Like many people I know, my work has shifted, post-COVID, to a hybrid-remote setting. In a tight labor market, my largely brick-and-mortar employer realized that we were losing too much talent to corporate remote options that paid better. Last year, in an attempt to stem the tide, we were offered the option for a 3 days in the office / 2 days remote. Some of our team was offered a fully remote option, (which all but one who were offered it took). For summer, this increased to 1 day in, 4 days remote. It was considered a perk, offered conditionally provided we could continue to offer the same service and do our work just as effectively as when we are in the office.
It has been working well, it seems. For a largely traditional institution, we pivoted pretty quickly in March 2020 when we were all fully remote (due to COVID) by necessity. Our phone system shifted to our laptops, VPNs were added, and Zoom meetings became a regular thing. Though I missed seeing my co-workers from time to time, and occasionally felt isolated and disconnected, I found I was just as productive at home as I was in the office. The hybrid option seemed like the best of both worlds--it got me out of the house occasionally, while reducing my commute and allowing me to do things around the house on my lunch break.
It is not lost on me that this is a privilege of my particular strata in the workforce. Were I a bricklayer, or a cashier, or a daycare worker, such options would not be available to me and others who now find ourselves working primarily from the comfort of our home. But since it is my situation, and since workforce culture and employer understanding seems to be shifting, it has allowed me to observe the effect of this shift on family life.
I have a friend who thinks and writes about the family-unit prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not being a historical affodicio, I can only write in general terms. But it seems that prior to the late 18th century, society was largely agrarian, and populations localized in small towns. When Industrialization came about, men would leave their families and villages to seek employment in factories in largely urban areas.
My friend noted that families prior to this era were together more by nature of the work they did. This seemed to be the case, and sometime I noticed, when viewing the film A Hidden Life (set in rural Austria) with my wife a few years back. There was a rhythm and cohesion to life, more localized economies, more sense of community. When the automobile became more commonplace, my friend lamented, this sense of place was further fractured as people were able to travel farther distances for both work and leisure.
This is my first time working remotely in a job. But it's interesting, isn't it, that whereas low-wage agrarians two hundred-some years ago had the benefit of family cohesion and togetherness (but minimal opportunity), now it is tech-workers with higher commanding salaries that find themselves, well...at home.
Because we also homeschool, we are together in proximity as a family much more than just a few years ago, when I would leave the house at 7 and get home around dinner time five days a week. Even when I am working upstairs, or on slower days with no meetings, in the kitchen, the kids are at the dining room table with my wife doing math and language arts. On my lunch break, we can eat together, or we can go to the adoration chapel together, or I can work in the garden. Because I don't have to leave or get up as early as in previous years, my wife and I begin our day with prayer and reading scripture at the kitchen table over coffee. When I log off at the end of the day, I'm already home. We could probably even give up one of our cars if we had to, since I tend to bike commute whenever I am able
The days I am in the office and it is slower, I am literally staring at the wall in my office. I don't mind, but it just seems so--antiquated. The Corner Office used to be a sign of status and prestige, especially in law-firms and places like that. Now it just seems like an expensive waste of space and not something you would brag about the way a yuppie might in the nineteen-eighties. I literally don't need anything to do my work--and more effectively and productively, mind you--than a flat space to put my laptop on.
Has technology improved our lives? There's something to be said about washing dishes by hand for nostalgia's sake, but I don't think any housewife is going to be giving up their dishwasher anytime soon. Same for the automobile, or air conditioning, or WiFi. We enjoy doing things old-school--baking bread, tilling a garden, writing a letter with a pen and paper--because we are recipients of the privilege of not having to do so. If we were forced to thresh wheat by hand for 16 hours a day, or canning all our produce to get through the winter, it might be a different story. We're kind of--"playing", if you will. It's quaint and pleasant.
But agrarian life was not always quaint and pleasant. It was work, always work, and were one to mimic the sluggard in Proverbs, they would, well, die. But there was a hard simplicity to life, and I think that was in fact a good that is often neglected. Hard work is good for us, and we were not made for unbridled comfort, leisure, and security.
So it's an interesting swing of the pendulum--those at the higher socio-economic rungs are enjoying more efficiency, more time, better compensation, and yes, more leisure in this new post-industrialized tech-ocracy. For many, the laptop is the new scythe.
For those working at lower-wage jobs that require in-person presence, it's quite the opposite. They are taken away from their families, often scrambling for child-care, while just trying to make ends meet and pay their bills. For many of these jobs, it's necessary. You can't "virtually" build a skyscraper or empty waste cans remotely.
It is for this reason that I often reflect that despite my median-income, I am the rich man in the bible, afforded a position not of want or need, but of surplus. The bonus, however, which I am increasingly grateful for, is that I seem to have more time with my family (whom I actually like being around), even when I am working in the next room.
It would be one thing if I wasn't able to work as well from home as in the office. But this new model has afforded us a curious new paradigm of family life in the midst of a sometimes godless technocratic world order, to make of it what we choose--for good or for evil. There is fruit there, and I don't want to squander it or take it for granted. This is not to condemn or succumb to privilege-guilt, but simply to cultivate gratitude as a matter of perspective (hot water! flush toilets!) and accept a responsibility of multiplying talents for the kingdom and the least of these with what we've been afforded. For those who are given much, much is expected.
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