Discussing working from home

 So...Biden seems to be getting a lot of backlash on the internet at least for his state of the union last week. A big criticism is the idea that it's about time that Americans stop working from home, and that they should go back to the office. Biden thinks this is a great thing. Of course, Biden is literally the guy of "nothing will fundamentally change". I did briefly discuss this in my initial state of the union reaction, and I was turned off by this comment, but I mostly discussed it in the context of COVID. But, honestly, from an economic perspective? Yeah, I don't really like it.

Here's the thing. I am of the opinion the pandemic should have caused us to re evaluate our lives and our social structures in ways that would allow us to change our way of life. I honestly think that COVID really opened up the possibility of a dialogue about UBI, and our work centric society. And I honestly think that my own ideas and ideology would have made the US far more able to weather this pandemic on many, many levels. UBI would've given people a means to survive without jobs, M4A would've given them healthcare, and my anti work ideas would've made the country far more resilient to the virus. Honestly, the pandemic is really one of the things that really caused me to stop trying to simply go along with what the "progressives" wanted, and to really forge my own course in terms if political idea and ideology. Ideas that before the pandemic I figured needed to be discussed 10 years from now suddenly became relevant now. And honestly, my ideas began to take precedence over stuff that I saw as more important short term priorities in the past. 

But, as I said, Biden is the status quo guy. He wants to go back to the old normal. He's the guy who ran on "nothing will fundamentally change", and that's why I advocated against him with every fiber of my being. I HATE centrist democrats. To me, they're what republicans SHOULD be on economics (on social and foreign policy issues I align with them more though). And Biden? He's old timey. He still acts like it's the 1950s. He was the guy who said that "jobs provide dignity" while going on about his old man (wanna know what my old man said about work? "I hate my job, and I want to hit the lottery"). He's the guy that to Millennials going on about their economic plight, said "give me a break". Biden was never equipped to be the president we needed, and with COVID, he's made it his major priority to go back to 2019's "normal". I hated that normal. That normal sucks. We shouldn't go back to it, and doing so proves we've learned nothing. It's bad the reactionaries on the right were screaming about wanting to work in the middle of the pandemic, but given the dem consensus is leaning that way too, I feel like we are truly screwed as a society. But that's how it is on everything. GOP sets the narrative, and then moderate dems capitulate. OF COURSE we should've seen that coming with Biden, it's essentially his entire presidency, despite some more populist flairs in his speech last week. So, are we really surprised when he thinks going back to the office is a good thing?

Now, to be fair, I'm fairly mixed on the work from home thing. I think that work sucks either way, honestly. And work from home, despite the benefits I will discuss later, does have some problems in my opinion. I want to discuss the problems as I see it first. First of all, I feel like it represents a breakdown of work life balance for some, as work and home life become more blurred. While work from home allows you to...work from home, it also means you're working...in your home. And that there may no longer be a hard boundary between being "on" and being "off". TO be fair, in American work life, that balance is often iffy at best, with bosses often demanding people check emails or answer their phone off duty, but working from home kind of ramps that up. And because employers want to control employees, it often leads to people being forced to install spyware on their home work machines so bosses can spy on them. Pointless in person meetings might be replaced with pointless zoom meetings, and given the home and work environment blurs, family members like children could interfere with the work environment in that sense. Speaking of which, some people like working because it allows them to get AWAY from their families. People dont want to be around their families, particularly kids, 24/7, as they can be demanding, and some workaholics are so simply because they want to avoid being at home as much as possible. Work from home could also make getting a job harder, because while in offices people are assigned hardware like computers and proper internet connections, workers might be expected to front these things themselves which might increase barriers to entry. Workers might also be hired with the expectation they know what they're doing. This means less training which may otherwise happen in the office. I also suspect work from home could lead to less efficiency in some fields. For example, a lot of people might be wondering what's up with the gaming industry. We just had a season with block buster shooters, only to get games with little content, a lot of bugs, and few patches to fix thigns months later. It could be working from home is leading to slower progress and less efficiency as an office doesnt streamline game development and files are transferred from computer to computer over the internet rather than the ethernet. So, I could see things being bad there.

So...its obvious that I'm not going to be uncategorically pro WFH. I see some benefits to it, but it does have costs. Now, the benefits. Well, not having to commute is one thing. Having to work 8 hours, or 9 with breaks is bad enough, then you account for people commuting up to 1-2 hours a day each way and yikes, you're spending most of your life doing nothing but eating, sleeping, getting ready for work, working, and commuting back and forth. Speaking of which, a lot of office jobs in the WFH space might be at least partially BS jobs. People might work only 10-20 hours in reality and spend the rest of the time merely looking busy to please the boss. Well, here, people might actually get their work done in 10-20 hours and have better work life balance. THis seems to be a huge thing bosses are afraid of. They want the control over peoples' lives. People who work less are also less engaged with work as they discover passions outside of work, and are thus less passionate to work. So working from home could increase anti work sentiments over time and they dont want that. Bosses want to enforce their cultural dominance over their lives. Speaking of cultural dominance, I've seen bosses passive aggressively telling workers "bet you miss those sweat pants, huh?", as in, HAHAHA you have to come in and wear a suit again and too bad you cant do this in your jammies any more. As if that's something to mock. Work culture is weird and seems to mock people for having to put up with inconveniences no one really likes but are expected anyway, and while we could get rid of these cultural expectations like dress codes, well, that's another thing that people want to enforce. Because people dont like change for some reason they want to preserve the legacy of wearing a suit for some reason. Even though no one actually likes it and for someone autistic like me it's hell on earth. And then there's stuff like not needing to buy lunch any more, or worry about packing a lunch. And despite the above, some people LIKE being around their family. Heck, working from home you can work wherever you want. I know some people would brag about working while getting a tan at the beach. I mean, with WFH being a thing, i guess it's an option. 

So let's be honest. It does have a lot of benefits. And these benefits MAY outweigh the costs. So let's focus on the real reasons people want to preserve office work in the office? I already gave some of them above. Efficiency could be a concern, but despite my complaints about the state of the gaming industry above, this isn't borne out in the data overall, and it largely works. A lot of it seems to be about control. Bosses want to maintain control over their workers. They gaslight them and insist "they're family" when instead you can be with your real family. They worry about you goofing off, despite targets being reached. They worry about you developing passion outside of work, because they want nice little cult followers who do what they say and are into the culture they wanna impose on people. So working from home means bosses can exert less control over people and while it might make employees happy, it makes bosses upset, and because our system is designed to look out for the rich and not the people, guess who biden is going to side with?

Some of it is just being conservative for its own sake. There's been a real undercurrent, especially from the right, during this whole pandemic of resisting change. Often irrationally. People didnt wanna wear masks. or take their shots. And they wanted to work as they always did. They didnt like change. And because of how tribalistic our society is, they resist all change kicking and screaming. So they look at all this new fangled work from home stuff and harp on about it. And because anything less than being an absolute martyr for your job comes off as laziness for this reactionary crowd, they seem WFH and its potential impacts on work as a bad thing because it encourages laziness and change, and they dont want laziness and change. It's dumb. But that's how it is. Some people just get nostalgic over the past, no matter what the past is, or how crappy it is, and many people dont want positive change. They just want things to be the same forever. 

Another issue I see going around the internet, and this is one of the reasons I really wanted to write this, is apparently to do with real estate. Apparently corporate real estate is a big business, and a lot of people will lose money if people dont keep renting out massive offices to work in. So to justify renting out these offices and keeping the status quo, we must all work so we can continue to rent offices so the people who own the offices make money off of them. Never mind that without needing that space for office space, we could convert that stuff to housing. We could turn those offices into apartments or condos or something, increasing the amount of housing. Which would help bring rent down. 

Like, really, this is one thing where I almost see where socialists are coming from. Capitalism is stupid. We must all suffer so things remain the same. It isnt that the world would be made a worse place if things changed. It's that some people who are currently stakeholders might lose out. So we must all suffer and remain stuck on the past to benefit them. We must work in offices to justify giving commercial realtors money. We must not convert that to housing because it might devalue someone's property or make it cheaper. And despite low prices being good for consumers, it isnt good for the people who own those properties. So special interests insist on keeping things as they are because it's more profitable. it should be noted none of this makes me support socialism, as I said I dont think that would work with housing, but it does cause me to be critical of certain stakeholders under capitalism. 

Another thing I've seen mentioned, and this is where I go full "anti work" and start pointing out how BS jobs are, is people mention in reference to these jobs, well think about all of the workers who help maintain the office worker's lifestyle. You commute to work, then they stop by starbucks for coffee or a restaurant for lunch, and these businesses might no longer be needed and might no longer exist if office workers dont have to commute an hour in every day just to work at an office. So...basically, not having people work in offices might unemploy a bunch of service sector workers whose services would no longer be needed. *sigh* GOOD. I mean, this is your brain on jobism. We need these people working to support these guys, who have to come into work for a completely arbitrary reason, and if we dont have them working here, then these guys wont be able to work at all either. Okay, cool. Well, maybe if we think about things from a "LETS ALL WORK LESS" perspective, instead of a perspective based on maintaining full employment, maybe office workers can work from home and work less. And then maybe those service workers can get a UBI and not be forced to work crap jobs they probably dont wanna do anyway. And then maybe if there's now a surplus of service workers, we can cut the work week for them. And maybe we can cut the work week for office workers too, because many of them might not do their work in 40 hours anyway. And maybe we can all work less.

*breathes heavily after expressing above thought in run on manner*

Seriously. You ever think that maybe we can all, like...work less? Maybe if we think about things from the perspective of saving labor, and designing our society to do the most with the least labor possible, automating as much as we can, eliminating redundancies, we could all, you know, work less. maybe those 20-30 hour weeks arent that unrealistic. Because maybe if we all worked less, there would be less work that needs to be done. Maybe we could reduce our consumption, while also reducing our need to work. Maybe instead of polluting our atmosphere and spewing green house gasses into the atmosphere with our morning commutes, we can all skip that and just work from home, and work less. Maybe we can not waste time. Maybe work can be less central to our lives? Maybe we should just give the finger to all of the control freak bosses and special interests in the real estate industry. 

I mean, outside of the one paragraph where I was actually negative toward the concept, it seems like working from home being normalized could solve a lot of issues under capitalism. We could reduce our work weeks, we could have better work life balance (assuming it doesnt go the other way and it does blur together to an uncomfortable degree), we could be happier, we could pollute less, we could have more time to ourselves. It seems like outside of the few negatives I mentioned the only losers are employers and people who make money selling commercial real estate to people who dont really need it.

Idk. I mean, I'm mixed on the concept. I see pros and cons. But either way, I will say this. As Socrates once said, the unexamined life isn't worth living." We should honestly question our social conventions more. We should question our work culture. We should question our culture of unmitigated consumption. We should question capitalism, but also question leftism in a way where we dont actually think socialism is a good idea. We should question if we need to live as we do, in a post covid world. COVID gave us a perfect chance to examine how we live and change things as we want. And I know what change I want to see, mostly. As I said on this topic I'm somewhat mixed, but I will say this. I think Biden is wrong. And he supports his position for the wrong reasons. He supports not questioning our social structures. he supports maintaining things the way they've always been for its own sake. He's the "nothing will fundamentally change" guy, the guy whose head is decades in the past. He's always been on the wrong side of history. He started his career questioning a lot of the civil rights debates of the 1970s. He was the one who actually made the student loan crisis as bad as it is and won't change it. And now he's the face of the democratic party, which outside of his handling for ukraine is floudering in terms of popularity because they refuse to do anything worth a darn. And now the dude wants to go back to pre pandemic normal, without the pandemic actually being over, and not learning anything about the pandemic.

Honestly, I cant stand Joe Biden. Maybe Trump IS worse. I wouldnt dispute that. But as Nina Turner said, half a bowl of ####, or a full bowl. Biden is half, Trump is full. Both are terrible. We need to do better than either. And honestly, we need to reform our system to actually fit our needs here in the 21st century. We need an Andrew Yang or at least a Bernie Sanders. We need someone who will actually make our lives better.

American politics is so frustrating...