"nObOdY WaNtS tO wOrK AnYmOrE!" And here's why: Part 1 in Those Public Entries

About a year ago, I saw a post from someone on this very site, who believes WFH is not only a net negative, but that we should abandon it completely in favor of working in the office full-time again. No caveats, no “it should be an option,” no nuance. Just “it works for me, so clearly it works for everyone!”

…No. No, it doesn’t work for everyone. Demonstrably, it doesn’t work for everyone.

“But studies show–” Hold the fuck up. As someone who has done a lot of academic research, both for school and recreation (and, sometimes, to bring evidence to my annual doctor’s appointments to show that I’m not “making things up”), I am sorry to tell you that the phrase “studies show” is essentially meaningless, unless you know how to back it up. And that is not as easy as you might think. “Studies show” a lot of things, and unless the results of these studies can be replicated several times over, with less than a 10% margin of error each time, they actually don’t show anything, and they certainly can’t prove what they can’t show.

Example: Andrew Wakefield’s absolute steaming pile of rancid horse shit study “showed” that vaccines cause autism. Which… If I have to spend any more time explaining why he was wrong, I will find out where this Wakefield bastard lives and spray-paint a hybrid puzzle piece-hammer and sickle on each of his windows, cars included. Harry Brewis, aka “hbomberguy”, has done an incredibly well-researched and thorough video essay on this topic, so go watch it. …Read this first, then watch hbomberguy’s vaccine video.

Now, are there studies that indicate that WFH can negatively impact workers’ productivity and creativity? Yes. But when you go to Google Scholar or EBSCO Host and search “working from home and productivity”, you will find that the majority of the research on this topic is not in unanimous agreement, nor does it come to same or similar conclusions. In other words: WFH might negatively impact productivity, but it also might positively impact it. I think this is one of those “it depends on the person” situations: Some people are more productive when they work remotely, and some people are more productive when they work in the office.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, in cases where WFH is negatively impacting employee’s creativity and productivity, WFH itself is not the root cause. The root cause is more likely to be a lack of good leadership, or workers being burnt out, or feeling unappreciated, or being underpaid. They could also have been shut down for suggesting something new in the past, and are hesitant to bring up any new ideas they might have.

Oooooooorrrr… maybe the employees in question have just been through a mass death event, like a pandemic, that upended their lives and made them face their own mortality, and they realize that their job shouldn’t be the defining feature of their lives, so now they work to rule, as is their right and responsibility. I’ve noticed this last one, in particular, gets shit on by people who are still married to hustle culture; you know, the “nO oNe WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE!!!” crowd.

I have to admit, I feel sorry for people who make their job a major part of their identity, or whose job becomes their identity. In the first place, your job will never love you back, you’ll never get the same out of it as you put in (no, not even monetarily), and if you die tomorrow, your manager won’t spend any more time mourning you than it takes for HR to replace you. In the second place, you’re a human being and you deserve to be treated better than that. You deserve to have a life and community completely apart from your job, whatever else this late capitalist hellscape we call life and its attendant hustle culture tells you. Join a book club. Go to a game store and ask if you can join a beginner D&D game. Hell, go to a bar or a club on a Friday. Do community theater. We are not put on this planet to work and nothing else. Always remember, we’re here for a good time, not a long time, and if you think you’re going to lay on your deathbed and have that last thought, “Damn, if only I’d worked eighty hours a week instead of forty…” Eh, maybe you will. But don’t think I admire you for it.

Second thing about WFH policies and how beneficial they are: I’m not sure how many people have noticed this, but life is prohibitively expensive right now. In Burlington, VT, where my job is located (I’ve been WFH full-time since February 2023, due to extensive water damage in my office building, although that’s coming to an end soon), rent for a one-bedroom apartment averages $2127 a month. The two-bedroom apartment I rented from July 2021 to January 2022 was $1600… And I supposedly could afford that on $39k/year, but I had to basically give the “Always Be Closing” speech and get my mother to co-sign on the mortgage for a $130k house with a (now) $947/month payment (versus my now just-under $48k/year salary). Capitalism, YAY! But, in order to get a house this cheap, in addition to being incredibly lucky, I had to move 90 minutes away from Burlington… Right as gas prices went through the roof.

Burlington, VT is not the only city that’s unaffordable. New York is even more spendy for apartments than usual, and according to NerdWallet, with a national average rent of $1997, a person needs to earn $79,889 a year to afford it. (Stop and think for a second: How many people do you, personally, know, who are between the ages of 28 and 43, or between the ages of 18 and 27, who are making $79,889 a year? Personally, I know two, and I ain’t one of ‘em.)

So, often, the only way to escape crushing rents is to move out of the cities, which presents a horrendous Catch-22: Be able to afford housing, but have a long commute and have to pay up to $150 a week for gas, depending on your car, plus additional for extra maintenance and wear and tear? Or stay in the city and end up on the street in the immediate future, because nothing stops landlords from increasing rent every year?¹ WFH has the potential to eliminate that Catch-22 entirely, so that people can find a place they can afford to live in and not have to choose between a long commute or almost certain homelessness.

And let’s be clear about this: There is ZERO reason, apart from pure greed, that anyone who works 40 hours or more a week should have to even consider that they can’t afford housing. There’s no reason anyone should be unhoused, period, except greed and the sociopathy that calls itself “capitalism.”

Third thing: WFH has been good for women, trans people, and BIPOC. Why? Because they aren’t constantly trying to “hold their own” and “prove themselves” in the overwhelmingly, aggressively White Bros Club that most corporate work environments are. I want to point out, I’m white and cis, so I don’t have direct experience with racial discrimination at work, or being denied the use of bathrooms because no one can figure out where I should shit. I know there are BIPOC and trans people on this site who have had those experiences, so if they have shared those experiences or are comfortable doing so, I would suggest you seek them out. (Do not pressure or harangue anyone to share those experiences, and if you do, keep my name out of your mouth.)

But, as a woman, I have definitely been on the receiving end of sexism and misogyny in the workplace. I have had to endure men hitting on me or sexually harassing me. I have been the only woman in a roomful of men. I have had my competency questioned by the men I was responsible for training. I have been made to “train” (read: babysit) men whose behavior management doesn’t want to deal with. At my current job, I have a male coworker who constantly treats me like his personal assistant, in spite of both me and my (cis woman) supervisor reminding him that I’m an admin assistant for five offices across three states, and that I am under absolutely no obligation to drop everything and run at his every beck and call. I’ve had men explain my job to me, when I’ve been doing this job for three years and they don’t even know what a “p-card” is or how to use it. I’ve been called “girl” and “honey” and “sweetheart” and other sexist and misogynistic microaggressions.

Finally, some of you might remember that, between 2020 and 2021, at my last job, I was directly blamed and written up for three instances of “inappropriate communication” when all I really did was say, respectively, “I gave that document to the process server; once it’s in their hands, it’s their responsibility to deliver it, not mine to hound them about it,” “we need teamwork if we’re going to work as a team,” and “I’m not a programmer, and even if I was I don’t have the right permissions to fix this bug, can you tell me how to work around it?” If I were a (cis) man, I would never have been written up for any of that! It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that a man should be written up for saying those things, because men are supposed to be direct and forthright when they communicate! But women aren’t supposed to be direct communicators, and we’re definitely not supposed to have a clear boundary between “my responsibility” and “not my responsibility,” and we’re absolutely not supposed to even suggest that the boundary exists in the first place. We’re supposed to apologize profusely for any instance where anyone else is even mildly inconvenienced (and especially when men used weaponized incompetence to make us look bitchy), look pretty, and barring any of that, keep our mouths shut.

I am a simple woman, all right? At the end of the day, most of us are simple people, at least when it comes to our jobs. And when it comes to our jobs, most of us just want to do the job we were hired to do, get paid, get recognized for it (and not lavishly; not cake and ice cream every day, just “good job” or “I appreciate the work you do”), and not have to deal with the insane, ladder-climbing bullfuckery that is Corporate Office Hell. Eat shit, Dante! You thought being chewed up by Satan for all eternity was the worst thing that could happen to someone’s eternal soul! Try working in a 21st century office, you hack.

…Where was I? Oh right, why RTO policies suck.

The fourth thing about WFH is that it does work for a large number of people. Namely, WFH has been a major boon for disabled people.

Before I go into why WFH has been so good for disabled people, I want to make a few things clear.

1. Disabled people are the largest minority in the world. By most conservative estimates, 1 in 5 people has a physical, mental, emotional, or developmental disability. There are 7.88 billion people on the planet; 20% of 7.88 billion is a little over 1.5 billion. That is a little more than the population of China, so legit, disabled people could form our own country.

2. Disabled people cannot stop being disabled. Disability is not a state of mind. Disability is not an attitude. Disability is not an issue of mind over matter. Disability is a way of existing. Disability is how one’s body and/or mind exists in a world that is not built for it. Existing as a disabled person impacts your life in every single way, and you have to learn to navigate in a world that is not meant for you, and often, your very survival depends on how well you can force yourself to adapt, even when doing so will almost certainly destroy you, psychologically.

3. Not all disabilities are physical, or readily apparent. How do you know if someone is deaf, just by looking at them? “Easy, they have hearing aids!” Actually, no, not all deaf people have hearing aids or cochlear implants (and yes, they’re different). Nyle DiMarco doesn’t, and he’s been Deaf since birth. (Quick note: “Deaf” with a capital D refers to the culture that Deaf people have built, and it’s how Nyle refers to himself. Lowercase-d “deaf” refers to the state of not being able to hear.) And deafness is just one example of a disability that can be, and often is, hidden. At least three people you personally know are on the autism spectrum, and unless you know who they are, I guarantee you can’t tell. Disability isn’t just sitting in a wheelchair; it is very often invisible. If you have a chronic illness, if you’re neurodivergent, if you have mental illness, all of these are disabling conditions and they’re invisible to the outside world.

4. Anyone and everyone can become disabled. “Disability,” generally defined, is any condition which impacts your ability to live and navigate in the world without modifiers. Pregnancy, for example, is considered a “disabling” condition, because pregnant people are told not to do certain things, to ensure their own health and the health of their baby: They are advised to avoid certain foods, certain forms of exercise, any activity that could result in a fall, or changing a cat’s litter box. If you have ever been pregnant, you have been considered a “disabled person,” if only for that nine months, plus recovery time after birth. After major surgery, you’re considered “disabled” until your recovery is complete. And these are just things that, in general, most people experience. But make no mistake: Each and every one of us is one accident, one nervous breakdown, one major illness, one step away from becoming disabled.

So with that in mind, let’s examine why WFH has been good for disabled people.

In the first place, public spaces in general are not designed for disabled people. Most buildings, even in the US, are not designed for disabled people. Here’s an example: If you use a wheelchair in my office building, you’d better hope you work on the first floor, because if there’s a fire and you work on the second, third, or fourth floors, you’re gonna die, unless the emergency crews can (a) get to you, (b) carry you out of the building (with or without your wheelchair), and (c) not get caught by the flames or the smoke. And this isn’t just my building; it’s most office buildings throughout the country and throughout the world. Disabled people are generally considered expendable in emergency situations; that’s why a lot of them are so angry that people have stopped wearing masks, even though COVID is still around and mutating, and why a lot of them are still wearing their masks.

This isn’t just a problem with office buildings; it’s a structural and systemic issue. During Hurricane Katrina, 71% of the dead were over 60, including a quadriplegic woman who was denied access to the Superdome. And things aren’t getting better: Disabled students don’t have an evacuation plan during school shootings. Disabled employees are usually told to wait in a stairwell during emergencies, and if they survive, someone will come rescue them. Evacuation plans during natural disasters don’t account for disabled people. Here’s a documentary about a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, and its effects on Moore’s deaf population.

So imagine this: You are in a wheelchair, because you were in a car crash a few years ago and now you’re paralyzed from the waist down. Zero ability to walk. Think about the office building you work at, if you still work in an office on a full-time or hybrid basis. If a fire or a flood, or even a mass shooting, were to happen there, what are your odds of survival? What’s your evacuation route? Does your building have an accessible evacuation route for wheelchair-bound people at all? Or, imagine you have kidney disease and depend on dialysis to stay alive. If there’s a natural disaster in your town, and you’re trapped in your office until someone can come and get you, do you trust that emergency services will be able to reach you before you die from kidney failure? If you’re an insulin-dependent diabetic, think of how many vials of insulin you’d need if you weren’t able to get inside your house for a week, and then think of what could happen if you (probably like a lot of insulin-dependent diabetic Americans) don’t have that number on you, in case of an emergency that keeps you away from your home. (No judgment, by the way; I’m not diabetic, but I know how much insulin costs in this shithole country, and it’s fucking inhumane. The cost of insulin in America should honestly be considered a crime against humanity.)

Whereas disabled people tend to make their homes as accessible as possible for their needs. Per the Americans with Disabilities Act, housing for disabled people is required to be as accessible as possible to meet their needs (although I do want to point out, enforcement of these codes is iffy at best). Rental units are also required to be accessible, and landlords are made to cover the cost of reasonable accommodations (again, this is enforced loosely, if at all). This security -and the fact that mass shooters don’t target individuals’ homes- means that they’re able to work without constantly thinking of their own survival if the worse should come to the worst.

And it’s not just physically disabled people who benefit from full-time WFH. Neurodivergent people, myself included, also work better from home than in an office. Why? Because we’re in an environment we have complete control over.

Let me use myself as an example: I have ADHD. I work better with some kind of noise: Music, an audiobook, a podcast, YouTube videos, the like. But, I don’t like having earbuds in all the time; it legitimately causes pain, and I don’t need to damage my hearing any more than I already have. So I prefer an external speaker, like the one on my TV or computer. I can do this at home, because it’s just me and my cat. In an office, I either need to have earbuds in and be in pain for eight hours a day, or I can’t have any noise at all, since it’s distracting to my coworkers. Even when I’m on medication, a lack of noise makes it harder for me to focus on what little work I actually have on a daily basis. (Also, I want to point out about ADHD meds: They work some days, and don’t work others. I have no idea why and how this happens, I just know that, every morning, I stand with coffee in one hand and my Strattera in the other and say, “All right, meds: Are you going to work today, or not?” and then hope for the best.)

I also work best when I’m allowed to have my focus going in different places. Since my job consists of 15 minutes of filling out forms, updating forms, and time-checking every Friday and literally nothing else (unless I have to put in a supply order, which adds about 15 minutes to my weekly work load), I fill the rest of my time with other things. Like, since I’m trying to get into an infosec position, I’ve been doing modules on cybersecurity and information security. Can I do this in the office? Yes, but only if no one else is around, because there are snitches who will tell my manager about this as if I’m not also doing my assigned duties. (Of which, I cannot state enough, there are fleetingly few, and that is 100% the fault of the US Treasury that employs me.) But, when my brain has had enough of that, I need to do something else. At my office, there’s nothing. Literally nothing. I’ve looked. At home, there’s laundry, or vacuuming the living room, or loading up the dishwasher, or watering my gardens, or playing with the cat, or sweeping and mopping the kitchen, or… As long as I’m getting the few tasks I need done, and as long as I make it to most meetings (where I basically just check in on Teams, mute myself, and then do something else, because 99.999999…% of the time, I don’t actually have a reason to be in these meetings besides quotas), literally no one cares.

Finally, like a lot of people with ADHD, I can’t sleep on a normal schedule. This is due to delayed sleep phase syndrome, which basically means I’m supposed to be asleep from around 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., which is in direct opposition to the 8 to 5 office workday. One of the reasons I want that information security job? I can ask to be put on a swing shift, from 4 p.m. to midnight, which is absolutely a perfect shift for me. Before I started working an office job, I almost always worked night or swing shifts, and I was good at them.

Or, let’s take this ~office culture~ that so many Boomers and Boomer wannabes seem to think is so almighty important. Okay, maybe if you’re a C-suite or close to it, office culture is good. But those of us who aren’t in the corner office? Not even in the same universe as sorry: I could leave a carton of yogurt open and uncovered on my counter over the weekend, and it would develop more ~culture~ than I’ve seen in every single office I’ve ever worked in the last fifteen years.

Think about the most popular “I work in an office” movies, like 9 to 5 and Office Space. Notice how they don’t say, “Yeah, man, working in a cube farm for just slightly above subsistence wages is awesome for the rank and file! What with having to talk to people whose only commonality with us is this job, being constantly badgered and needled by management, being called ‘antisocial’ if we’re just there to work, and knowing that at the end of the day all we did was get incrementally older!”? That’s because it’s not awesome for us. It is, in fact, drudgery. It is what we do, because our Puritan society has decided that work is how we decide who’s “worthy” to stay alive. Not only that, but a big part of grind culture is having the carrot of “promotion” dangled over our heads, provided that we work so much and so long that we have no identity outside our jobs, but instead of that promotion, we just get more work, and more work, and more work, and more work, for no extra compensation. No raise, no extra PTO, nothing. That, mes amies, is ~office culture~. Hard to want to go back to that, isn’t it, when you’ve gotten a taste of what life could be without it.

Plus, as a neurodivergent-but-not-autistic person, I completely understand and relate to this post I saw on Vellum and Vinyl a few years back:

Alt text: biblioprincessdalian
Applying for jobs is a hell designed specifically to torment autistic people. Here is a well-paying task which you know in your heart and soul if they just gave you a desk and left you alone and allowed you to do it you would sit there and be more focused and enthusiastic and excellent at it than anyone else in the building. However, before they allow you to perform the task, you must pass through 3-4 opaque social crucibles where you must wear uncomfortable clothes and make eye contact while everyone expects you to lie, but not too much (no one is ever clear exactly how much lying is expected, “over” honesty is however penalized). You are being judged almost entirely on how well you understand these very specific and unclear rules that no one has explained. None of this has anything to do with your ability to perform the desired task.

If I were to modify this for ADHD, here’s what it would say: “Modern office culture is a hell designed specifically to torment ADHD people. Here is a well-paying task which you know in your heart and soul if they just gave you a desk and left you alone and allowed you to do it, and also allowed you adequate breaks, ample move-around time and fidget items, and let you listen to your music/podcasts/shows/movies in the background, you would be more focused and enthusiastic and excellent at it than anyone else in the building. However, instead of just allowing you to perform the task, you must go to the most under-stimulating, boring, fuck-ugly environment, where everything is greige, you must wear uncomfortable clothes, you must sit completely still, in silence, for eight hours a day (and as a bonus, some brown-noser is going to report every single bathroom break and instance of you walking around to your boss), you must stare at a screen and pretend you didn’t just finish eight hours of work in thirty minutes, and make small talk with people when they come to your cube, all the while pretending like your brain isn’t constantly searching for something, anything, to occupy itself, and because you’re bound to fail at that, everyone is going to think you’re an idiot when, in reality, your brain is so starved for stimulation that it’s randomly shutting down for just long enough to make you look like you’ve been beamed up. You are being judged almost entirely on how well you can follow these very specific and unclear rules that no one has explained. None of this has anything to do with your ability to perform the desired task.”

Oh, and because your brain is so starved for stimulation in that environment, any type of sensory input is going to hit twice as hard. You’re normally sensitive to other peoples’ perfumes? Be prepared to have a constant headache every fuckin’ day you’re in that office, because not only are people wearing perfume and (hopefully) deodorant, but they’re all wearing different brands and different scents, and none of them mesh, and don’t even get me started on the people who think perfume or body spray is an adequate substitute for a goddamn shower. Someone comes up to your cube to talk? You’re gonna talk their ear off, because oh mah gawd, sensory input! Or, since you’ve already spent your entire life scolded and disciplined for, you know, being neurodivergent, you’re going to mask all of this, and by the end of each day, you’re so exhausted and irritable from masking that you make stupid decisions on the drive home, like driving way too fast, or succumbing to road rage, both because your self-control was spent three hours ago and you need some type of stimulation. Neurodivergent people who work in office spaces, I find, are either constantly overstimulated or constantly understimulated, and in both cases, it takes a major toll on our mental health. For myself, I’m at a point where I simply won’t mask anymore, and I don’t care how uncomfortable that makes people. I’m not hurting anyone by being a little bit weirder than them, and if they think I am, that’s their problem.

The thing about sensory issues and overload that I find neurotypical people don’t usually understand (because NT people usually don’t experience them, or at least not as often or as severely as ND people do) is we have no control over it. Neurotypical brains can be switched on and off at will; neurodivergent brains are either on or off, and we have no control over it. When we’re on, we’re on. My brain, in particular, when it’s on, is like the full team of Budweiser Clydesdales at a flat-out gallop. Now, I know how to deal with my brain when it gets like that, because I’ve had a literal lifetime of dealing with it, and I know that the best way to bring those horses back under control is (a) don’t let them run away in the first place, but if they do, (b) go someplace quiet, preferably dark, and literally reset my brain by playing my music lying down with my eyes closed. This does not, cannot, take place in a matter of seconds; on a good day, it takes at least twenty minutes. Most days with an ND brain are not good days, because we live in a world that not only doesn’t understand us, but actively refuses to make even the slightest concessions so our day-to-day doesn’t feel like being tortured constantly.

And I can’t make this argument about WFH benefiting disabled people without pointing out that COVID-19 has, itself, contributed to the disabled population. Millions who survived being infected are still dealing with long-term effects, some of which include fatigue, joint and muscle pain, chest pain, vertigo, heart palpitations, changes to menstrual cycles, damage to their hearts and kidneys, and brain fog. Long COVID has also been named as causing strokes, aneurysms, and encephalopathy (i.e. altered brain function), and it’s accepted by everyone except the COVID “truthers” (or, as I like to call them, “complete fucking idiots whose parents didn’t give them enough love or attention, and decided to make it everyone else’s problem”) that COVID wasn’t “just a cold” or “just the flu,” but a serious illness that affects multiple organs, for a long period of time, possibly the rest of one’s life.

All of this means that WFH is, at the end of the day, probably the only way to genuinely have an inclusive and diverse work force. We’re living in a world where a poorly-handled pandemic has killed millions and permanently disabled millions more, and even more who survive COVID’s variants are going to become disabled in the coming years. We cannot abandon the disabled by taking away the one policy that allows them even a chance at survival in this late capitalist, money-obsessed hellscape we call life! If you want disabled people to survive, if you think they should be given a fair shake at working, then let them WFH. Support a WFH policy in your workplace.

I want to make something very clear here: Demanding that people work in an office full-time, regardless of any mitigating factors, is an inherently and fundamentally ableist position. It’s not a conscious act of ableism, but most ableist acts and thoughts aren’t. Most societies in the world, including American society, view disability as at least laziness, and at worse a curse or a punishment, and these teachings have a way of shaping how we think about disability. But now that you’re aware of how ableist this position is, and how much it devalues the lives of disabled people, I hope you change your mind.

I’m not the first or only woman or neurodivergent person to have experienced any or all these at work. I’m certainly not the woman with the worst experiences in the workplace. And again, because I’m white, mostly able-bodied, and cis, I’ve never been subjected to racial microaggressions, open racism, bathroom politics, or the physical barriers to working in an office safely. But the very existence of these facts, by themselves, should prove that the office is, more often than not, a dangerous place for anyone who isn’t a white, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical man, or those who are good at sucking up to them. Psychologically dangerous; often physically dangerous. It is impossible to do your best work when you’re constantly having to check your surroundings for danger. It is impossible to do your best work when you constantly have to think about the stereotype other people hold you to, and how well you’re living up to it. It is impossible to do your best work when you have to constantly, obsessively police every single word that comes out of your mouth, and re-read and re-write emails five or ten times over, just to make sure there’s not even a hint of anything that could even be construed as “offensive,” just because your skin is the wrong color, or your gender identity is wrong, or you were born with the wrong genitals, to just say what needs to be said. And above all of that, it is impossible to do your best work in that environment, because every single fucking goddamned day, everything I listed gets proven right multiple times per day.

Also, at the end of all of this, I want to leave you with this thought: The person who’s most surprised by how much I like WFH and don’t want to stop doing it? Yours Truly. Even right up to the minute the shelter-at-home order was given in Indianapolis in March 2020, I was convinced I’d hate working from home, that it would wreck my ability to leave my work at work, that I’d be so distracted and disorganized that I’d never get anything done. I literally told people, “I would hate to work from home. I like having an office, so I can mark Work Day and Personal Time in a real, physical way.” So imagine my surprise when, by the end of the first full day of WFH, I realized I could do this, that I was less distracted at home, that I was getting more work done, and that, by god, this was amazing! And by the end of the first week, I literally never wanted to set foot in an office again.

Not only that, but my life went on a significant upswing as I kept working from home: I realized how shitty my supervisor was about literally every single thing I did and said, and how much he blamed me for anything that went wrong in the office. I was able to step back from that situation and see how toxic it and he really were, and I was able to start planning my way out. I started applying for other jobs, and I got one with the IRS that, as of today, has me making about $22k more a year than I did at that job. I went from renting a shitty apartment and making $27k/year, to being offered a job with the IRS in the state my soul really feels at home in (Vermont), to being a homeowner, and doubling my income along the way. I even finished my undergrad since starting to WFH! I’m not saying this absolutely couldn’t or wouldn’t have happened without WFH, but I’m not convinced that it would have or could have happened without it, either. WFH allowed me a much better work-life balance than I’d had before. I was able to straighten out my diet and start an exercise routine that I enjoyed enough to stick with. I started therapy, and a medication regiment that works for me. And now, with RTO in my near future, I’m worried about losing the things that I could lose (better diet, exercise, therapy, and given how much of a Not Morning Person I am, even the medication regiment). And I don’t believe, for a second, that I’m being a worrywart or that I’m upset over nothing.

WFH did me so much good, it’s done so many people so much good, that I can’t understand why, apart from justifying rent on office space and/or managers realizing how superfluous they are without the office, we’re having that taken from us. We deserve better. And I say, if you want WFH to stay, that you should kick up a big fuckin’ fuss if your employer tries to take it away.

TL;DR: WFH is a much better and more equitable policy than demanding people work in an office. If people are feeling less creative and collaborative right now, it’s not because they’re WFH. It’s because they, and in fact all of us, have experienced a hellish and traumatic four years, and we cannot “just move on” from it. We need to slow down. We need to take time to sit with the events of the last four years, and consider all the ways it impacted our lives. We need to accept it and make peace with it. You cannot process and heal a massive psychological trauma like a pandemic in a few hours. That’s going to take years, at the absolute fastest. So maybe, juuuuuuust maybe, we should be doing everything we can to make it possible for people to process the pandemic and come to terms with it; yes, even if that means letting people WFH full-time from now on, if they so choose. Some people will choose permanent WFH. Some will choose a hybrid model. And yes, some will even choose going back to the office full-time. People should be allowed to do what works for them, as long as they’re not hurting other people.

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¹I mean, we could pass laws prohibiting real estate speculating, or we could pass laws saying that any house purchased must be used as a dwelling space for either the owner or a lessee on pain of massive tax penalties, or we could pass laws that prevent landlords from charging more than a certain percentage of a tenant’s net income each month (i.e., they can only charge the tenant 25% of their monthly net income for rent). Or we could siphon some of the excessive funding that goes to the military and give it to HUD, so they can fund and expand housing voucher programs. We could also incentivize construction companies to build more houses by giving out substantial tax breaks for things like solar panels, energy-efficient windows and HVAC systems, and weatherization. But let’s be real, it will never happen, because we’re so into capitalism in this country, any policy that even gently rubs up against it is going to be nuked like Bikini Atoll.

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Last updated June 05, 2024