like my university professors forcing me to read physical books and handwrite notes; something that just made learning arbitrarily harder without giving any benefit. (I learned more and retained more from the classes where I could read, write, and note take using my computer and iPad ... these are notes I still revisit from time to time; whereas my forced paper notes were discarded as soon as I completed the final for those classes).
I'm not a Starbucks drinker, but I immediately think of all those Starbucks locations that recently converted to "pick up only". They're just empty rooms with no tables and a counter. No bathroom, either, which I suspect was really the point. Every time I see these I have flashbacks to the darkest days of the lockdowns. Apparently their new CEO will reverse these. I hope so.
On a broader scale, I think the dependence on delivery services were also a lasting change. The sidewalks in Toronto are now constantly clogged by Uber Eats and all those other gig workers barreling around on their e-bikes, often on the sidewalks, and jamming up the commuter trains, elevators, condo lobbies, and everywhere else. There's also the scourge of Amazon orders, which pile into our building by the truckload multiple times per day. I know delivery is essential for some people (the elderly, the disabled, etc.) but for those who can, I think it's better for our own sanity and for the vibrancy of our neighbhourhoods if we get off our asses and run our own mundane errands.
Yes, it's not only Starbucks but everywhere you go now you're essentially required to interface with a screen instead of a person. Just went to a movie over the weekend and instead of talking to a cashier, you buy tickets through a screen. I see the efficiencies in this method, but I can't help but think it's just a whittling away of human experiences.
As for delivery, yes, it's beneficial to run errands. I completely see, though, why it's caught on. The volume of work for many people is brutal and delivery is the only way to keep up with life demands. Still, we need to manage delivery better in a bunch of dimensions -- the traffic, the waste, the decline of retail and so on.
McDs have all been converted into glorified digital vending machines. You have the option of ordering from the drive through kiosk or the indoor kiosk. Occasionally some poor sap will stand bewildered at the lone unmanned cash register awaiting one of the people who have now been assigned backroom duty to notice.
I think you are describing a class-bound phenomenon. The working and middle class are absolutely crushed by inflation and loss of work during the pandemic, and cannot afford to go out as often - or ever. A lot of moms had to quit (against their will - I’m not talking about SAHMs by choice) and finances are tighter than ever.
The upper middle class - like, where I live, in a suburb of north NJ - is at least partly remote, thriving, and spending more money than ever where we live. Local restaurants are popping up like mushrooms after a rain.
I can say for me fully remote work changed my life: I have 3 hours a day of my life back that I’m able to spend with my family and friends. We are able to randomly go out on a Friday night or spontaneously spend an hour in the park Thursday evenings and get pizza, because I’m not lying on the couch physically shaking, trying to recover from a Penn Station rush hour. I rarely have work to do after 5pm (I’m a research admin) because I can actually do my paperwork, analyses, literature reviews, etc. without people constantly stopping to bug me - I used to spend half the day fielding distractions. I’ll add it has major health benefits: I made the switch in the middle of pregnancy and my gestational hypertension literally *disappeared.* My OB was surprised (and pleased).
So yeah, my neighborhood feels far more vibrant. But NYC, the area where I used to work, feels dead. The tradeoff is the tradeoff. I’d rather spend time with/fund local neighborhoods and businesses than a progression of faceless Starbucks and Citibank managers.
Yes, you definitely describe how remote work has been an amazing benefit to a set of folks. It is fascinating to see how the same phenomenon can have so many different impacts on people depending on age, geography, industry, etc. Also you are the prototype of the higher fertility rate in NJ that I wrote about in yesterday's piece on the new Census data -- I am guessing remote work is enabling the higher birth rate in NJ and NY.
Interesting to hear about the north NJ suburbs becoming more vibrant. I was expecting to see the suburbs blossom because we have such high rates of remote work still. That said, in Philadelphia, aside from the wealthiest parts of the Main Line, I haven't seen many changes beyond higher housing prices.
It's literally just down to class I think. I was raised working class and still have many friends without BAs or just BAs. They appreciate the idea of working in an office because to them it means stability, responsibility, legitimacy. Imagine a middle manager of an office insisting on RTO because he's certain everyone at home is goofing off, and has no formal way to assess deliverables or progress besides butt in seat.
Those SAHMs really may live in desolate new build suburbs with no safe place to walk or play, schools that stick kids in front of iPads, maybe gas to go to Target is just a bit too much to pay today... and if they get a remote job maybe they're not doing childcare because they desperately need the money and can't lose it to daycare. That's a structural problem. Remote work is orthogonal to it. It reveals the fault lines, it did not create the conditions.
I joined the PMC. Knowledge workers are independent - I may be salaried but I operate like a contractor. We don't like being told what to do. We want the freedom of a midday coffee and chat with a vendor instead of 2 hours on an LA highway.
An exception is those in high control settings (think NYC biglaw) who fervently believe suffering is the route to success. I know a few of those.
This is sooo soo good. One thing I've noticed in recent years is that we often invite friends & kids' friends over to our house but those invitations are mostly not reciprocated. It's striking.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to the 6yo that no, we can't go over to their friends' house w/out invitation. It breaks my heart, having to socialize her into a fundamentally anti-social society. But also, it feels shitty when people aren't reciprocating.
It's one of the reasons I don't want to live in this country anymore.
Completely agree. My 8 year old is outgoing and always making friends but the actually making plans falls to me and it seems no one is interested in getting the kids together
Something that ties into why people may prefer working at home but which I haven’t seen much written about, is a “collaborative workplace” office redesign model that swept across corporate offices across the US a few years before the pandemic. Individual offices are for the most part eliminated and replaced by a sea of cubicles. In theory the space that was saved is transformed into new small meeting rooms, casual areas, and a variety of other spaces where workers can collaborate. This transition was completed in my office a few months before the pandemic and after 30 years as a professional and 25 having my own office I was moved to a cubicle with no place for my small library of books or memorabilia from a 30 year career. It seems in my office they forgot about the collaborative alternative meeting spaces half of the equation. They also forgot that there are a hundred different working styles in an office environment. Mine is being on phone calls with colleagues around the country half the day and in deep thought trying not to write technical reports the other half the day neither of which is well suited to the noisy environment of a cubicle farm.
So the redesign made social distancing an impossibly during the peak of the pandemic. One thing that was interesting is that the 6-7 people that still had individual offices continued to come to the office every day once the stay at home period ended. I’m doing fine in my cubicle because with only 25-30% of the people in the office the noise level is manageable.
In terms of office spaces I see a profound design failure that by chance coincided with the pandemic and may be an under appreciated reason why people still prefer not to return to their office. I think the collaborative workplace model was being widely adopted before the pandemic.
Thanks for sharing this. I agree that poor office space design is partly to blame for the reluctance to return to work. In my own experience, I also noticed that people working in cubes were far more resentful of management in offices at the beginning part of the pandemic because those in offices didn't have the same level of exposure to people when Covid was a concern. We've clearly not hit on the right designs to express a more horizontal workforce with the appropriate amount of privacy. I can say that I work from a co-working space most days but I work from home when I have a Zoom call because I have more control over my environment from home.
Where I live in the South, Chick-Fil-A has long been a third space for families with young children as they used to have playgrounds which came in exceedingly handy in the long summer months when it's too hot to play outside. Alas, they have nearly all been ripped out in favor of more food delivery and drive thru support. My kids sadly say "I miss making new friends there."
This is fascinating and I didn't know about this particular situation with Chick-Fil-A. Thanks to you and Julia above for bringing this example to my attention!
Chic-fil-a closed their play places during the pandemic. My mom’s club used to meet there for coffee while the kids played, those of us who worked from home would bring our laptops. Now it’s storage.
In Long Beach, CA - we have about 20 outdoor Micro art galleries where people can view art in their neighborhood (for free), and where the “curators” often have front lawn art openings that bring people together. There are no limits on how far this concept can go. The little galleries started springing up during the pandemic and are going strong after. People like the no-pressure casualness of being able to arrive, stay, or leave the events at their leisure. And the art is there 24/7. Still, your point is strongly resonating with me. I’m hopeful things like art and music can still bring people together. We just need to create more options for free or low-cost events.
good one thanks. I was just thinking: "Am I having worse friends now", and then I realized: "nope. people just don't socialize any more like they used to. It's not the same after the pandemic."
I live in Tacoma, which does have a problem with homelessness, open drug use, and crime, someone tried to break into my building last year when I was living there alone. And I live in an area where houses go for $900K. Its a nice part of town but we’ve had huge encampments with fires and other problems. I was randomly assaulted by a man in a bar who was on some kind of meth bender and hurt me and four other people. He got away with it. I’ve been followed or chased home numerous times and my friend was chased down the street by a homeless man with an axe. She lives a couple blocks from me. A guy I was dating got punched in the face when he was just going on his run. There have been three fatal shootings within 3 blocks of my house in the past 3 years. This is what life is like here. It doesn’t stop me from going out—maybe I am insane?—but I understand why it would for other people! we need to stop tolerating this kind of disorder and constant specter of violence in order to preserve in-person socializing. But it’s also become taboo to point any of this out among my liberal friends.
I am staff at a large Midwestern University. Although classes are now almost completely in-person, most meetings I have are still done via Zoom, and many people are on hybrid schedules. It's a bit of a weird situation. On the one hand I get it, because campus is huge and it's hard to coordinate in-person meetings not knowing who is in and who is off campus, but theres also a feeling I get that there's a strange kind of unspoken taboo about even mentioning or attempting in-person meetings. I think at least a small portion of this is holdover COVID anxiety. I think there's some people who are just having a real rough time with the idea of returning to the world of direct human interaction. I saw someone yesterday walking down the sidewalk wearing a full-on respirator, outside.
For others I wonder how much of it is just inertia. We adapted to this remote mode and now maybe it's just hard to switch gears. It stinks because even though I am an introvert by nature I very clearly recall the old campus culture, and it was way better and more connected, which is saying a lot because people complained about silo'ing before. It's so so much worse now.
I have seen this myself. I participate in a monthly housing group run by a local nonprofit. It's the kind of thing that pre-pandemic would have been held in person, but now of course it's on Zoom. No one really pays attention or talks and everyone's multitasking. When it's a group of people who could meet in person because they're in the same city, I want to ask -- if the meeting is not worth gathering in person, is it worth having at all?
I'm fascinated by this subject, I've been researching Third Places a ton this past year and planning to write more about the future of Third Places since I think people are craving more analog IRL experiences.
A big part of it is density. One of the criteria of Third Places is that it's accessible by foot to a large number of people so that there's always some activity there. The problem in the US is we're lacking density in most places. I wrote about it here if you care to check it out :)
From 2016-2022 I was on the board at a community garden in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. I led the garden’s events, and during the height of COVID, we were one of the only third spaces offering safe gathering bc we were outdoors. In fall of 2020, our harvest festival was THE BEST event we ever threw. People were so ready to connect, share veggies together, create art and listen to live music. After 2022 I stepped off the board to shift focus to a new full time gig but the garden events and operations are still very much going strong. Our members talk frequently about how wholesome it feels to meet strangers in a place the community owns, not a corporation. But it’s a positive drop in the third space bucket to be sure!
My office has slowly boiled the RTO frog (from 1, to 3, to 5 days in the office come January).
Our building has been rearranged a bit to better enable lots of in person collaboration ahead of this. We’ve got a bunch of cafes in the area and are encouraged to walk around.
This compares pretty favorably to the entirely virtual slack and video call based work environment I’ve had at every other professional internship / job I’ve had.
They’ve also put a lot of effort into moving people around different teams so that everyone is in the same office as the majority of their colleagues. Compare this to my last job where the 6 people on my team were scattered around every corner of the US.
Thanks for writing this. I think about it all the time. Right now, the aspect of this phenomenon that troubles me the most is that my middle schooler is still doing school on an iPad. That is, he goes to an IRL school with IRL teachers where he spends 75% of the day staring at a screen. It feels like everyone’s just given up.
Such an important point -- schools rely on screens a lot these days.
I don’t necessarily think the reliance on screens - in and of itself - is a problem. I don’t know any workplace that still uses significant amounts of paper.
The outsourcing of thought / teaching to low quality digital tools is a larger concern than the devices themselves.
Schools are not “workplaces” for students. They are places of learning. And study after study shows that kids can’t learn as well on screens as they can through tactile in person instruction. Digital distraction is an enormous problem — particularly for people with underdeveloped frontal lobes.
I'm thinking in the context of high school / university, where digital tools for note taking, organization, etc were super useful for my learning; especially as someone with Dyslexia. In the high school context I view the digital distraction problem as something to be solved (both with good UX design and with skills an 18 year old needs to develop anyway (hence my comment about workplaces)) rather than an intractable problem with computers.
In the context of elementary or even middle school just staring at computers all day is a bigger problem. I agree that young kids should be running around and engaging with physical things.
My main point is I'm hesitant to view this in a "screens are bad" sense as I think this leads to perverse policies like my university professors forcing me to read physical books and handwrite notes; something that just made learning arbitrarily harder without giving any benefit. (I learned more and retained more from the classes where I could read, write, and note take using my computer and iPad ... these are notes I still revisit from time to time; whereas my forced paper notes were discarded as soon as I completed the final for those classes).
As you can see from my original comment, I was talking about middle school.
I'm not a Starbucks drinker, but I immediately think of all those Starbucks locations that recently converted to "pick up only". They're just empty rooms with no tables and a counter. No bathroom, either, which I suspect was really the point. Every time I see these I have flashbacks to the darkest days of the lockdowns. Apparently their new CEO will reverse these. I hope so.
On a broader scale, I think the dependence on delivery services were also a lasting change. The sidewalks in Toronto are now constantly clogged by Uber Eats and all those other gig workers barreling around on their e-bikes, often on the sidewalks, and jamming up the commuter trains, elevators, condo lobbies, and everywhere else. There's also the scourge of Amazon orders, which pile into our building by the truckload multiple times per day. I know delivery is essential for some people (the elderly, the disabled, etc.) but for those who can, I think it's better for our own sanity and for the vibrancy of our neighbhourhoods if we get off our asses and run our own mundane errands.
Yes, it's not only Starbucks but everywhere you go now you're essentially required to interface with a screen instead of a person. Just went to a movie over the weekend and instead of talking to a cashier, you buy tickets through a screen. I see the efficiencies in this method, but I can't help but think it's just a whittling away of human experiences.
As for delivery, yes, it's beneficial to run errands. I completely see, though, why it's caught on. The volume of work for many people is brutal and delivery is the only way to keep up with life demands. Still, we need to manage delivery better in a bunch of dimensions -- the traffic, the waste, the decline of retail and so on.
McDs have all been converted into glorified digital vending machines. You have the option of ordering from the drive through kiosk or the indoor kiosk. Occasionally some poor sap will stand bewildered at the lone unmanned cash register awaiting one of the people who have now been assigned backroom duty to notice.
I think you are describing a class-bound phenomenon. The working and middle class are absolutely crushed by inflation and loss of work during the pandemic, and cannot afford to go out as often - or ever. A lot of moms had to quit (against their will - I’m not talking about SAHMs by choice) and finances are tighter than ever.
The upper middle class - like, where I live, in a suburb of north NJ - is at least partly remote, thriving, and spending more money than ever where we live. Local restaurants are popping up like mushrooms after a rain.
I can say for me fully remote work changed my life: I have 3 hours a day of my life back that I’m able to spend with my family and friends. We are able to randomly go out on a Friday night or spontaneously spend an hour in the park Thursday evenings and get pizza, because I’m not lying on the couch physically shaking, trying to recover from a Penn Station rush hour. I rarely have work to do after 5pm (I’m a research admin) because I can actually do my paperwork, analyses, literature reviews, etc. without people constantly stopping to bug me - I used to spend half the day fielding distractions. I’ll add it has major health benefits: I made the switch in the middle of pregnancy and my gestational hypertension literally *disappeared.* My OB was surprised (and pleased).
So yeah, my neighborhood feels far more vibrant. But NYC, the area where I used to work, feels dead. The tradeoff is the tradeoff. I’d rather spend time with/fund local neighborhoods and businesses than a progression of faceless Starbucks and Citibank managers.
Yes, you definitely describe how remote work has been an amazing benefit to a set of folks. It is fascinating to see how the same phenomenon can have so many different impacts on people depending on age, geography, industry, etc. Also you are the prototype of the higher fertility rate in NJ that I wrote about in yesterday's piece on the new Census data -- I am guessing remote work is enabling the higher birth rate in NJ and NY.
Interesting to hear about the north NJ suburbs becoming more vibrant. I was expecting to see the suburbs blossom because we have such high rates of remote work still. That said, in Philadelphia, aside from the wealthiest parts of the Main Line, I haven't seen many changes beyond higher housing prices.
It's literally just down to class I think. I was raised working class and still have many friends without BAs or just BAs. They appreciate the idea of working in an office because to them it means stability, responsibility, legitimacy. Imagine a middle manager of an office insisting on RTO because he's certain everyone at home is goofing off, and has no formal way to assess deliverables or progress besides butt in seat.
Those SAHMs really may live in desolate new build suburbs with no safe place to walk or play, schools that stick kids in front of iPads, maybe gas to go to Target is just a bit too much to pay today... and if they get a remote job maybe they're not doing childcare because they desperately need the money and can't lose it to daycare. That's a structural problem. Remote work is orthogonal to it. It reveals the fault lines, it did not create the conditions.
I joined the PMC. Knowledge workers are independent - I may be salaried but I operate like a contractor. We don't like being told what to do. We want the freedom of a midday coffee and chat with a vendor instead of 2 hours on an LA highway.
An exception is those in high control settings (think NYC biglaw) who fervently believe suffering is the route to success. I know a few of those.
This is sooo soo good. One thing I've noticed in recent years is that we often invite friends & kids' friends over to our house but those invitations are mostly not reciprocated. It's striking.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to the 6yo that no, we can't go over to their friends' house w/out invitation. It breaks my heart, having to socialize her into a fundamentally anti-social society. But also, it feels shitty when people aren't reciprocating.
It's one of the reasons I don't want to live in this country anymore.
Completely agree. My 8 year old is outgoing and always making friends but the actually making plans falls to me and it seems no one is interested in getting the kids together
Something that ties into why people may prefer working at home but which I haven’t seen much written about, is a “collaborative workplace” office redesign model that swept across corporate offices across the US a few years before the pandemic. Individual offices are for the most part eliminated and replaced by a sea of cubicles. In theory the space that was saved is transformed into new small meeting rooms, casual areas, and a variety of other spaces where workers can collaborate. This transition was completed in my office a few months before the pandemic and after 30 years as a professional and 25 having my own office I was moved to a cubicle with no place for my small library of books or memorabilia from a 30 year career. It seems in my office they forgot about the collaborative alternative meeting spaces half of the equation. They also forgot that there are a hundred different working styles in an office environment. Mine is being on phone calls with colleagues around the country half the day and in deep thought trying not to write technical reports the other half the day neither of which is well suited to the noisy environment of a cubicle farm.
So the redesign made social distancing an impossibly during the peak of the pandemic. One thing that was interesting is that the 6-7 people that still had individual offices continued to come to the office every day once the stay at home period ended. I’m doing fine in my cubicle because with only 25-30% of the people in the office the noise level is manageable.
In terms of office spaces I see a profound design failure that by chance coincided with the pandemic and may be an under appreciated reason why people still prefer not to return to their office. I think the collaborative workplace model was being widely adopted before the pandemic.
Thanks for sharing this. I agree that poor office space design is partly to blame for the reluctance to return to work. In my own experience, I also noticed that people working in cubes were far more resentful of management in offices at the beginning part of the pandemic because those in offices didn't have the same level of exposure to people when Covid was a concern. We've clearly not hit on the right designs to express a more horizontal workforce with the appropriate amount of privacy. I can say that I work from a co-working space most days but I work from home when I have a Zoom call because I have more control over my environment from home.
Where I live in the South, Chick-Fil-A has long been a third space for families with young children as they used to have playgrounds which came in exceedingly handy in the long summer months when it's too hot to play outside. Alas, they have nearly all been ripped out in favor of more food delivery and drive thru support. My kids sadly say "I miss making new friends there."
This is fascinating and I didn't know about this particular situation with Chick-Fil-A. Thanks to you and Julia above for bringing this example to my attention!
Chic-fil-a closed their play places during the pandemic. My mom’s club used to meet there for coffee while the kids played, those of us who worked from home would bring our laptops. Now it’s storage.
Another commenter mentioned Chick-Fil-A -- thank you for sharing this example. Seems like a prominent case of what I'm writing about.
In Long Beach, CA - we have about 20 outdoor Micro art galleries where people can view art in their neighborhood (for free), and where the “curators” often have front lawn art openings that bring people together. There are no limits on how far this concept can go. The little galleries started springing up during the pandemic and are going strong after. People like the no-pressure casualness of being able to arrive, stay, or leave the events at their leisure. And the art is there 24/7. Still, your point is strongly resonating with me. I’m hopeful things like art and music can still bring people together. We just need to create more options for free or low-cost events.
good one thanks. I was just thinking: "Am I having worse friends now", and then I realized: "nope. people just don't socialize any more like they used to. It's not the same after the pandemic."
I live in Tacoma, which does have a problem with homelessness, open drug use, and crime, someone tried to break into my building last year when I was living there alone. And I live in an area where houses go for $900K. Its a nice part of town but we’ve had huge encampments with fires and other problems. I was randomly assaulted by a man in a bar who was on some kind of meth bender and hurt me and four other people. He got away with it. I’ve been followed or chased home numerous times and my friend was chased down the street by a homeless man with an axe. She lives a couple blocks from me. A guy I was dating got punched in the face when he was just going on his run. There have been three fatal shootings within 3 blocks of my house in the past 3 years. This is what life is like here. It doesn’t stop me from going out—maybe I am insane?—but I understand why it would for other people! we need to stop tolerating this kind of disorder and constant specter of violence in order to preserve in-person socializing. But it’s also become taboo to point any of this out among my liberal friends.
This sounds really bad! I think the disorder issue is tricky! I wish it weren't a liberal/conservative flash point and wrote a little about it here: https://thenewurbanorder.substack.com/p/why-the-disorder-debate-doesnt-have
I am staff at a large Midwestern University. Although classes are now almost completely in-person, most meetings I have are still done via Zoom, and many people are on hybrid schedules. It's a bit of a weird situation. On the one hand I get it, because campus is huge and it's hard to coordinate in-person meetings not knowing who is in and who is off campus, but theres also a feeling I get that there's a strange kind of unspoken taboo about even mentioning or attempting in-person meetings. I think at least a small portion of this is holdover COVID anxiety. I think there's some people who are just having a real rough time with the idea of returning to the world of direct human interaction. I saw someone yesterday walking down the sidewalk wearing a full-on respirator, outside.
For others I wonder how much of it is just inertia. We adapted to this remote mode and now maybe it's just hard to switch gears. It stinks because even though I am an introvert by nature I very clearly recall the old campus culture, and it was way better and more connected, which is saying a lot because people complained about silo'ing before. It's so so much worse now.
I have seen this myself. I participate in a monthly housing group run by a local nonprofit. It's the kind of thing that pre-pandemic would have been held in person, but now of course it's on Zoom. No one really pays attention or talks and everyone's multitasking. When it's a group of people who could meet in person because they're in the same city, I want to ask -- if the meeting is not worth gathering in person, is it worth having at all?
I'm fascinated by this subject, I've been researching Third Places a ton this past year and planning to write more about the future of Third Places since I think people are craving more analog IRL experiences.
A big part of it is density. One of the criteria of Third Places is that it's accessible by foot to a large number of people so that there's always some activity there. The problem in the US is we're lacking density in most places. I wrote about it here if you care to check it out :)
https://serendipitylab.substack.com/p/where-do-we-hang-out
10000% percent. Thank you for naming it. It scares me -- for our world, for my 30 year old single daughter, for myself.
I’m glad this resonated!
From 2016-2022 I was on the board at a community garden in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. I led the garden’s events, and during the height of COVID, we were one of the only third spaces offering safe gathering bc we were outdoors. In fall of 2020, our harvest festival was THE BEST event we ever threw. People were so ready to connect, share veggies together, create art and listen to live music. After 2022 I stepped off the board to shift focus to a new full time gig but the garden events and operations are still very much going strong. Our members talk frequently about how wholesome it feels to meet strangers in a place the community owns, not a corporation. But it’s a positive drop in the third space bucket to be sure!
That’s a great observation about the physical world serving the digital world—rings so, so true
Thank you!
My office has slowly boiled the RTO frog (from 1, to 3, to 5 days in the office come January).
Our building has been rearranged a bit to better enable lots of in person collaboration ahead of this. We’ve got a bunch of cafes in the area and are encouraged to walk around.
This compares pretty favorably to the entirely virtual slack and video call based work environment I’ve had at every other professional internship / job I’ve had.
They’ve also put a lot of effort into moving people around different teams so that everyone is in the same office as the majority of their colleagues. Compare this to my last job where the 6 people on my team were scattered around every corner of the US.