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What if Work Doesn’t Work?
Building a sustainable future of work may help us build other sustainable models for society
Over at the New York Times, Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, co-authors of a forthcoming book on remote work, argue that the pandemic-induced mass adoption of remote work has left many people feeling somewhat, well, distant from their workplace.
Employers, they write, have a lot to do to keep employees engaged and involved if remote, or even hybrid, work is going to be part of “building a sustainable future of work.”
What interests me about this isn’t the remote work vs. hybrid vs. workplace argument, nor even the specifics of holding remote orientation seminars or other more managerial elements of a job. Instead, what interests me is the “sustainable future of work.” I don’t think, on their own, any of these things I just listed matter to that — or that they’re incidental to a more fundamental and (I think) important issue, which is that people are generally not guided to think about what model of work will sustain them, rather than their company or the economy or whatnot.
It seems to me there are two very broad models for work and/or careers as they relate to life. In one model, life is a distraction from work, and in the other work is a distraction from life.
