If We Don't Go Back to Work, the Communists Win

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The Culture War. A constant battle of young versus old, new versus old, modern versus old. It’s Helen Lovejoy wailing “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” on The Simpsons. It’s Kevin Bacon coming to Bomont and telling John Lithgow “It’s time to dance, Foot-loser!” in Footloose. (I think that’s the line, anyway. Been a while since I’ve seen that movie.) It’s growing up with Pokémon Blue but hearing kids talk about how their favorite starter “growing up” was Rowlet, which was introduced in 2016, and realizing that holy shit, if the Charmander you picked as your own starter in middle school was a real person, it wouldn’t even get charged extra for renting a fucking car.

Culture is the soul of society. And, according to the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan, remote work is here to murder it.

Where are we in the office wars? I think there’s an armistice between the return-to-the-office side and the work-from-home forces. Perhaps hostilities will resume in the fall. Bosses are hoping the old reality will snap back as the drama of 2020-22 recedes, that people will start to feel they need to come back, or can be made to.

This OpEd starts with a wonderful Trojan Horse of a point. “There’s an armistice between both sides, which I will present as neutrally as possible before implying that the Bosses are virtuous heroes that want to save America from the dirty, Communist clutches of today’s youths. Grr, young people!” Trust me, just wait. It gets crotchety real fast.

The work-from-home people are dug in, believing they’re on the winning side, that the transformation of work in America, which had been going remote for years, was simply sped up and finalized by the pandemic.

Yes. That’s almost exactly correct. Maybe “finalized” is a bit far, but that’s the way the wind has been blowing ever since the Internet was just a glint in Al Gore’s eye. As our economy has largely shifted away from agrarian/industrial jobs toward service-oriented ones, coupled with massive advances in communication technology, it’s pretty easy to see how the places where work gets done would shift, too. See? That’s not so bad. Being reasonable is easy!

The benefits of working from home are obvious: freedom, no commute; it’s easier to be there for family, the dog, the dentist appointment. Less time wasted in goofy officewide meetings. I’ve wondered if there is another aspect, that office life was demystified by what began in the years before the pandemic, the rise of HR complaints and accusations of bullying, bad language and sexual misconduct. Add arguments over masks and vaccines, and maybe office life came to be seen less as a healthy culture you could be part of and more like a battlefield you wanted to avoid.

Wow, this is excellent stuff. What a great summary of all the reasons remote work rules. Remember those pictures from early 2020 that showed the skyline in LA looking astonishingly clear?

It’s not like LA normally looks like that: The lack of commuter pollution made that happen. Woo! Remote work is the best! Death to office life!

Arguments against working from home are largely intangible, and I focus on these. They are less personal, more national and societal.

I don’t want to see office life in America end. The decline in office life is going to have an impact on the general atmosphere of the country.

Oh, Noonan. We were so close. Guess I’ll put the champagne and streamers away.

I don’t inherently disagree with the premise here, BTW. I do think ending office life will have an impact on the general atmosphere of the country, and likely the world. The main difference is that I think that impact will be a positive one. I could name all sorts of reasons why, but I don’t really need to — Peggy did that for us literally one paragraph ago.

There is something demoralizing about all the empty offices, something post-greatness about them. All the almost-empty buildings in all the downtowns—it feels too much like a metaphor for decline.

If that feels like a metaphor for decline, you’re really gonna hate seeing our literacy rates, medical debt and homelessness. Kinda makes you think we’ve actually been on the decline for a while now, huh? And I love the Manifest Destiny-style bullshit that empty buildings need to be full. Maybe the buildings never needed to be that big in the first place? Maybe they’d be better suited as affordable housing? I guess those things are also “post-greatness.”

My mind goes first to the young. People starting out need offices to learn a profession, to make friends, meet colleagues, find romantic partners and mates. The #MeToo movement did a lot to damage mentoring—senior employees no longer wanted to take the chance—but the end of office life would pretty much do away with it.

Whoa there. We started heading down Wistful Street and then got dragged into a back alley on Rupert Murdoch Boulevard. The #MeToo movement catching strays in an article about office work was not on my Terrible Takes Bingo Card™. But let’s address the broader point: That younger people need to go into an office to develop in meaningful ways. Should I make a numbered list of the issues I have with this sentiment? Yes, I think I should:

1. The word “need” is, right off the bat, an absurd choice. It implies there’s no alternative path here. Sorry, mechanics and freelancers! Guess you don’t get to have friends.
2. Learning a profession can definitely be done in an office. You know where else it can be done? Not in an office. What about via Zoom? Webinar? Over the phone? At a coffee shop? From a book? Via Google search? By observing randos in your day-to-day life? We don’t truly need an office to learn how to do our jobs. If anything, I would argue offices also significantly distract us from our jobs. Especially if we make friends, colleagues or partners/mates there. Which reminds me:
3. Finding romantic partners and mates? In the workplace? In our own workplaces? You … you know that’s frowned upon, right? It’s in, like, every HR handbook that’s been written since the 1950s. The whole concept of “don’t defecate where you consume your food” is based on the idea that you shouldn’t do anything that jeopardizes your food. In this case, the food is your money. And the defecation is the potential messiness, toxicity and all-around awkwardness that comes with relationships — and especially relationship troubles. And the table is your office. And the commingling of office power dynamics with sexual power dynamics is like when your hot roommate won’t stop leaving the fucking Brita out on the countertop. You want to yell at them for it, but it’s not really your place, and your attraction to them is a whole other clouding factor that makes the whole initial problem needlessly tricky to manage relative to its actual complexity. What was I talking about again? Oh, right: Nothing.
4. Not to put too fine a point on it, but blaming the #MeToo movement for the decline in mentorship is crazybones. It implies that the only reason senior staff members were mentoring people in the first place was to benefit from it in the form of unreciprocated sexual attention. And the decline of the American office is … a … bad thing? Am I losing my mind?

I could keep going, but we’ve got a lot left to tackle.

There will be less knowledge of the workplace, of what’s going on, of the sense that you’re part of a burbling ecosystem. There will be fewer deep friendships, antagonisms, real and daily relationships. Work will seem without depth, flat as a Zoom screen. Less human. Without offices you’ll lose a place to escape from your home life.

Hoo boy. I don’t even fundamentally object to the first part here. Or even the main point, really. Work will be different because remote work is different. There are drawbacks to it, certainly, even if there are a lot more perks. But the idea that work will seem “less human?” I’m beginning to think Peggy Noonan is using “office culture” as a strawman for the rise of Millennials in positions of power and just, like, general equality. And “a place to escape home life?” Jesus, who actually wrote this article, an AI imitating Ralph Kramden?

My guess is the end of the office will lead to a decline in professionalism across the board. You learn things in the hall from the old veteran. You understand she’s watching your progress, and you want to come through with your excellence. Without her down the hall, who will you be excellent for?

I don’t know, ourselves? I want to do a good job at stuff because it feels intrinsically good. It’s cool to learn a new thing and watch that slowly make way for proficiency and maybe even mastery. Also — and I know this is gonna sound crazy — I still manage to learn new things every day even with a remote job. It’s not because I’m a super smart cyborg witch who cast a knowledge siphoning hex on everyone above age 50. It’s because I know how to self-direct. We all have access to absurd computational power and crowdsourced knowledge thanks to the Internet, and I still have weekly 1:1 meetings with my manager and daily/weekly Zoom meetings with my team.

If I want to figure out the syntax for a SQL query, or learn how to effectively blend two images together in Photoshop, or waste the last hour of my workday setting up a Substack, I can do all of that from home and get positive results. Maybe I won’t get any weird Don Draper caricatures winking at me over their scotch and telling me “You’ve got the goods, kid” or whatever, but I can still get by.

This is already a little long, so I’ll skip ahead a bit. The next two graphs are basically rewordings of the last two anyway. And then there’s a really fun bit about Jamie Dimon — who I covered in the “About” post here — mentioning that people need to get back into the office because of leadership reasons. Couldn’t possibly be that having empty commercial buildings is impacting your ability to make money, right, Jamie? No chance that’s a factor here? Whatever. That guy’s an asshole. Let’s move on.

It is possible working at home is changing the nature of professional ambition. A piece last month in the Journal by Callum Borchers cited Jonathan Johnson, CEO of Overstock.com. To foster a sense of togetherness and shared mission, he invited everyone on staff to join him for lunch every Tuesday at the company’s Midvale, Utah, headquarters. In eight months, a total of 10 people attended. “Most of the time, I eat my peanut butter sandwich alone,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. Borchers, “When I was 25, if I had a chance to eat my sandwich with the CEO, I’d have been there.”

Yeah! I’d have been there too! Nothing better than a little face time with the CEO. Well, unless I worked out of Colorado. Or Kansas. Little far to get to Utah for a lunch, you know? Oh, and definitely not if I worked out of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, or Washington State, all places where Overstock has offices.

But I’m in! Although there’s no way I’m making that trip on a regular basis. And honestly, if I thought enough people were going to go anyway, I’m not sure I’d get enough of an opportunity to stand out anyway. I mean, it’s just lunch. Not like we’re getting into the nitty gritty of the business. Besides, how would I have known only 10 people would show up over eight months? Do you think Overstock made that known to employees? I doubt Jonathan Johnson would allow his ego to get bruised so publicly.

Oh, and let’s not forget: he’s the CEO. I don’t know the man (I mostly make lunch at home so we’ve never had the chance to meet), but if any other business priority comes up, odds are he’s gonna bail on the lunch hour anyway.

Woo! Facetime with the boss! Maybe I’ll have him over for dinner and ask for the big promotion. Then life can go back to the 1950s sitcom Peggy Noonan wants.

Here are my two greatest concerns. The first is that in my lifetime the office is where America happened each day. That’s why many of our most popular TV programs were about the office, from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” through “Mad Men,” from “ER” through “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation.” You can name others. Even “M*A*S*H” was about the workplace. And of course “The Office.” Without Dunder Mifflin, how would Jim have met Pam? How could the utterly ridiculous Michael Scott have entered your sympathies without seeing him every day, and knowing him?

I was kidding when I made that sitcom dig, but apparently she wasn’t. And let me note up front that this could well be a joke on her part. I feel like the spirit of her point is that ‘Hey, office life is relatable, and without relatable people and situations, what happens to comedy?’ But since it’s couched in the rest of this monstrosity, I’ll respond to it by taking her point at face value. Watch me:

Are you fucking serious? “Where America happened?” I want to stitch “The Office is Where America Happens” onto a new Gadsden flag with an even bigger snake on it. (Also, I think the snake should be wearing a tie and have a slicked-back wig. I just think that’d be cuter.) This is pseudo-patriotism at its finest. Of course it seems like offices are where “America happened” if that’s where you’ve spent your life, Peggy. They make TV shows about office life for exactly that reason. But I’d argue that America also happens on farms and ranches, in bars and restaurants, around the house and within our neighborhoods.

The actual version of America happens everywhere, and it involves long commutes, unpaid overtime, skyrocketing healthcare costs and minimum wages that don’t keep up with inflation. It’s people working multiple jobs amid ever-shrinking social safety nets just to get by. It’s why you can sit back at night, streaming 30 Rock and getting Vietnamese takeout driven to you by a guy who does Uber Eats for extra cash. That guy’s in America too, Peggy. And I bet his office life would make for some depressing TV.

And not that this matters too much, but two of the most popular shows in recent memory were Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. Not exactly relatable viewing, but decidedly popular and didn’t involve offices at all.

I wonder what Peggy Noonan thought of the writer’s strike.

The primary location of daily integration in America—the coming together of all ages, religions, ethnicities and political tendencies, all colors, classes and conditions—has been, during the past century, the office. It is where you learn to negotiate relationships with people very different from you, where you discover what people with different experiences of life really think … Daily life in America happened in the office. If it doesn’t, where will America happen?

That’s right! The office is where all of our differences were set aside. It’s where we solved racism, shattered the glass ceiling, and rolled our way up the ADA-compliant ramp to the top, together. That’s why job postings have that EEO statement at the bottom: to brag about how great a job we’ve all done at learning to work together and respecting our differences :) :) :) :)

Again, this is only true if you set aside that most people don’t actually work in an office. Once you remember that, you suddenly have your answer. America can “happen” anywhere, everywhere, all the time. What is with this romanticized idea of the hard-working office temp that learns the ropes from a grizzled veteran being the platonic ideal of America? “Where will America happen?” This is complete nonsense.

And, this being a political column, my second worry. The end of the office will contribute to polarization. Receding from office life will become another way of self-segregating. People will be exposed to less and, in their downtime, will burrow down into their sites, their groups, their online angers. Their group-driven information and facts.

I have some unbelievably bad news: that’s already happening. Jesus, remember the Pandemic and the rise in anti-vax COVID denialism? I remember reading articles and listening to TED Talks as early as 2008 outlining the danger of online echo chambers. Facebook opened itself up to everyone in 2006, but its eventual devolution into our main global source of misinformation and radicalization was just the natural extension of what the Internet gave us from the beginning. Sure, we could come together and find like-minded people with similar interests. We could create our own communities, find our own families.

But doing so fundamentally meant less time interacting in spaces that were disagreeable to us. And when social media and search algorithms are designed to tailor your experience specifically to you, and have been for decades, it’s hard to imagine a working lunch counteracting all of that.

Let’s wrap this up, shall we?

I suppose what I fear is a more disembodied nation. You can see it on the TV news—the empty, echoing set where there used to be people at desks in the background, running around … I don’t want America to look like an Edward Hopper painting. He was the great artist of American loneliness—empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone. We weren’t meant to be a Hopper painting. We were meant to be and work together.

Look, even I will admit that this is a pretty strident takedown of an OpEd that’s now almost two years old. If her entire point had been “I, Peggy Noonan, personally find value in office life,” then I wouldn’t be here dissecting this article and calling her an elitist. But that’s not her point. Her point is that America is awesome and part of why it’s awesome is our office culture.

But that simply isn’t true. We’re playing a game of “Right Point, Wrong Attribution.” Yes, humans are meant to be and work together. Community and inclusion is important! Love and friendship and mastery of your work are important too! But the decline in office attendance isn’t why these things are problems.

In actuality, office life in America is really only great if you meet a handful of demographic standards. There’s a reason Jon Hamm and Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda and George Clooney get a lot of these leading roles, after all. But as times change and technology improves, people are starting to reject the idea of needing offices at all, let alone as a means of feeling accomplished, accepted or excellent.

If we could close the income disparity in the US and give people a means to build the lives they really want, maybe we could recapture some of that vibrant, hum-and-thrum American spirit Peggy Noonan wants. Maybe if empty offices owned by commercial real estate magnates didn’t litter our downtowns, there’d be more room for bars, restaurants, boutique shops, bakeries, art galleries, music studios — you know, the things that actually constitute culture. Work is such a limited part of human experience, and seeing it get a disproportionate share of the blame for our overall social decline is insane.

Then again, what do I know? The grizzled Accounting Manager down the hall hasn’t stopped me in the hallway once this week. I wonder if he’s mad.