> Approach the impossibly tall black glass that is my office building. Badge in. A dozen or so floors later, step off the elevator and swing into the day: say hi to coworkers, settle into my cubicle, plug into monitors, sip coffee, gradually get subsumed by unstoppable vibrancy of caffeine high, and we're off to the races.
Every part of his day except for this part was awesome. Family, Train ride, etc... But the glass building and cubicle. I'm desperately trying to get out of knowledge work and into something else. Enshittification is knowledge work now. I would rather be in an excavator digging footings.
I understand your point completely, as I used to feel the same way in the past. Then I realized it's just that being forced to do a commute for work makes it OK to potentially put extra load on your spouse, or to leave your kids with some other caretaker, but this doesn't have to be this way. It should be fine to take some time if you need it even if there's no job-related reason behind it. So now both my wife and my…
That's why you just lock yourself in the bathroom like the rest of us! /s
haha, when the weather is really bad, the bathroom with the lights off and headphones is great. Growing up with a single bathroom, a multi-bathroom home is just amazing.
I do wonder if having a single bathroom as a child played any part in my reasonably good grasp of concurrency control though!
I couldn't get over the amount of time lost to commuting. Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result. The time most people spend commuting, I spend going on hikes with my dog in a forest or working out. For those who lack social activities as a result of working from home I s…
I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that. Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever. So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of…
I did the math during COVID. I was putting in about 30% more hours when I had to go to an office, and all of them were unproductive. I wasn't being paid any extra to do that - which was especially unfair since I also had additional wear and tear on the car, lunches out, fancier clothes to buy, etc. I may go back to the office someday if I'm forced to, but I won't do it for free. Companies need to compensate in office…
For me, I take the bus to work, so my commute time is spent on pleasant things like reading library books, or working through Chinese lessons on my phone, or just looking out the window, or occasionally chatting with other commuters. I actually enjoy my commute, it's some nice time set aside entirely for myself each day. If I had to be stuck in a car for my commute, I'd definitely resent it.
Being in a disease-ridden tuna can that is often filled to the brim so you don't even get a seat is not exactly something that I would call pleasant. My friends who commute to work via public transport get sick multiple times per year, I don't.
Yeah starting to feel the need to play Defense here too. Especially on YouTube. Even with a subscribe driven flow of known creators it’s getting bad. Everything is about something negative with emotive thumbnails and clickbait titles even from the better creators. And Google has now crammed their unwanted “relevant for you” along with shorts into the top of the subscribe feed. So now even that last trick to get a non…
There's a nice extension called unhook which blocks a ton of the YouTube trash, you can configure it to hide different things. At this point, they only thing I see on YouTube is a search box and my subscriptions.
This was a very pleasant read. There's (justifiably) a lot of debate about AI prose on this forum, which has become tiring. It's refreshing to read something so grounded. Doubly so while looking at a packet of Belvita breakfast biscuits on my own desk. As far as lo-fi goes, I must recommend Leavv. Mind Garden and Tales of a Flowing Forest. Both pre-AI music albums that are lovely to work/study to.
To each their own of course, but I personally don’t get the point of avoiding AI music when what you’re listening to (lofi beats) is essentially elevator background tier noise anyway. I listen to various types of it all the time and I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between AI or not in this genre. Listening to Tokyo Echo Sounds right now, is it AI? Probably, but how tf would I even know if I did care?
I prefer my elevator music to be human created, and not a moral failing of techbros who don't believe in creativity.
I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that. Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever. So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of…
It's interesting that the only way your wife will let you have some time to yourself is if you're spending it commuting.
There's small children involved, you have to coordinate that kind of thing.
I couldn't get over the amount of time lost to commuting. Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result. The time most people spend commuting, I spend going on hikes with my dog in a forest or working out. For those who lack social activities as a result of working from home I s…
I've been in multiple car accidents this year, none of them my fault. Commuting might actually be the death of me, I can't express to a future employer how much I'm willing to trade just to not have to do it anymore. Doesn't help that I deal with some of the worst traffic in America...
I have a "rich" life outside of work - guitar, gardening, prairie restoration, gym 3 times a week, dogs, and I work security or bartend 1 event per week (typically music). I can only have this "rich" life outside of work because I don't commute to an office daily. But we're all different. Kudos to the poster for a good read and for finding something that works for them.
I was about to say something similar: OP talks about how in office days support their routine but adding the office to my day would do more to disrupt a routine than solidify it. As of right now my workdays, despite being WFH, are shockingly rigid in their form. Wake up, coffee, weightlifting and a podcast, start work, coffee break around 1030, lunch at noon with wifey, back to work until the afternoon doldrums set it, then exercise bike to try to force some oxygen up above my shoulders, then finish out the day, then dinner. Adding everything that an in-office day entails would mean developing two routines, one for office days and one for wfh days, and also that the number of ways that my routine could be disrupted on office days going up significantly. I'm not here to prescribe my way of life for everyone, I'm actually quite strange, but I do think that it's important to point out that there are ways to get the stability that people thrive on in WFH situations or in the office.