Jose-Andres Alegria I’m going, to be honest. I have no idea how to start this without it sounding incredibly ranty, but the topic of working from home is a hot-button issue. Everywhere I look, all anybody has to say is that they don’t want to work in an office, and they prefer working from home over having a commute.
Office space is still a novelty to me
I spend way more time on Twitter than I would like to admit. And I know Twitter can be a bit of an echo chamber, but all anybody says is that they refuse to go back to an office, and I’m jealous of them. Can I be as mentally healthy as everyone else that they are perfectly cool with sitting in their studio apartments all day staring at a computer screen?
A big factor in my wanting to go back into an office is because it’s still a relatively new experience for me. I worked in an office for nine months before the world shut down. It also didn’t hurt that I had a 15-minute commute, and I liked my coworkers. But, and this might sound childish to some, I felt like an actual adult putting on work clothes and going to an office.
Nothing felt better than Uno reversing my mom for the first time in my life. As a kid, if I called my mom eight out of ten times, I would get a message along the lines of “In a meeting. I’ll call back later.” So when I finally got to send that message to my mom, I laughed internally. It felt good.
I need a new hobby
Another reason I hate working from home is my hobby. I am a degenerate gamer. So if I’m not looking at an empty google doc for work, then I’m still at my desk gaming. And my degeneracy falls completely on me, but what else was there to do during the pandemic? Learn to make bread? That’ll be a hard pass from me. my computer
Making friends as an adult is hard. Colleges should offer classes on how to do it. I would have taken it, but that might just be the introvert in me speaking. But gaming is a top-tier hobby. It lets me stay connected with my boys even though I moved three thousand miles away. The time difference can be a real bother, but we work it out. This has less to do with work from home and me airing out the fact that I need a hobby that gets me out of my prison cell of an apartment.
Change of scenery
Here’s the thing. I completely understand the grievances of having to work in an office- commutes blow. My little sister recently got stuck in three-hour traffic on her way to school. Waking up early sucks. (Morning people are lying to themselves about liking waking up before the sun.)
If you have kids, working from home must be the biggest blessing ever. (When they aren’t being loud and annoying.) Having time to drop them off at school or time in the afternoon to pick them up without feeling rushed or stressed must be a relief. But I don’t have kids unless you count my two-year-old Weiner dog. But working from home offers a great work-life balance.
Office space gives those of us who don’t have daily human interaction an outlet to find it. Especially after this pandemic. (Yes, Covid is still here, but the world is slowly returning to normal regardless of the number of Covid cases.) And above all else, I don’t have multiple rooms that I can go to in my apartment.
I have a bedroom and one giant room for my kitchen and living room. It’s the same four walls. Do you know how hard it is to unwind when your work computer is staring at you while eating dinner? It’s not fun.
(I know, a typical millennial complaining about not owning a house, but have you seen the market? It’s a pipe dream at this point. And that’s the best-case scenario. Renting for life!)
My final random thoughts you don’t care about in the slightest
I want to go back to working in an office, but a hybrid. But I think hybrid is a perfect description for my age bracket. I remember life before the internet where we had payphones instead of cellphones, but Instagram, Facebook, and myspace soon became a pivotal part of middle school and high school. One of the last generations to know a world without the internet and then had it become an impactful part of our development. So it might not be a surprise to see this generation, my generation, fight back for a hybrid system. Working from home is great but gets old.
