Building H #77: What Comes After WFH?
The well-known venture capitalist (and inventor of the browser) Marc Andreessen recently sounded the alarm about the social implications of the rise of remote work. While more and more people have gradually returned to their offices, the numbers are roughly half of what they were before the pandemic. Andreessen described the traditional role that workplaces and corporate campuses have played in social relationships, whether for friendship development or dating opportunities, and lamented its loss for, in his view, an entire generation who are now unmoored: “What you get is to sit in your studio apartment in front of your laptop and good luck. You’re cut off from everything else.”
Andreessen, a middle-aged man who made his first billion in his 20s, has a somewhat, um, particular perspective on life. The workplace life he describes has never applied to people in a wide variety of job categories and for many, the social experience of the workplace has never been good. (See, for example, PBS’s report on the comparative reluctance of Black workers to return to the office.) So to be clear, not everyone shares Andreessen’s rose-colored version of traditional office life, but a shift in which people are, on average, headed into offices half as much as before is a very big deal. It’s a fundamental restructuring of one of the pillars of modern life. The implications are far-reaching – in addition to the change in the experience of work, this transformation could affect the designs of homes and communities, the transportation options that people seek, the way we spend our time, and the ways that we meet people. And we’re seeing the consequences already. Public transportation is being squeezed with reduced ridership. Removing workers from downtown areas has ripple effects, as noted in this Bloomberg piece on how much remote work is costing Manhattan. And, back to Andreessen’s concern, we appear to have entered a “friendship recession” that’s driven in part by the WFH experience.
Significant transformations of our environment – like the industrialization that brought us to offices in the first place, and the introduction of technologies like automobiles, televisions and smartphones, change our day-to-day behaviors and – as we regularly point out – those changes can have major health consequences. One of our greatest qualities as a species is our ability to adapt. And adapt we have. As we engineered routine physical activity out of daily lives, we developed the idea of exercise – which, over time, has evolved into a variety of expressions, from playing sports, to going for a run, to using treadmills and other equipment in a public gym, to Pelotons in the home, to, as we see in Peter Flax’s enthusiastic review of Supernatural for Men’s Health, workout games in VR. Working out in the metaverse is apparently quite serious – Flax notes that “the imaginative verisimilitude translates into a real-life metabolic boost that has been substantiated scientifically.” And while most will engage in these games from the comfort of their homes, they can be played (virtually) with others and the settings (again, virtual) are essentially limitless (Flax tried a boxing workout set in Yosemite National Park).
The big shift to more work from home comes at a time when just about every other reason to venture out now also faces competition. In addition to exercise, we can now shop, get food from our favorite restaurants, FaceTime with friends and watch hi-def movies on big screens, all without crossing our thresholds. And if we miss the great outdoors, there are always VR nature walks. As many of the assumptions of what one needs in proximity when choosing a home start to crumble, the questions of where we will live and work – and where will see each other – become more urgent. The human needs to be social, to move our bodies and to experience nature remain deeply encoded in our DNA. How will we meet them as the structure of work life changes for so many people? The shift creates opportunities to reimagine these structures: to rethink zoning regulations and approaches to urban planning, to create more diverse transportation options, to integrate more social opportunities into residential settings and more. As with every big sociocultural or technological transformation, the key question is whether we can approach it by intentionally prioritizing its impact on health. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how to do so – comments are open.
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