The Once and Future Workplace
On the remote-work experience, the Supreme Court's next moves, and more.
I’m trying something a little different this week. In today’s newsletter, I’ll spend a bit longer on a particular topic instead of flitting back and forth between a few of them. The other format is coming back next week, but if this one works well, I might do more like it in the future.
If you like this approach, let me know at matt@tnr.com. If you don’t like it, let me know at matt@tnr.com. If you just stole a Van Gogh in a daring museum heist and want to store it at my place until the cops stop asking questions, let me know at matt@tnr.com.
The United States crossed a major milestone this week: One hundred million Americans have now received at least one dose of the vaccine. Cases and hospitalizations are ticking upward again in a few states, so we’re not completely out of the woods yet. But a path back to normal is finally in sight after a long and miserable year of isolation.
What sort of normal will that be? For a great number of Americans, it means returning to the office after a year or more of remote work. One of them is The Atlantic’s Arthur C. Brooks, who teaches at Harvard and wrote this week about the “hidden toll of remote work.”
Between one-third and one-half of American employees worked in person throughout the pandemic, with or without a say in the matter, and some at great personal risk. Most of the rest of us were forced to work from home, also without necessarily wanting to. And in fact, almost two-thirds of people in a poll last fall felt that the cons of working from home outweighed the pros, and nearly a third said they had considered quitting their jobs since being banned from the workplace. In another poll, about 70 percent said that mixing work and other responsibilities had become a source of stress, and about three in four American workers in the early days of the pandemic confessed to being “burned out.”
So while some people are understandably nervous about returning to their workplace, many are having an experience more like mine. My friends and colleagues who have returned to a physical office and seen others—even in a limited capacity—have told me that returning made them realize how isolated they had become during the pandemic, and the burden of stress they had been carrying, even if they faced no job threat or major health risk.
I don’t doubt Brooks’ relief or that of his friends and colleagues. I can’t imagine being an educator, or a student, or a parent of school-age kids over the last twelve months. And I don’t really blame anyone else who’s been stuck working from home since last March if they crave the hubbub and rhythm of pre-pandemic office life.
My fear is that, as things return to “normal,” the remote-work experience will become so linked with the pandemic that it’ll be almost stigmatized by association. I hope we don’t automatically conflate the stress and anxiety of the pandemic—and everything else that happened over the past year—with working from home itself. Otherwise we risk missing out on a chance to rethink how our workspaces can work better for some of us.
I admit that remote work isn’t ideal for everyone. Many jobs can’t be done remotely. Many others shouldn’t be done remotely. But more than a few jobs can be largely performed this way with no apparent loss in quality or efficacy. A few pundits sagaciously declared after the lockdowns began that the sudden work-from-home experiment could forever change the nature of work itself. If anything, we’ve learned more about remote work’s practical limits along the way.
It’s also true that many people don’t actually want to work remotely. But more than a few others have discovered its potential. On Friday, The New York Times profiled a few people who share my dread about returning to a system that didn’t really work for them.
“I’m not excited to go back to the office,” said Tracie Smith, who has an hour commute each way to her job as an analyst at California State University, Fullerton. In March, the university told Ms. Smith to come back in July, but it is not clear how often she will have to go in.
“My fear is that, given the opportunity, they’ll take all of it away and we’ll be back to 8 to 5 in the office again,” she said. “But the pandemic has shown that there are alternatives that work well.”
For the first time in decades, Ms. Smith, 49, said she felt rested because she’s not getting up early to commute. Over breaks or during lunch, she dispensed with laundry or grocery shopping, rather than using up precious evening hours.
While she has, at times, been lonely and is looking forward to kibitzing with colleagues and students, she doesn’t want life to return to its previous grind.
“I feel like a whole person. I am living an actual life every single day, instead of trying to cram it into a day-and-a-half on the weekend,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s definitely making me re-evaluate my work-life situation.”
“I feel like a whole person.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’ve always struggled with getting out of bed early in the morning and trying to fall asleep early at night. I’ve always stressed about whether I’d be on time for work somewhere for a job that I can do virtually anywhere. My commutes usually ran to two or more hours each day in travel time, depending on Metro status or on street traffic. I always wondered if my mental and physical health would improve if I could get that time back.
For years, I thought this was all my fault. Maybe I’m just lazy or undisciplined. Perhaps I just needed to wake up even earlier or somehow try even harder. I shudder to think about how much caffeine and sugar I’ve ingested over the years to try to power through it. And when I experimented with alternative schedules at previous jobs, like starting later and finishing later, I found that other aspects of my life would quickly suffer along the way.
Things slowly started to change for me after the lockdowns began last spring. My actual workday still started at the same time each day, but now I could wake up naturally and feel more refreshed before then. There are fewer distractions and fewer complications in my apartment—a helpful quality when you’re living with ADHD. I’m more free to create a working environment that actually works for me. And, if that Times story is any indication, I’m not alone in feeling this way.
It wasn’t a panacea, of course. I’ve wrestled constantly with insomnia and anxiety about the state of the world, especially during the long, dark winter. I worried that I would get sick. I worried that my loved ones would get sick. I worried that American democracy would collapse. I worried that things would somehow get even worse. I can’t wait for things to get better. And all I want is to bring the best thing I found last year back into the sunlight with me.
Brooks, to be fair, wasn’t categorically against remote work in that Atlantic column. He was mainly addressing the potential harms in it for those who don’t want it. “The problem is, if millions of people never ‘go back to work’ in a way that resembles the pre-pandemic world, it could have drastic consequences for our well-being,” he warned. “There’s nothing wrong with a partially remote situation—say, work-from-home Fridays or more flexible schedules. But going fully remote forever could exacerbate one of the worst happiness disasters of the pandemic.”
That’s fair. I can hardly blame anyone for yearning for a return to office life or, at least, an end to what they see as “living at work.” If working from home isn’t your thing, you shouldn’t have to do it. I just hope there’s room for those of us who work and live better this way to stay the course.
When Anthony Kennedy retired in summer of 2018, legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin predicted that Roe v. Wade would be gone within the next 18 to 24 months. On paper, the current Supreme Court should be poised to undo the legal scaffolding that protects abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts effectively prevented the court from veering against its own precedents right away last summer. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation means Roberts can no longer stop the court’s anti-abortion bloc from carrying out its will if it so desires.
There are two abortion-related cases on the court’s radar at the moment that are worth tracking. One is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case from Mississippi that asks the court to elaborate upon (and perhaps even reconsider) some of its abortion-rights precedents. The justices first planned to consider Mississippi’s petition at their weekly conference in September, but they appear to have delayed it from around the time of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that month until this January. They’ve debated it every week since then. It’s unclear from those delays whether they’ll ultimately hear the case or not. The Supreme Court is often mysterious about this aspect of its work.
The other case is Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, which the justices said on Monday they would hear later this fall. The case isn’t really an abortion case in the way most people think about them. The justices won’t decide whether to strike down or uphold the Kentucky law that sparked the underlying dispute. They’ll simply decide whether Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general, can actually participate in the case on procedural grounds. As I explained on Tuesday, it could still be an interesting window into how the court’s new conservative supermajority is thinking about abortion-related litigation, and how aggressively it wants to move on the issue.
I also had the misfortune of writing and thinking about Florida Representative Matt Gaetz this week. Gaetz is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department for alleged sex trafficking; he denies any wrongdoing and claims that he and his family are the victim of a convoluted extortion plot. What struck me most about the saga was his bizarre Trumpian defense of himself on Twitter and Fox News earlier. To the extent Trump’s defense strategy worked for him, it helped that he could actually fire the people investigating him. Gaetz doesn’t have that ace up his sleeve.
Since that article, there have been a series of other disturbing allegations about Gaetz’s behavior. ABC News reported, for instance, that he and other unnamed “young male lawmakers” had a “game” to “score their female sexual conquests.” CNN reported that he would share nude phones of his sexual partners with other members while on the House floor. Since this implicates behavior within the Capitol itself, hopefully the House Ethics Committee will investigate those allegations further. Gaetz was reportedly considering leaving Congress before these stories became public. Hopefully he accelerates his plans.
Lightning round! Police tracked down a Mafia fugitive through his YouTube cooking show. Remember the satanic panic? A Montana lawmaker wants a gun on the state flag. Container ships might be getting too big. Old Bay seasoning has a fascinating Jewish history. The cherry blossoms in Kyoto are starting earlier each year. John Boehner really, really doesn’t like Ted Cruz.
This is only the fourth issue of my newsletter, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. What did you enjoy? What could you do without? Please feel free to send me your feedback at matt@tnr.com. See you again next week!