In praise of offices

One of the things the last year has revealed to me is how intensely people itch to (and indeed do) go to restaurants, take holidays, go shopping, and hold house parties, even during the height of the pandemic. Granted we're social animals, but the trade-off with a fatal pandemic would have tilted the balance much more in favor of staying put, I'd have thought, than it did. After all, if it were OK to talk with precision in polite society, most of these trips could be categorized even charitably as "somewhat desirable but wholly unnecessary". But even amidst all this 'being realistic and getting on with our lives', any suggestion of reopening offices is enough to make most people shudder in disbelief! "How can they do that, it's so dangerous," they'll balk at the faintest hint of it, even while on their way to the popular Sunday morning brunch hotspot.

But for all the bad rep offices get, they fulfilled a most important purpose even outside of bringing people together for collaborative work: they excused us from ourselves.

While it has been argued that working from home has played to introverts' advantage, I'd argue that introverts, in fact, will relate most with my defence of the office-going routine. As introverts fully well know, their need for solitude has more to do with not having to relate with other people, than being geographically alone. To that effect, the office, in spite of putting you in the same building as hundreds others, offered you a partial solitude. It provided a break from having to perform your personal relationships at all times: imagine the live-in with the relatives you didn't want, and thanks to your office routine, it would never come up anyway. Or the party you had no interest in going to, so you'd just work a little longer. Office was the separation from personal life that gave us a few quiet moments to reflect on the personal life. Equally, going home from work was a breather from the professional race, giving us the moments to make sense of work, to see where it fits in the larger perspective of our full lives. With office and home one and the same, there is no refuge from either onslaughts of experiences: experiences that we consume ever more voraciously but assimilate hardly at all.

In other news, I got promoted the other day, although that has nothing to do with my decision to write favorably about offices today. I do feel the crests and troughs of professional successes and failures, but ever so slightly that I feel sorry that I'm not more excited when it is good news, such as this. It's like being a buzzkill. When it is bad news, I don't feel quite as sorry about not being distraught, since the folks around also don't mind it, of course. The last two sentences are not meant to imply that I prefer bad news, I certainly don't haha. I wasn't expecting the promotion, but then I rarely expect good things to happen to me; I find that I live more peacefully this way. But I'm happy for it, mainly by the almost teary-eyed joy it brings my parents who toiled so hard on me for so many years so unconditionally and plainly. It reminds me of how inspiring they are, and that's the best part of the promotion.