Only the lonely

WTHE WASHINGTON POST e’re all itching to get back to normal— but wait, no, not like that!

The coronavirus changed our lives in myriad ways for the worse. So many things we couldn’t do, and so many places we couldn’t go: to the movies, to another country, to a sister’s wedding, to a grandmother’s hospital bed where she lay on a ventilator.

There was, however, one place the pandemic kept us from going that some of us hadn’t wanted to go anyway. That was the office. And now that other constraints are starting to fall away, working remotely has become an opportunity that many white-collar professionals don’t want to lose.

Maybe we’re having a revolution. So says venture-capital bigwig and self-proclaimed technology optimist Marc Andreessen, who sees ahead of us “a permanent civilizational shift.” Or maybe this is merely a reprieve from the regular, a transition to a future with a smidgen more flexibility than what came before.

The answer depends on whom you ask, because our society is cleaved between the returners and the stayers. Everyone has their reasons for wanting to return, or never to return—and much of that can be explained by our mutual, miserable experience of the past year’s pandemic.

There are obviously personal and practical reasons that explain why working from home appeals to so many. Covid-19 prevented us from doing plenty of things we wanted to do, but the ability to shed the confines of a nine-to-five schedule also allowed us to do other things previously impossible, like playing with a toddler before naptime, or logging off at 3 p.m. and on again at 10 p.m., or smoking a pork shoulder on a Tuesday.

The pandemic also allowed us to be in plenty of places we couldn’t otherwise have been, whether somewhere cheaper, or closer to our families, or sunny when it was cold outside. Now, even big fish don’t have to live in the big city, but can swim in the smaller ponds of less populated locales.

The allure of remoteness may also owe its force to our post-pandemic hang-ups. Suffering is always easier to bear when it happens for something—and in this case, we can at least say the coronavirus taught us to stop worrying and love the laptop. Besides, readjusting to life as it once was is weird. We gave things up, and now we have to give up whatever replaced them. Who’s to blame people for hoping to hang on to the only thing about the pandemic they actually enjoyed? Yet for every employee who has purchased a standing desk to guarantee long-term ergonomic bliss in the spiffy upstairs study, there’s a manager rolling out a job listing for an explicitly in-person gig—no ifs, ans or webcams. And there are surely countless employees thirsty for some water-cooler chatter, or else the ease of exchanging ideas with a casual stroll up to a cubicle rather than in a labored email with just the right number of exclamation points.

These people have their own covid baggage weighing down their reasoning. They spent the past year believing that all of this was only temporary. Now, it turns out that working remotely may stick around, which makes them feel stuck, too, and not in a pleasant way. This whole ordeal won’t be over, they feel, until folks exchange awkward elevator nods as a matter of morning routine.

Each side of this debate can’t seem to understand where the other is coming from, even though both are coming from the same place: months of stress and deprivation that arrived hand-in-hand with separation from the office.

The funny thing is, we’re so divided on this subject today in part because we’ve been so united over this year. We’re convinced that the future must be all-or-nothing because the past 15 months were all-or-nothing.

Now, suddenly, we can do what we want again, and we don’t all want the same things. This is bound to be a better world, safer and freer, too. But sometimes it may feel like a lonely one, no matter where we’re working from.