Don’t work at home
For the good of your soul, don’t work at home. Don’t have a home office. Don’t idealize and advocate working at home as a revolution and the future now, the product of the natural evolution of work, especially in an information economy. No, don’t do any of that. As a general principle, I don’t work at home. And so far during this coronavirus pandemic, I do not work from home, either. There has been so much talk about online classes at school, Skyping and Zoom for work and worship, funerals and holidays as the new thing, the new norm. It almost makes me think I’m missing out on something. Admittedly, the pandemic will likely change everything - change our work, education, worship, dating, courting, family, vacation and recreation behaviors and more in ways than we haven’t seen yet, even in preview, and in ways we can’t yet imagine. It ill probably change the ways we have sex and babies. In Japan, a birthrate that was already low took another dive this year. Understandable.
It bothers me that one of those changes is the normalization and acceptance of the work-from-home idea. For many years now, the notion has been idealized by paid actors who appear on television glibly boasting that they have the “freedom” to live full-time on their yacht in the Caribbean while “teleworking” with the office in New York. This is presented as a desirable lifestyle, and an accomplishment of the duly clever. Rubbish!
I have worked at home - a lot, over the years. I’ve never been very keen about it, and I always intentionally try to avoid it, and minimise it when it’s unavoidable.
The thing is that I believe in privacy, and I believe that home is not the place for work, that work and home ought to be kept separate, in specialized compartments. Privacy is private. That’s why it’s called that. Furthermore, specialization is a grand accomplishment that lends itself to utility, success and progress.
Just as I don’t want to mix and socialize with work colleagues after working hours (because it confuses leisure with work), I don’t want to invite work into my home. It obliterates a sacred boundary. My home is my castle, my cave, my harbor, my haven, my hole-in-the-wall and my escape. Outsiders are not welcome. The world is filled with people that I despise. Society is filled with people whose madness I am required not only to tolerate but to indulge and even participate in, as well. The idiotic and false notion that work at home and from home is okay, the way of the future, and actually liberating is evil.
But I could be wrong.