I am really curious to see where we'll be in a year, two, three down the line wrt remote/office/hybrid work at major companies. This forced experiment has had some surprising outcomes about the effectiveness of remote workplaces, but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions, is clearly not the same as indefinitely in normal times. But there's reason to think that may go even better, not worse; I am r…
I can see that many people who worked in cafes before the event, will retrain to work as therapists and will be helping people to adjust to normal life, in the sense, for example, teaching how to find friends outside of work, how to meet with local people for lunch and so on. There will be a lot of opportunity to teach people how to cook and do other tasks that they couldn't do because of commuting, no time outside o…
I've always thought that work and life were far too closely bound together - I neither want to pick up nor be picked up at work and while I have occasionally made a really good friend at work most of my friends come from pursuing interests (i.e. board games and RPGs) so I'd be extremely happy if workplace relationships got comparatively less important in people's lives.
The ability to engage in additional interests is a really interesting point but I'm afraid we're going to lose it without really strong push-back. The trend of employment since the seventies has seemed to be - whenever an employee isn't working isn't it a shame? During the pandemic companies have mostly (from my observation) been pretty chill about pushing extra workloads due to the generally high natural level of stress everyone is feeling. I'm interested to see if companies treat the extra hour or two we'll all be saving from the commute as a nice bonus for employee moral or time that should rightfully be spent working.
I think your scenario is a very interesting and quite realistic outcome, but my pessimism still has me in the "Wait until everything gets terrible again" camp.