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 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.
Neither paper not screens should be needed as much - just a reduction in bureucracy by 10 to a 100 factor. We used the increase in productivity created by computers to fill the space with 100x the busywork (and for reduced service quality).
> 1. Computers made it much easier to create new information 2. Computers made it much easier to process information. So we (naturally) spend a lot more time information processing.
Yes, except there's nothing natural about this.
It was easy to collect more information, and process it, so we collect more and process more. And demand more.
But not because it's useless or beneficial. On the contrary, it's detrimental, paralyzing, and mind-numbing.
"Given how much more complex the world is today" - computers were supposed to make it simpler. It's more complex because we drown it in busywork, rules, regulations, and rent-seeking complexity.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm shocked that I'm the first person here to point out that we are not living in a "post-pandemic" world and it's not "five years after the pandemic" — just five years after lockdown. The pandemic is ongoing. Just because mandated lockdown is over does not mean the threat of infection, transmission, death, and long-term COVID-triggered illness (AKA long COVID) is over. I'd really urge you to subscribe to The People's CDC and to practice more caution in posting about this in the future. I say this as an earnest call-in, because I know the lack of effective media coverage and systemic public health failure has led a lot of people to believe COVID is "over." But as of the first week of December, there were 18 states reporting ‘High’ or ‘Very High’ transmission. I know several people who are living with disabling symptoms due to long COVID. And we're on the verge of another widespread pandemic with Bird Flu transmission rising. Please be careful, and please be thoughtful. It's especially dangerous for immunocompromised people to be living in a world where people are actively pretending a deadly and disabling virus no longer exists. And those of us who are continuing to take COVID precautions are responding to that unfortunate reality.
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."
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!
The doom loop long predates COVID or Remote Work. As a parent, no-one lets their kids go over to other's homes. It's all pre-coordinated activities elsewhere which often get canceled. Then add in the issue with the lockdowns and when habbits get broken, when Coffee is made at home and not at a Cafe, it's hard to change them back.
Then just add in the general angst in society and we have a conflagaration since humans do best in hyper-social situations. Something's been shifting for a while, it just accelerated in 2020. I think there's an undercurrent of anti-social behavior, specifically manifest on social media, that drives this. It's like a revenge of the introverts. More musings on that topic here:
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.
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.
Hello, first of all I am an architecture student and I love finding a space where people talk about urban planning in relation to current trends and people, which should be the first focus of urban planning. I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the one hand, all the issues of capitalization in matters such as those you mention in the article take a long time to arrive or settle in the country and then despite this, I feel that in matters of city and urban planning we do not have a direction and current trends are taking over certain parts and taking over the city in the same way that a virus does. Pre-pandemic and a bit at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about new trends that were being generated, for example the city of 15 minutes from Paris, and it was being evaluated how to carry it out here in the city, there was a search for how to achieve a greater community in the city. For those who don't know "the autonomous city of Buenos Aires", the capital, I'll quickly put you in context. For many years we have had the same population of people living in the city. There are empty apartments but no possibility of renting them due to multiple factors. More and more people are moving to the outskirts of the city and in 20 years what is called "conurbano" has developed: people who live outside the city, who come to work and then leave. During the pandemic, the center of the capital, the epicenter of all things offices, banks, companies, stores, began to be abandoned, as people began to work from home. There have been several projects to revitalize the center, but today they have come to nothing. These years, Air bnb appeared, luckily the climate of tension that was experienced with that decreased a little but it is still a considerable aspect when you are looking to rent or buy a home. How difficult, having such a rich place, with so many opportunities, I feel that it is losing the concept of community. With the arrival of the pandemic, the concept of "gentrification" became more visible since several neighborhoods that were mainly residential were taken over by restaurants, shops, etc. Areas were rehabilitated, places that seemed abandoned are now full of cafes, etc. The city government tried to generate that each neighborhood has its distinctive "thing" but that was only to generate attraction for people who were not from the neighborhood, and thus commerce moves. Now, as you comment in the post, I am observing that everything is already taken over by restaurants, cafes and bars, but the new trend is for restaurants, cafes and bars that are only pick-up, that have no tables, that you buy and leave, that are passing through, that do not invite you to stay, that force you. to go back to your house or to some other place, there is no such other place (this could also be due to the issue of rent and that it is more expensive, but that generates a worse trend) and then restaurants began to emerge that are pick-up and delivery services, they do not serve the general public. So we increasingly have ephemeral spaces, where people only move from one place to another, and some in which they no longer serve you. I have signed up for a project/program, I don't know how to define it, that seeks to rethink all these situations and with private money propose things to improve the city, you had to fill out a form, propose ideas and they invited you to the meetings. It is still in process, so I don't know much, I will update, but I went with the idea that we have to rehabilitate the 3rd space, it is the key aspect to meet again as a community on the sidewalk and/or in some space to be able to talk with our neighbors. Excellent article from Slate, it has made me think a lot!
I loved hearing about how things are going in Buenos Aires. It's too bad that it's become a city so oriented around tourists. That's a problem everywhere, but I think especially bad in Latin and South America right now with digital nomads seeking less expensive places to live and visit. Please do keep me posted about the work on 3rd spaces there! I'd love to hear how they evolve. Thanks for reading.
I gotta be completely honest here. The lockdowns pretty much gave me an excuse to do what I wanted to do all along. Starting five years before it began, I’d been realizing that most of the people I’d been trying to get to know just weren’t worth it. And I can’t be the only one my age (26) who thinks that.
If anything, the internet and social media (and streaming services if you’re so inclined) themselves are to blame for the rise of asocial and antisocial behavior. The lockdown was just an accelerant.
I do think that the dopamine highs of online life can make everything else seem slow and boring by comparison. Getting to know people can take time and real life has a lot of "friction" to it compared with seamless online experiences where you click and get instant gratification of watching, buying or responding to something.
I think our wires must have gotten crossed somewhere. This happened back when I was in high school. I didn’t even half a smartphone then. I was desperate to make friends and found out only when it was too late that half of the “friends” I made in high school were closeted assholes who only cared about popularity and punching down on anyone who was more of a loser than they were. When I got to college this hardly changed at all. Now it seems like social media and the internet are just perpetuating high school social dynamics for all eternity. No one has to grow up anymore. I’m still trying to make friends, but it’s awfully hard to do that when people increasingly communicate through memes and can’t go five minutes without injecting their chosen flavor of political brain rot into the conversation.
Sorry if it seemed like my use of "you" meant you in particular -- I meant people in general! My point was that it can be hard to get excited by the pleasures of human company when online life can be so much more stimulating -- for all of us. I think many people here have commented on the decline of social life in a variety of contexts. My only advice is to use the internet to its advantage here -- you can go relatively deep into any topic or hobby or sport and find other people who are passionate about it. And then hopefully meet up with them in real life and hope they're not assholes!
Ah ok, thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for misunderstanding. I’m using a mix of both (using the internet to find people with common interests and meeting people irl). It’s just sort of frustrating because I’m at a stage in my life where almost everything is impermanent but hopefully that’ll end soon.
I’m an attorney who came out of law school during Covid. My work is considered hybrid, but our office really just functions as a mailroom. And all of our mail gets digitized by administrative staff, so the attorneys never need to go in. I’m told that pre pandemic, when everyone was in-person, paralegals admins and attorneys got along way better than they do now, though I wasn’t there to experience the before times.
The bizarre flip to physical spaces supporting the digital world resonates SO much. The weirdness of it is amplified by increasingly evident class divides within our organization. Admins have to RTO bc they get assigned mail duty. Meanwhile I get the sense some attorneys view it as “beneath them” to have to come in, because that’s something ONLY admins have had to do until now. Many attorneys are vocal about how they will quit if forced to RTO. Not sure if it’s possible to undo the social stratification at this point.
I loved reading everyone’s comments on how lockdown changed their social and work lives. Great piece and great community here! Subscribed!!
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 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.
Neither paper not screens should be needed as much - just a reduction in bureucracy by 10 to a 100 factor. We used the increase in productivity created by computers to fill the space with 100x the busywork (and for reduced service quality).
I don't think I agree with this.
My view:
1. Computers made it much easier to create new information
2. Computers made it much easier to process information.
So we (naturally) spend a lot more time information processing.
Given how much more complex the world is today than even a couple decades ago I'm not convinced that this is bad or wrong.
> 1. Computers made it much easier to create new information 2. Computers made it much easier to process information. So we (naturally) spend a lot more time information processing.
Yes, except there's nothing natural about this.
It was easy to collect more information, and process it, so we collect more and process more. And demand more.
But not because it's useless or beneficial. On the contrary, it's detrimental, paralyzing, and mind-numbing.
"Given how much more complex the world is today" - computers were supposed to make it simpler. It's more complex because we drown it in busywork, rules, regulations, and rent-seeking complexity.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm shocked that I'm the first person here to point out that we are not living in a "post-pandemic" world and it's not "five years after the pandemic" — just five years after lockdown. The pandemic is ongoing. Just because mandated lockdown is over does not mean the threat of infection, transmission, death, and long-term COVID-triggered illness (AKA long COVID) is over. I'd really urge you to subscribe to The People's CDC and to practice more caution in posting about this in the future. I say this as an earnest call-in, because I know the lack of effective media coverage and systemic public health failure has led a lot of people to believe COVID is "over." But as of the first week of December, there were 18 states reporting ‘High’ or ‘Very High’ transmission. I know several people who are living with disabling symptoms due to long COVID. And we're on the verge of another widespread pandemic with Bird Flu transmission rising. Please be careful, and please be thoughtful. It's especially dangerous for immunocompromised people to be living in a world where people are actively pretending a deadly and disabling virus no longer exists. And those of us who are continuing to take COVID precautions are responding to that unfortunate reality.
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."
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!
The doom loop long predates COVID or Remote Work. As a parent, no-one lets their kids go over to other's homes. It's all pre-coordinated activities elsewhere which often get canceled. Then add in the issue with the lockdowns and when habbits get broken, when Coffee is made at home and not at a Cafe, it's hard to change them back.
Then just add in the general angst in society and we have a conflagaration since humans do best in hyper-social situations. Something's been shifting for a while, it just accelerated in 2020. I think there's an undercurrent of anti-social behavior, specifically manifest on social media, that drives this. It's like a revenge of the introverts. More musings on that topic here:
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/homo-socialis
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
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.
Hello, first of all I am an architecture student and I love finding a space where people talk about urban planning in relation to current trends and people, which should be the first focus of urban planning. I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the one hand, all the issues of capitalization in matters such as those you mention in the article take a long time to arrive or settle in the country and then despite this, I feel that in matters of city and urban planning we do not have a direction and current trends are taking over certain parts and taking over the city in the same way that a virus does. Pre-pandemic and a bit at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about new trends that were being generated, for example the city of 15 minutes from Paris, and it was being evaluated how to carry it out here in the city, there was a search for how to achieve a greater community in the city. For those who don't know "the autonomous city of Buenos Aires", the capital, I'll quickly put you in context. For many years we have had the same population of people living in the city. There are empty apartments but no possibility of renting them due to multiple factors. More and more people are moving to the outskirts of the city and in 20 years what is called "conurbano" has developed: people who live outside the city, who come to work and then leave. During the pandemic, the center of the capital, the epicenter of all things offices, banks, companies, stores, began to be abandoned, as people began to work from home. There have been several projects to revitalize the center, but today they have come to nothing. These years, Air bnb appeared, luckily the climate of tension that was experienced with that decreased a little but it is still a considerable aspect when you are looking to rent or buy a home. How difficult, having such a rich place, with so many opportunities, I feel that it is losing the concept of community. With the arrival of the pandemic, the concept of "gentrification" became more visible since several neighborhoods that were mainly residential were taken over by restaurants, shops, etc. Areas were rehabilitated, places that seemed abandoned are now full of cafes, etc. The city government tried to generate that each neighborhood has its distinctive "thing" but that was only to generate attraction for people who were not from the neighborhood, and thus commerce moves. Now, as you comment in the post, I am observing that everything is already taken over by restaurants, cafes and bars, but the new trend is for restaurants, cafes and bars that are only pick-up, that have no tables, that you buy and leave, that are passing through, that do not invite you to stay, that force you. to go back to your house or to some other place, there is no such other place (this could also be due to the issue of rent and that it is more expensive, but that generates a worse trend) and then restaurants began to emerge that are pick-up and delivery services, they do not serve the general public. So we increasingly have ephemeral spaces, where people only move from one place to another, and some in which they no longer serve you. I have signed up for a project/program, I don't know how to define it, that seeks to rethink all these situations and with private money propose things to improve the city, you had to fill out a form, propose ideas and they invited you to the meetings. It is still in process, so I don't know much, I will update, but I went with the idea that we have to rehabilitate the 3rd space, it is the key aspect to meet again as a community on the sidewalk and/or in some space to be able to talk with our neighbors. Excellent article from Slate, it has made me think a lot!
I loved hearing about how things are going in Buenos Aires. It's too bad that it's become a city so oriented around tourists. That's a problem everywhere, but I think especially bad in Latin and South America right now with digital nomads seeking less expensive places to live and visit. Please do keep me posted about the work on 3rd spaces there! I'd love to hear how they evolve. Thanks for reading.
I gotta be completely honest here. The lockdowns pretty much gave me an excuse to do what I wanted to do all along. Starting five years before it began, I’d been realizing that most of the people I’d been trying to get to know just weren’t worth it. And I can’t be the only one my age (26) who thinks that.
If anything, the internet and social media (and streaming services if you’re so inclined) themselves are to blame for the rise of asocial and antisocial behavior. The lockdown was just an accelerant.
I do think that the dopamine highs of online life can make everything else seem slow and boring by comparison. Getting to know people can take time and real life has a lot of "friction" to it compared with seamless online experiences where you click and get instant gratification of watching, buying or responding to something.
I think our wires must have gotten crossed somewhere. This happened back when I was in high school. I didn’t even half a smartphone then. I was desperate to make friends and found out only when it was too late that half of the “friends” I made in high school were closeted assholes who only cared about popularity and punching down on anyone who was more of a loser than they were. When I got to college this hardly changed at all. Now it seems like social media and the internet are just perpetuating high school social dynamics for all eternity. No one has to grow up anymore. I’m still trying to make friends, but it’s awfully hard to do that when people increasingly communicate through memes and can’t go five minutes without injecting their chosen flavor of political brain rot into the conversation.
Sorry if it seemed like my use of "you" meant you in particular -- I meant people in general! My point was that it can be hard to get excited by the pleasures of human company when online life can be so much more stimulating -- for all of us. I think many people here have commented on the decline of social life in a variety of contexts. My only advice is to use the internet to its advantage here -- you can go relatively deep into any topic or hobby or sport and find other people who are passionate about it. And then hopefully meet up with them in real life and hope they're not assholes!
Ah ok, thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for misunderstanding. I’m using a mix of both (using the internet to find people with common interests and meeting people irl). It’s just sort of frustrating because I’m at a stage in my life where almost everything is impermanent but hopefully that’ll end soon.
I’m an attorney who came out of law school during Covid. My work is considered hybrid, but our office really just functions as a mailroom. And all of our mail gets digitized by administrative staff, so the attorneys never need to go in. I’m told that pre pandemic, when everyone was in-person, paralegals admins and attorneys got along way better than they do now, though I wasn’t there to experience the before times.
The bizarre flip to physical spaces supporting the digital world resonates SO much. The weirdness of it is amplified by increasingly evident class divides within our organization. Admins have to RTO bc they get assigned mail duty. Meanwhile I get the sense some attorneys view it as “beneath them” to have to come in, because that’s something ONLY admins have had to do until now. Many attorneys are vocal about how they will quit if forced to RTO. Not sure if it’s possible to undo the social stratification at this point.
I loved reading everyone’s comments on how lockdown changed their social and work lives. Great piece and great community here! Subscribed!!
Thanks so much! And thanks for this comment. It reminds me that there's some new research that notes that hybrid is not "best of both worlds" as previously contended. It's worse for people's burnout, anxiety and job growth. See slides 15, 18, and 19 https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/WFHResearch_updates_December2024.pdf