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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

There is an underlying attitude on work from home that I've noticed seems to dominate peoples opinions on it.

1) Work is for work and the goal of work is to earn money to have more time at home.

2) Work is an integral part of my human person.

Either because of how I was raised or temperament I'm in the #1 bucket. I enjoy being good at my job and think about it and occasionally talk about it with my wife, but at the end of the day its just some stuff I do for money to spend time with my family.

By contrast a lot of other people talk about their "work family" and "bring their whole self to work".

This extends to many spheres. I don't think romantic relationships should be allowed at work at all (not consensual ones, not any ones, its work!). I see no conflict with "don't say gay" bills because I don't think teachers should be talking about their personal lives at work (gay or straight). But I've seen other people have a vehement position in the other direction, and I think a lot of it has to do with peoples opinions of what the relation between work and personal life should be.

In general WFH benefits those with rich family lives the most. Work in the office benefits those that either don't have a family life (young singles) or have prize positions at work they find enjoyable (executives).

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

I'm a huge booster of WFH as well. I don't buy the productivity decrease from it, but even if true I think the well being increase is vast. It's also one of the few "eugenic" experiments we've seen (professionals have more kids when they can work from home).

I also think the fact that WFH was imposed rather then planned is part of why some people dislike it (and obviously they must be right in some contexts).

What I have noticed is that high paying jobs are getting laid off while low paying jobs are in high demand. This is probably easy to brush off if you think of it as "Facebook", but my best friend is also a robotic engineer and his entire sector is in decline (he got laid off by amazon). If my friend reaches the point where he's hawking Rita's then something is definitely happening in the economy.

Maybe there is something else going on. People had a lot of paper wealth. They felt they could use that paper wealth to buy goods and services way into the future (I'm especially thinking of retiring baby boomers). However, now we are finding out that those goods and services are going to be a lot more expensive then we thought (inflation) and the paper wealth isn't worth what we thought. So it turns out "assets" are worth less relative to "hard labor". And in many cases the worth ratio of "high end labor" vs "concrete labor" isn't as favorable for high end labor (a lot of high end labor is tied up in the value of assets).

This would tell a story of how the Fed and government created a lot of money during the pandemic, made everyone feel richer, and then when the lockdown ended it turned out that the money couldn't actually buy the goods and services we wanted which all got bid up. It would also indicate that a lot of the jobs created during the pandemic, just like other assets, weren't worth as much as people thought at first.

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