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Moving Forward To The Past
Why work-from-home will soon be a distant memory
Journalists and commentators are excitable folks who live within a bubble of the permanent present. Knowing nothing of history, nor in fact of anything much at all, media types reliably imagine the future by simply extrapolating in a straight line from whatever transient circumstances happen to exist at the moment they are doing their prognosticating.
Not surprisingly, the value of these prognostications is almost always very slight indeed.
As far back in time as most people can remember (e.g., two months ago), all the chatter was about the future of work being a blend of work-from-home with one or two days per week spent in the office. I was skeptical because everything I know about human nature tells me that people cling to the most worthless anachronistic behaviors with a tenacity that would put a limpet to shame. People who have spent their careers striving for a slightly better office will not willingly surrender the shreds of status they have worked so desperately hard to attain. Hence I was fairly certain that despite all the ebullient chatter about how our currently fashionable coronapanic has changed everything, in reality, we’ll all rapidly return to how things were before.
