Why I’m considering a trip to the office
A little about me first. I’m a fiction writer and contract content designer. I’m half storyteller, half researcher, chooser and user of the right words (hopefully) to help people get through online services. Living this divide isn’t always easy by the way, but I’ll save that for another time.
Being a contractor and freelancer predisposes me to being part of a culture of nomads with no ties, no cares, and just enough battery life to get through the next gig. No way. The appeal of this seems desperately surface level. I am categorically — I repeat ‘NOT’ — a singular, selfish manikin tethered to my own ego and distanced from the rest of humanity like some frozen, superior silver bullet in space. I am H.U.M.A.N. And the more I admit it, the better I feel. It’s a relief isn’t it? Come join me for a minute…
A small caveat
I’m not planning to return to the office full-time or even half the time. But I think I’d like to do it sometimes. I haven’t had some kind of life changing experience or epiphany because my home is intolerable as a place to work. I’m simply looking for a change of scene and a little human interaction.
Working remotely more seemed inevitable
The idea that people who use computers for a living would ever have lived out their professional lives in offices always seemed naïve to me. The companies that created remote-enabling technologies surely didn’t picture their users physically going to work indefinitely? When you create tools with officeless potential written all over them, you send a message. Bring on the future. The second you’ve got a device in your hand that allows you to communicate or produce something while physically disconnected, you’re in remote mode.
I thought commuting would last forever
The culture of spending up to two hours a day on a train watching my fingernails grow seemed, for a long while, indestructible. It felt like I would end up measuring out a decent-sized slice of my life in one context, as a commuter. I conditioned myself to tolerate this way of life, inventing all types of coping mechanisms. I started with books. I often reminisce about being so emotionally moved reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian that I almost forgot to get off my train to work. Then, by degrees, phones were suddenly able to do more things, turning people’s faces from masks of deep thought into twitching fleshy circuitry. I’m old enough — but nowhere near wise enough — to have experienced this change in human behaviour. People who once seemed to display outward shows of individuality became flesh and bone extensions of plastic and metal rectangles.
Human interaction as inspiration
As a fiction writer, inspiration’s important for creative survival. The conditions for inspiration do not exist within the confines of home. In other words, I need to be among people to help speed my ideas along. Creating characters when there’s very little human interaction is okay up to a point. But to really create characters, stories, the glint of an idea that becomes a novel. These things arrive, I feel, only as a result of pressure (like combustion or a chemical reaction) to a healthy mixture of three dimensional subjects and objects. I’ve never been able to successfully create the same conditions at home, even if the coffee I’ve made is dangerously potent. I recently overheard someone on a video call describe going to an office to chat with work colleagues as ‘topping up your social quota’. For me, this isn’t a cynical view on a mechanical action our bosses are forcing us to take. It’s simply necessary, as long as we remain human, organisms belonging in spaces among others. I think privately so that I may express myself publicly.
