I love having an extra hour every day that I’m not sitting in my car commuting to an office. I don’t have to make lunches ahead of time or worry about the dog being at home all day or schedule my exercise at the very beginning or end of the day. I haven’t had to worry about any of that for over two years—my office went remote in January of 2020, so I’m ahead of the curve there. I can use my thocciest mechanical keyboard and I’m not going to bother a soul as long as I mute myself on calls. This is truly the life.
People who talk about how they need the office to keep them focused and socially satiated have been my enemies over the last two years. Although I’ve been at this company for my entire post-collegiate professional life, I think the chances are good that I will end up retiring somewhere else, and I want to ensure that I have the opportunity to continue this life of flexibility whenever I do land somewhere else. I always argue that what works for them isn’t necessarily an optimal solution for everyone, and that even after folks do return to the office, fully-remote positions should be normalized whenever possible. And I still believe every word of that. I don’t want to go back into an office.
But I have got to get out of my house.
I don’t really need a lot of in-person socialization to be happy. After all, most of my closest friends live in other parts of the country, and we basically talk all day long every day. But I find myself wanting to just get out of the house and do something, anything, at the end of the day, and especially during the weekend. It wasn’t until my husband pointed out that there might be a connection between the whole living where you work thing and my daily bout of cabin fever that I understood that I needed to change how I work. I need balance.
In the small window when my nearby coworkers and I had started working remote but the rest of the world hadn’t joined us yet, we would meet up every couple of weeks at a coffee shop or to get lunch and just vibe together. It really felt like a chore most of the time; the benefit of going remote was that we didn’t have to show up somewhere at a set time anymore! But then everything shut down, and obviously it was irresponsible to get together while there’s a pandemic going on and there were no vaccines. Then that dragged on so long that it’s become difficult to rationalize packing up and leaving my monitor and keyboard and webcam to go work from a less convenient location where I have to buy a cup of coffee and hope the sounds of milk becoming foam and beans becoming grounds don’t distract from whatever I’m saying on a call.
I’m not sure where I’m going to go work, or even if that's what’s ailing me, but I know I’ve got to start trying to go places a couple of times a week. Maybe the issue isn’t even just a change of location! Maybe the terrible people advocating for a full return to the office by everyone immediately are right and I really just want to be around other people more during the week. I don’t know that a trip to the coffee shop would help if that’s the problem. It probably wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot, though.
I love the convenience of working from home and I never want to have to be butts-in-seats for a job every day again, but working from the same place I eat and sleep and watch television and do just about everything else is finally driving me a little insane. In the old days, we called it working from home, but the Covid-era reframing of the office-less existence into working remote might be an indicator that trying to do it all from home isn’t the best path forward.