The social and economic costs borne by young people without offices

I think all of your points are completely fair so I don't want you to feel that I am being obtuse or overly pedantic. You're correct that I have not provided any evidence to indicate the author is not authentic. However, you made me curious so I decided to open the article in a private browsing session with no ad blocker enabled.

Maybe everyone sees a different advertisement, but what I saw struck me. The article is peppered by advertisements from facebook.

"Support Small Business Together." Is the tag line of the facebook advertisement.

What I say next is facetious of course. This article isn't part of a grand conspiracy by corporate real estate developers, it is a grand conspiracy by one of the largest advertising platforms in the world, facebook. Remote work is hurting facebook's advertising revenue because small business are dying off.

Again, entirely facetious. Still, The Atlantic is partially supported by advertising and I found this particular advertisement to be interesting given the content of the article and the discussion on HN.

Draper's eyes gleamed as he delivered the line that would seal the deal. "We'll make them nostalgic for their offices and that is how you will sell more advertisements to small businesses mister Zuckerberg."

For myself. I strongly believe remote work is a net gain for me and others like me. I appreciate that others do not feel the same way, but when the dust settles I stand to lose if I am the odd man out, no? I strongly believe that the sentiment conveyed in this article will be used as ammunition to drag those of us that prefer remote work back to the office. I'd prefer articles like this to find a balance that allows everyone to have their preference, but they seem to grapple for downsides that don't apply to everyone.

Just finished a parent transcript today. What came through loud and clear is that school from home is wicked hard for all kinds of people and that combining WFH and school from home is even more wicked hard. Parents are struggling with their kids' academic content (pre-calc? algebra?!). Kids are struggling with less structure. Everyone is struggling with limited bandwidth (literally and figuratively) and learning/working styles and the need for socialization are colliding in an unfortunate, constant way. For many, not all.

Looking forward to reviewing all the transcripts and compiling the findings. But if parents are any indication, it's gonna be a rough fall.

*Edit: Yes, I'm from New England. (wicked)

Some of the downsides of WFH that the article points out, like how our office coworkers incidentally become our social life (and now we don't have them), are also symptoms of larger issues that I don't think work should be tasked to solve. The social isolation of the youth (before Covid) and the dependency on an office for many people to make friends were already pretty depressing parts of our society.

But so was having to go to work to do a job that could be done anywhere. Like everyone always talks about wanting to retire so they can finally hang out on the beach year round, but WFH is what lets you do that. It doesn't need to be a distant dream anymore for when you're old. I get that people were suddenly tossed into the deep end of WFH due to Covid instead of given a choice, and that many people aren't cut out for it.

But this kind of coverage also goes too far, I think, in a world where we were always forced to go to an office. I was looking for a job last year, and I had to search high and low for a remote job. For example, almost all the job posts on HN want you to come into an office. I was unsuccessful finding remote work in my more traditional search and fortunately found a good remote job through my social circle.

Office jobs have a certain stability and, even more important, familiarity. But I think that familiarity can be confused with an assumption that it's the way things should be.

For example, I agree that a future where most jobs are WFH will have to consider a solution for helping us find a productive way to work (like giving us a private office in a coworking space or letting us choose a stipend to set up a home office). But also consider how depressing it is to clutch on to office work because it gives you an escape from your children—it's really not a quality of the office work itself that you're after, but somewhat of an incidental upside that can (and should) be replicated in a culture of WFH.

What I mean to say is that I see a lot of office-work praise for what's actually incidental advantages of office-work (that should definitely be replicated outside of office-work), and it would be a damn shame if we as a society use those incidental benefits to damn WFH and regress back to the more or less office-work-only society from which we came.

I hope we find a good 50/50 middle ground where people have a choice.