“I don’t know how much time I get.”
Justine Luebke, a 32-year-old teacher who lives in Montana, was undergoing chemotherapy for metastatic cancer when the pandemic hit last year. As the world shut down, Luebke was figuring out what she wanted the rest of her life to look like. “Time takes on a new meaning when you go through this,” she said. “This pandemic has definitely felt like it’s taken time from me. And I don’t know how much time I get.”
There is no cure for metastatic cancer. Treatment options are available, but once diagnosed, it is generally understood that patients will be sick for the rest of their lives. The median survival range for people with the disease is three years, but that can vary wildly depending on factors like age and treatment. It is common among those who are diagnosed to experience an urgent shift in their priorities — some want to travel the world, or stay close to family, or pursue meaningful fulfillment in their professional enterprises. Unfortunately, all of those considerations are sidelined by a pandemic.
As vaccinations ramp up, the country is taking on a newfound optimism and a sense that the end of the worst of this pandemic is fast approaching. For many, the past year will represent only a blip in their lifespan. But the same blessing does not apply to those battling cancer. They aren’t guaranteed anything, other than the weekslong intervals between check-ins with their doctors. They never know what news the next scan might bring. This pandemic has been cruelly unfair for so many different reasons, but especially for those who don’t know how much time they have left — and will never get lost time back.
We reached out to three women, all in their 30s, about what it’s been like to endure the Covid-19 pandemic while having metastatic cancer. Some of them are raising kids, some are still going to work, and all of them feel like the pandemic has stolen a precious year away from them. When you’re sick, all you want to do is hug your friends. Read their stories below.
“One thing I wasn’t willing to give up is teaching … My kids are my biggest reason for fighting.”
Justine Luebke, 32, Montana
In 2019 I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. I went through five weeks of chemo, and then waited for my surgery. It went terribly wrong. I ended up losing all of my large intestines, most of my small, and was in the ICU for a month. By the time I was strong enough to do the cleanup chemo, they had found that the cancer had spread to my liver and my lungs. So, in August of that year, I had confirmed metastatic cancer. I was doing chemo all the way up to April 2020.
Covid felt like a domino effect. It was a Saturday night in March, and my family called me and said that I needed to consider going fully into quarantine. I’m a teacher, so that would’ve meant not teaching. I went to the grocery store and stocked up, and told my school that I shouldn’t be going in. But after that weekend, everything shut down anyway. When I was going through these treatments, I’d have my parents at every appointment with me. Every doctor’s appointment, every scan, they were present. And now they couldn’t be there. That was extremely tough, especially on chemo days.
I still get to see my parents outside of the appointments. Fighting cancer is as mental as it is physical, and if I didn’t see my parents I’d go to a pretty dark place. My mom works from home. My dad goes into work but is very careful. I’m now fully vaccinated, so that helps a ton, too. I’m able to see friends who are also vaccinated.
One thing I wasn’t willing to give up is teaching. I’ve been teaching in person all year, and I try to create a bubble in my classroom. My kids are my biggest reason for fighting. I don’t have kids of my own, and I will not be able to have kids of my own. So, my students are like my kids. The fifth graders I teach are the same students I had in kindergarten. When they run up to me and give me a hug, that’s when I’m like, “Okay, that’s why you have to keep fighting, because you’re not going to leave these kids.” When I come to school, I leave what I’m dealing with at the door and I can be there for them. They give me meaning beyond cancer.
Time takes on a new meaning when you go through this. They almost lost me when I was in the ER. After that, the moments you spend with your friends and your family are so precious. We’ve all tried to find connections during quarantine. We can Zoom with our friends. But you just want to be having dinner in their house together. This pandemic has definitely felt like it’s taken time from me. And I don’t know how much time I get.
“When you’re dealing with full-time treatment, it makes you want to go out into the world and travel and experience all of these things.”
Emily Veach, 39, Illinois
Covid has been stressful and scary, but I also felt like I had a bit of a head start on these feelings of uncertainty, and the perception of threat in my environment. A lot more people have gotten to know the things that I worry about already. My idea of normalcy was stripped away a long time ago.
I was originally diagnosed in 2014 with early-stage breast cancer. It has since spread to my bones, and became late-stage breast cancer in 2017. My treatment weakens my immune system. I’ve had fevers that have landed me in the hospital, so I’ve always been aware of that even before the pandemic — long before 2020, I was flying with a mask on. Now, I no longer have to put up with any weird stares about wearing a mask.
I was making plans to move to Illinois before the pandemic started. When the lockdowns occurred, I knew that’s what I still wanted to do, and I went through all the scenarios to figure out what was the safest way. My wonderful mother volunteered to drive out and get me. I rented an SUV and packed everything in there, to the point that it felt like a big camping trip. I made the journey alone, and made stops along the way. My favorite was in Cedar Crest, New Mexico. I knew someone through my network who runs a nonprofit that does adventure trips for cancer survivors. I wanted to spend this trip outside of anyone’s home, and he invited me to camp in his place. It was up in the mountains, he hooked me up with a portable heater, and I spent the night in his horse barn. It was beautiful.
The things that have become most important in my life are nature and my community. But I haven’t seen my dad in a long time. I haven’t seen my best friends. We can jump on video calls, but I really want to hug my friends. When you’re dealing with full-time treatment, it makes you want to go out into the world and travel and experience all of these things. There’s a time sensitivity about that to me.
I have scans every 12 weeks. You never know which scan is going to be a really big change in your life. While I have this stability, I want to be out doing all I can.
“I want [my kids] to look back and say, ‘Mama really tried to do these things before she was gone.’”
Erin Schellert, 37, Missouri
I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in May of 2019. I was 36 years old, and my two kids turned 2 and 4 within a month of my diagnosis. I went in to see a doctor for an unrelated issue, and through some imaging they found a mass on my breast. It went downhill from there. Breast cancer wasn’t even on my radar, and then I learned it was in my brain, my lungs, and my bones. You’re in treatment indefinitely with my cancer. I live my life in three-month increments.
Currently I’m doing really well. If I was walking down the street you’d have no idea what was going on with me. That whole summer, two years ago, felt like it was stolen from us. I was thinking about all the fun things we could do as a family, and now here I was sick from chemo and hairless. 2020 was supposed to be the year we made up for lost time.
I heard bits and pieces about Covid in the news in the first few months of last year. I can’t remember the exact date, but there was definitely a moment where it felt like the bottom fell out. I saw the writing on the wall that things were about to close down.
We obviously couldn’t travel last summer, but we were able to get together with some people who had kids between the ages of 1 through 5. My husband was doing all the shopping, which was a big adjustment for us. It was manageable, but as the year progressed, we definitely got more scared. My mother used to visit quite a bit to give me a break and let me rest for a little bit. With nobody comfortable with flying, she didn’t come as often. Before the pandemic, we wanted to hire someone to come to the house and take care of the kids — but we could never find a situation we were comfortable with. That was hard, because I do get tired. Little kids are exhausting.
You never know, but it’s pretty likely that my lifespan will be shortened and that my kids won’t have their whole life with their mama. There’s so many things I want to do with them and want to experience together. This should’ve been my daughter’s first year of kindergarten. There’s years of school I’m probably not going to be here for, and we didn’t end up sending her because we were nervous about exposure. We’ve done a good job of making memories this last year, but one thing I really want to do is see all 50 states with my kids. I got them little state passports, and we’re gonna fill them all out. We need to get started on that. The clock is ticking. I want them to look back and say, “Mama really tried to do these things before she was gone.”
The first thing we’re going to do when we get a green light is a road trip. My husband and I used to love road trips before we had children. I want to put the kids in the car and have a destination in mind, but no route. We’re not big planners. We just want to see where things take us.
From where we work to how our work is measured, office work will be permanently different after the pandemic.
Someday, perhaps someday soon, when vaccination rates are high enough and the coronavirus relents, the world will return to normal. But in its wake, something as massive and meaningful as a global pandemic will leave many things different, including how we work.
In particular, knowledge workers — high-skilled workers whose jobs are done on computers — will likely see the biggest changes, from our physical locations to the technology we use to the ways in which our productivity is measured. In turn, how we work impacts everything from our own personal satisfaction to new inventions to the broader economy and society as a whole.
These changes represent a chance to remake work as we know it and to learn from the mistakes of our working past — if we’re thoughtful about how we enact them.
Here are 10 ways in which office work will never be the same.
- Working from home is here to stay
Even after the pandemic is no longer forcing us to work from home, many people will continue to do so. That’s because working from home has worked surprisingly well for both employers and employees. People were productive and employers saw a future in which they were less tethered to expensive office real estate. And, going forward, many of the things that aren’t working — having to homeschool while working, for example, or feeling like work never ends because you never leave your house — will be alleviated when we’re not in the middle of a global health crisis that’s adding extra hurdles and stress to working from home.
“One of the few great upsides of the pandemic is we’ve accelerated 25 years of drift toward working from home in one year,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor who studies remote work, told Recode.
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Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images
At the height of the pandemic, more than half of the US workforce worked from home, up from the single digits previously, according to market research company IDC. When the pandemic is over, those who can work from home will likely do so two or three days a week, according to research by Bloom and his co-authors that surveyed worker desires as well as their boss’s promises. This so-called hybrid work model, in which some workers work from home some of the time, will be the dominant office job arrangement. A smaller share of workers — 15 to 18 percent — will be remote full time, according to estimates from business consulting firm Emergent Research.
And there are measurable benefits to working from home.
Working from home allows people to skip their commute and can give them more flexibility in the hours they work, an arrangement workers are on board with and willing to put a dollar sign on. Bloom’s data says employees are willing to take an 8 percent pay cut for the opportunity to work from home two or three days a week. Remote employees save an average of $248 a month, according to a survey by Owl Labs and Global Workplace Analytics. Office management software company Envoy found that nearly half of employees said they’d leave their job if it didn’t offer a hybrid work model after the pandemic.
In short, the ability to work from home is no longer a perk; not allowing it is a dealbreaker.
- Flexibility is a double-edged sword
For years, workers have clamored for more flexibility in their work to accommodate their lives. And working from home will give them that.
“A lot of our employees said, ‘I’m getting more sleep,’ ‘I’m exercising more,’ ‘I’m making myself healthier food,’ ‘I know my neighbors more,’” said Ali Rayl, Slack’s VP of customer experience. “And people are really digging that kind of getting back to their lives.”
The flip side to all this flexibility is an increased feeling that work never ends: People are logging longer hours, attending more meetings, and complaining of just generally being always on. It’s tough to find work-life balance when the lines between the two are blurred.
Time spent in meetings is more than double what it was early last year, according to a new report from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, which combines insights from people using its tools like Microsoft 365 as well as a survey of more than 30,000 workers. Working from home requires more context than people would grasp naturally in an office, and people have created more meetings to fill the void.
People spend an additional hour — for a total of 10 hours — connected to Slack than they did pre-pandemic. The amount of time people spend actively working in or communicating on Slack jumped 30 percent to 110 minutes a day, according to the company. That means more time with Slack in the background and the foreground of our lives.
All of this can hamper productivity and generally leave people feeling worn out. Microsoft’s January survey found that 54 percent feel overworked and 39 percent say they feel exhausted.
Jared Spataro, corporate VP for Microsoft 365, considers this an “opportunity” for leadership to improve the experience at work. “If you just go with the flow and let the default reign, you’ll end up in a worse place than pre-pandemic,” he said.
Jan Rezab, founder and CEO of productivity analytics firm Time Is Ltd., agrees that a lot of our worst habits in the office — interruptions that keep us from focusing, meetings for the sake of meetings — have been carried over to remote work. “We’re just as unproductive as we were before,” he said.
- Some populations will benefit from working from home while others struggle
The benefits of working from home will not be evenly felt. While some groups have enjoyed working from home, the arrangement has been challenging for others.
First of all, only some jobs accord workers the ability to work from home in the first place, and that has largely been divided by income and education. People who work in high-skilled jobs that require a bachelor’s degree or higher were more likely to be able to work from home during the pandemic, according to surveys from Pew Research Center. In turn, people with lower-paying jobs were more likely to be in danger of contracting Covid-19 at work. The divide between those who can and can’t work from home will likely persist after the pandemic, creating what Stanford’s Bloom called a “two-tier economy” of who gets to enjoy work-from-home benefits and who doesn’t.
Many presumed young people, who are more familiar with technologies like video calls, would have had an easier time with the transition to working from home than their older and less tech-savvy peers, but multiple studies say that hasn’t been the case.
Employees over the age of 40 were more likely to say they would prefer to continue working remotely, while employees younger than 40 were more likely to want to return to the office, according to one study of teleworkers done by Bucknell University. Young people felt they were missing out on the mentorship and soft skills they would have received working alongside older colleagues in the office, who can help them advance their careers.
“They are impatient to be successful,” Eddy Ng, a professor at Bucknell University and one of the report’s authors, told Recode. “They now know the value of social capital and the need to interact with others.”
Meanwhile, more senior employees as well as managers — many of whom had been skeptical of remote work pre-pandemic — are more likely to prefer working from home. About 60 percent of business leaders said they are “thriving,” according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, while a similar percentage of Gen Z workers are only “surviving,” or struggling with well-being and mental health.
There are a bunch of reasons for the age divide.
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Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Work-from-home software proved surprisingly effective and simple for people of all ages, with 80 percent of employees in the Bucknell survey reporting that they had an easy time figuring out and using their company information and communication technology (think Zoom, Slack, Teams). Managers reported fewer distractions — namely, their underlings interrupting them at the office. Additionally, older employees are more secure in their careers. They are also more likely to have nicer, bigger, and more private home arrangements than younger people, who often have to contend with roommates or young children at home.
Indeed, half of parents with children under 18 said it was difficult to get work done without interruptions, compared with just 20 percent for people without kids at home, according to Pew. Women, who shoulder outsized responsibility for child care in addition to their jobs, have a more difficult relationship to working from home. They are much more likely to report burnout than men and have been increasingly leaving the workforce altogether, though women are also more likely than men to want to continue working from home post-pandemic. Of course, a lot of these troubles might be alleviated once the pandemic is over and other aspects of life — and child care — go back to normal.
A Slack study showed that race also affects people’s experience of working from home.
Nearly all Black knowledge workers currently working from home, some 97 percent, want a hybrid or fully remote work model, compared with 79 percent of their white counterparts, according to data from Slack’s Future Forum survey. The report posited a number of reasons, including remote work reducing the need for “code switching,” or making oneself and one’s speech fit the norms of a majority white office. Being outside the office also reduced instances of microaggressions and discrimination and improved Black employees’ ability to recover from those incidents. With remote work, Black knowledge workers reported a greater sense of belonging, a greater ability to manage work stress, and greater work-life balance than their white colleagues.
- The office will still exist, but you’ll use it differently
While many companies are downsizing their office footprints, most. are not getting rid of offices. Indeed, the office will still play an important — though different — role in people’s work.
More time in the office will be geared toward collaborative work that’s more challenging at home. Employers are also eager to revive the serendipity and problem-solving a physical office engenders — think of running into a colleague from a different department in the break room and getting her outside perspective on a task that’s tripping you up.
“We’re starting to think about the office as a tool in our toolkit for getting certain kinds of work done,” Slack’s Rayl said. “Folks come into the office a couple times a week, they have plans with colleagues to get together and brainstorm and plan collaboration in person.”
And to accommodate this type of work, the office itself will need a bit of a makeover.
Kate Lister, president of future of work consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics, expects more emphasis on shared spaces, which would be a flip from the previous configuration of the office space. Instead of offices that have typically had 80 percent personal space and 20 percent shared space, she said, 80 percent of the space going forward will be collaborative, while only 20 percent will be earmarked for people’s own use.
To aid the reconfiguration, some companies will replace people’s personal desks with “hot desks,” or space that any employee can use for private work when they’re in the office.
These trends in total are also a surprising boon for coworking companies like WeWork and Industrious. Even companies that are forgoing their own office space altogether are likely to pay for flexible office space for those times in which they do in fact need an office.
Technology in the office will also need a bit of a reboot, to accommodate meetings so that people videoconferencing in from home feel on equal footing with those in the office. This will require better video hardware and software so that at-home workers don’t feel like they’re just a box on a screen.
A whole cottage industry has popped up to make remote communication more like real-life interactions — or at least less soul-crushing than a day of Zoom calls. This ranges from cameras that follow you around the room to software that makes virtual venues more lifelike or immersive.
- Expect more AI, automation, and freelancers
Thanks to layoffs during the pandemic, many companies will have to operate with a leaner workforce than before. In turn, the remaining workers will have to rely more heavily on technology, fast-tracking existing trends toward artificial intelligence, automation and contract work.
“The introduction or acceleration of these tools should allow us to be able to handle the volume of business without having to do a lot of hiring until the economy is really booming again,” Kate Duchene, CEO of consulting firm Resources Global Professionals (RGP), told Recode.
Indeed, every time there’s an economic downturn there’s a push toward automation, since it cuts down on the very expensive cost of human labor.
“There’s little doubt that there’s been more automation this year, as financial stress coincided with better applications, and health and social distance concerns to create more demand,” Mark Muro, senior fellow and policy director at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, told Recode. He stressed that automation is not sequestered to blue-collar workers, but that office jobs are particularly in danger of automation.
Companies hoping to be more agile are also likely to outsource more work to contract and freelance workers, who they have to pay less since they’re short-term and don’t get as many benefits as employees.
“Companies said it last recession, and they’re really saying it this recession,” explained Steve King, partner at Emergent Research. “Everybody’s telling us that … we’re going to increase our use of external talent or non-employee labor.”
He added, “Once you’ve made the decision to integrate someone in remotely, whether they’re a traditional employee or not, it’s not as big a leap to then say, ‘Oh, we can hire a contractor to do that work.’”
For those of us left with jobs, we can take solace in the fact that our work might be less tedious.
Wayne Kurtzman, research director at IDC, expects workplace software to incorporate a lot more artificial intelligence and machine learning in the next five years that will help knowledge workers do their jobs with less drudgery.
“So many of us, when we work, such a big percentage is in menial tasks and not the actual valuable work,” he said. “What if we were able to automate a portion of menial tasks and spend more time on meaningful work?”
With more artificial intelligence and automation, “More barriers to work getting done will be removed so work can be done quicker, more intelligently, and possibly even more creatively.”
For instance, workplace software like Zoom and Teams already lets people transcribe meetings. What if future versions trimmed those meetings down to shorter videos or text that would be most germane to you?
- Our communication will be more asynchronous
As we move more toward a hybrid work model, don’t expect your colleagues to get back to you right away. While in an office, you can walk right up to your boss or coworker to ask a question. The creators of workplace software are hoping to make things a little different online. Specifically, to enable a remote workforce that might be scattered around the globe, they’re hoping to replace a lot of synchronous communication (in-person chats, live video, phone calls) with conversations that can happen at people’s leisure (messages, posts, recorded video).
The intention is to allow people to better concentrate than they could in the office, and to accommodate the realities of working from home.
“The companies that have navigated this the best are the ones that have figured out what’s urgent and how can we plan to make sure that fewer things are urgent,” Slack’s Rayl said. Doing so enables workers, especially parents, to make room for their lives at home, including teaching their kids or bringing them to school. “The expectation that everyone’s on all the time and everyone responds instantly is deeply unhealthy and it’s not equitable.”
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Keri Wiginton/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
As it stands, Time Is Ltd.’s Rezab says that most employees use existing communications software like Slack and Teams in a way that’s very synchronous. When people message their colleagues, they expect a quick response and they usually get it, which can be deleterious for concentration.
“Most of the current users of tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and others, treat it as synchronous communication,” Rezab said. “And I think — personal opinion — that’s wrong.” For communication to be truly asynchronous, the software will have to be better at managing people’s expectations.
Slack has been adding a number of subtle tweaks to goad people toward asynchronous communication, like putting up do not disturb notifications if people connect their calendars and are in a meeting. The company is also working on a feature that would allow asynchronous video recording so that people can add video comments to a conversation about a prototype, for example, without all having to gather in an hour-long meeting to do so.
Smaller workplace software companies like Volley and Friday are creating platforms that are meant to be inherently asynchronous, with features like pre-recorded video and allocated time for catching up.
It will also be important for companies themselves to govern how people use their workplace communications software and what’s expected of them and their response times. The vast majority of communications on Slack and Teams happen through direct messages, which many people feel compelled to respond to more quickly than, say, a post in a channel. To make sure this doesn’t feel just as pressing as a tap on the shoulder, companies need to institute guidelines that assure workers a response isn’t immediately necessary.
Unfortunately, since many companies moved to remote work so swiftly at the onset of the pandemic, they didn’t have time to put into place best practices for communicating online and working from home, Lister, from Global Workplace Analytics, said. Just because things are working okay doesn’t mean they can’t be made better.
- How our productivity is measured will change
One long-held criticism of the physical office is that metrics, like how long you spent there, mattered to management, and this assumption cultivated a system that benefited, say, young men without families, who could log more hours. Now, without as much emphasis on the actual office, the way that managers measure an employee’s success will also change.
RGP’s Duchene said the emphasis for knowledge workers has moved to output, or how much work an employee actually does.
“When I think about two years ago, how did you evaluate people in a workplace setting, it was aptitude, attitude, and attendance,” Duchene said. “Now that you don’t have those things on a daily basis, the concentration is on output.”
IDC’s Kurtzman thinks productivity metrics will be more qualitative: the outcome of production rather than the raw amount of something produced. He argued, “How much you can produce is an assembly-line metric, but doesn’t tell me how happy the customer is and if the customer will buy from you again.”
As definitions of productivity stand, the majority of workers in multiple studies say they’re just as productive or even more productive at home as they were at the office. Duchene, however, cautioned against solely looking at productivity, since that could cause other parts of work — like culture — to suffer.
“You can’t make that your priority and ignore everything else,” Duchene said.
- Culture will be harder to create
It’s much harder to make and retain a company culture when workers aren’t in the same room. And that ability has diminished as the pandemic has worn on.
“I wasn’t worried at the beginning of Covid about keeping the culture alive — we were all reaching out, everyone was so concerned about community,” said RGP’s Duchene. “Then we got in a rhythm of ‘this is here to stay’ so there’s not as much energy.”
In turn, workers have been limiting their interactions to a more core group of people — the ones they work with directly — rather than communicating with a wider range of groups that they may have in the office. And judging from onboarding metrics during the pandemic, that shift is primed to continue. The number of connections new hires make at work — inferred by time spent in small meetings and in the number of direct communications with different people — is down 17 percent compared with pre-pandemic, according to data from Time Is Ltd.
“It’s been a good thing for productivity, a bad thing for culture,” Duchene said.
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David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Without interactions with a wide range of people at your company, company culture suffers since people aren’t exposed to the same set of behaviors and values.
There have been some unexpected consequences as well. It’s notable, for example, that being physically separate from management has led to a spike in people reporting their employers for white-collar malfeasance. And the lack of cultural cohesion has implications for how the business operates.
“This will create silos in the business, massive silos,” Time Is Ltd.’s Rezab said, which can contribute to groupthink and can hinder progress. “The company gets things done by collaborating cross-functionally,” Rezab said.
To rectify this, management will have to be more intentional with connecting people across the organization, rather than just their direct colleagues. So far it’s been difficult to mimic online the culture-building that happens in person.
- We’re more human at work
You don’t come out of seeing your coworkers — and their living rooms and their babies and their pets — in the middle of a global pandemic without getting a little closer to them. And such closeness makes people happier and better at work.
The pandemic did a good job of humanizing people, not only because we saw more of their interior lives but because we worked with them while going through something immense.
“It was in fact a shared experience, but it was also coping with the shared experience together. It was people helping each other do it better,” IDC’s Kurtzman said. “That technology actually made us more human is a fascinating thought.”
Indeed, one in six people reported crying with a coworker this year, according to Microsoft’s study, and nearly one in three say they are more likely to be their authentic selves at work than last year. About 40 percent said they were less embarrassed when their home life showed up at work compared to how things used to be. All of these interactions correlate with a better sense of well-being, higher productivity, and more positive perceptions of work, according to the study.
Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. It’s easier to misinterpret text than it is in-person communication, and a lot more of our conversations are happening that way.
As such, we’ve become increasingly reliant on emoji to convey what we’re trying to say.
On Slack, emoji usage jumped a whopping 80 percent since the onset of the pandemic when we shifted to remote work, according to the company. According to a survey commissioned by Slack, the five most popular remote work emoji are the face with tears of joy, red heart, thumbs up, rolling on the floor laughing, and smiling face with heart eyes.
- More of your colleagues will live somewhere else
As more people can work from anywhere, more people will. There’s been more than a five-fold increase in the number of remote job postings on LinkedIn compared with last year. And nearly half of workers said they’re planning to move now that they can work remotely, according to both the Microsoft survey and one from Owl Labs.
This has the potential to reverse a decades-long move toward big cities.
“The shift to the big cities has been decelerated,” Emergent Research’s King said, “because at least in the near term — the next three to five years — location won’t matter as much.”
Already rents have plunged in big cities like New York and San Francisco, while climbing in second- and third-tier cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. In turn, industries built up alongside major office worker cities could struggle.
For those knowledge workers who move, this is a chance for more freedom in where they live and the chance to enjoy a higher standard of living than they had when tethered to big expensive cities. For employers, this means access to a wider range of talent than can be found in the city they’re headquartered in.
It’s one of the many changes the pandemic has wrought on office work.
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Ten Americans on the products and behaviors they won’t bring into the next chapter of their lives.
Last fall, as I prepared to downsize for a cross-country move, I found myself performing a pandemic-era KonMari ritual of my own.
Sitting on the floor of my room surrounded by a mountain of relics from my past, I tried to imagine myself on the other side of the pandemic. Holding a Kate Spade purse, its leather faded and limp from years of wear, I was overtaken by a feeling of alienation.
In many ways, the girl who’d bought that bag had become a stranger to me. She wore heels to the office and still ascribed to the Gospel of Girl Boss. She’d actually thought the 70-percent-off designer office wear she bought at TJ Maxx would buy her clout in the corporate world. It wasn’t just the purse. Suddenly a closet full of blazers and sheath dresses looked like a hall of artifacts from a bygone era.
Working from home was part of it, of course, but there was also a deeper disillusionment with the kinds of things I’d been taught to want and the kind of society that upheld them. Amid economic recession, vast inequality, and nationwide suffering, items meant to convey status (as impostering as mine ever was) felt more tasteless and wasteful than ever.
The lack of social influence had also distilled my own tastes and desires to become more my own. I didn’t know which style of jeans were in, so I just wore the ones I liked. On weekends, when I was feeling particularly down, I dressed up in outfits for myself alone, noticing they were much bolder and brighter than anything I used to wear in public.
There were other things too. My stack of apocalypse novels, once my preferred genre, seemed redundant if not repulsive against the backdrop of the daily news. I found it hard to believe that I’d once refused to go to the corner store without a coat of mascara. I made a resolution to stop plugging my ears with headphones every time I made an outing, wanting to never take those little daily public interactions for granted again.
As a pinprick of light finally starts to glimmer at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel, items will be jettisoned from our lives as a result of this transformative year, both naturally and by choice. Many people I’ve talked to say they will embrace the mellower, more comfortable norms of the socially distant lifestyle. Others, however, anticipate ricocheting in the opposite direction, choosing maximalism in all aspects of life to get as far away from this traumatic year as possible. But everyone, in one way or another, is leaving something — and some part of themselves — behind.
These responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Foundation
Claire, Los Angeles
Before the pandemic, I did not leave the house without foundation. I couldn’t stand the pinkness of my face, and I had really bad adult acne until a few years ago. Men on the street would often ask me about it or make fun of me. I felt embarrassed to be out in the world without makeup.
For a long time, I refused to have mirrors in my house. Now I’m on Zoom all the time, and before I discovered hide self-view I was constantly seeing my own face. For the first time it was like, “Yeah, I’m a pink person. So what?” It just seemed so insignificant suddenly. My appearance, the idea of having my face perceived by other people, started to feel so much less fragile. We were all just little faces on the screen.
I think there’s still fun to be had with makeup. There’s a big difference between a statement lip or black eyeliner — the kind of makeup that’s about being more expressive — and the kind of makeup that’s meant for hiding your face.
Nonlocal shopping
Patricia, Brooklyn
All this excess that people have been chasing … Now the pandemic has forced us into thinking, “Why do we need all of these things?” Now, less is more. I really believe the pandemic is going to change the way we shop. I want people to start buying locally. All the books and clothes that I sell in my store are recyclables. They’re either from thrift shops or donations or finds. Why do I have to go to the source when there’s so much that’s already out there?
I’ve met a lot of people this year in my shop who probably never would have spoken to me before. People were so self-absorbed that they didn’t really engage. Now people share. We all get to learn about each other, which is something I think we as Americans need to do, because then we’ll see how much we have in common — and how together we can create something better. We need to stop with the “me, me, me” attitude, which has not led to anything good. I really believe that the country is changed, or is about to. I think the days of spend, spend, spend and buy, buy, buy, whether we need it or not, are over. I think it’s time for people to rethink, “Where do we go from here?”
Apple Watch
Tobias, Oakland
I took off my Apple Watch at the beginning of the pandemic, and it seems doubtful that I’ll put it back on. I’m multitasking less. Usually if someone’s texting me, it’s not an urgent, “What time are we meeting up?” and it can wait until I’m done with whatever I’m doing. Overall, I’m responding to people a lot slower, which is sometimes good and sometimes feels rude.
It was also very useful while commuting, which I’m not doing anymore. Even as I’ve gotten back into exercising, I’m less inclined to want the whole gamified, “Good job! You burned X calories every day this week!” aspect. It’s an accessory for a version of me that wanted a faster-paced life, and I think I just want that less now.
Alcohol
Ottavia, Los Angeles
My birthday was on March 16, the day things started to get really serious in Los Angeles last year. My partner and I bought a bottle of wine to celebrate, and that’s when I realized that drinking only made me feel so much worse about an already bad situation. Then everything slowed down, especially socially. There wasn’t that much reason to drink, so I stopped.
It was a completely personal thing for me. I know that for other people it can be a comfort, or a part of their routine they don’t want to give up, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. I just know that I feel better mentally, emotionally, and physically. Saving money is a big part of it, too.
I’ve been to small get-togethers and even then I haven’t really wanted to drink. I can have just as nice a time without it.
Sweatpants
Annie, Providence, Rhode Island
When we were all sent home from college last spring, I wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt for a week and a half. I just couldn’t bring myself to change my clothes. But then as quarantine kept going, I started to push myself to wear things that would make me feel cute.
Now they have me living in a hotel nearby, so whenever I go up to campus it’s kind of an event. I like to wear funky stuff. Anything with a bit more personality, a print, or bright colors. Walking up the hill is my runway now.
The chance to dress up is something I took for granted when I was at school before the pandemic. I would wear sweats to class. I’ll have higher standards for myself now that my time in college has been cut in half. What’s the point of going out and not fully enjoying yourself? For me, getting dressed up is part of that.
Going to bed late
Tori, Houston
I have never been a morning person. I used to stay up until midnight or 1 am and was always my most creative and energetic at night. Then this year I got a new remote job that started at 6:30 am. I was still staying up until 11, and then I’d be a nonfunctioning human until 9 am, which just wasn’t working. Then I read that article in the Cut that says the best time to go to sleep is 8:45, so I started taking melatonin at 8 and passing out before 9.
I not only got so much more work done, I [also] felt like my days were fuller. I got to see the sunrise. I started making these elaborate breakfasts. And going to bed made me so happy! Now if I go out to eat with a friend, I can be more confident in saying I’m not gonna have another drink and going home. I have a bedtime now, and I really do not see that stopping.
It has actually made me more in control of my behavior during the day. I feel calmer, more at peace. Now I‘m most creative in the morning. I have way more energy, and an hour after I wake up, I’m ready to roll. It’s shifted my entire nature. I look back at my pre-pandemic self and she seems like a child! This year, as horrible as it’s been, has been an opportunity to experiment with things we never would have otherwise. It’s shown me who I want to be and what I want for myself — not on a grand scale, necessarily, but every day.
My gym membership
Charlie, Los Angeles
I am going to leave behind my gym membership, which seems like the opposite of what a lot of people are going to do, but I just realized that gyms are a cesspool of germs and a waste of money. I bought myself a set of parallel bars instead to use at home. If I want to exercise, I shouldn’t hold myself hostage by paying for a membership. I should just get my ass out of bed and work out.
Kate, Longmont, Colorado
I used to use Instagram a lot when I was actually doing things — visiting friends, going on work trips, doing things with my spouse. It was like I was telling the world, “Look at what this says about me!” I’ve been asking myself why I never feel inclined to put any part of my life into a semipublic forum anymore.
My last Instagram post was a picture of me and my chicken, the last week of March 2020. Now, it’s like, what am I gonna show you, a picture of the 34 hats I knitted in 2020? This weird cocktail I made up? My dogs? I just didn’t care anymore about broadcasting my life. It made me realize that curating this grid for a bunch of people you don’t know that well was always pretty meaningless.
The moment it really changed for me was during the Black Lives Matter protests in June. So many people used Instagram as this virtue-signaling tool. On one hand, it’s like, yes, every person should be active in this movement. On the other hand, so many of those people were the same people who went on vacation to Mexico in October. They went to one protest and haven’t worked for any significant change since. Then they’re going on this very same app to showcase activities that actively put lives in danger.
I only have so much energy in a day. Now I want to put that energy and effort I used to put into Instagram into actively engaging with the world and the people I care about.
Airport lounge passes
Katharina, Atlanta
If I can, I’ll always travel as much as humanly possible. The pass has always been worth it in the past, especially with a baby in tow. But I suspect prices will go up — the airlines will have to get their lost revenue somehow — and travel now is just weird. Buffets at lounges are questionable, and how quickly will we be comfortable with a packed lounge? Things will be odd for a good while. Plus, several countries will have tight border restrictions for another year minimum, I’m sure. Travel will not be easy, fast, or cheap in the foreseeable future. So I may well give it up for at least a year or two. I remain hopeful it won’t be longer.
In-person first dates
Sarah, New York
There are so many advantages to a remote first date. I can see if they actually look like their pictures, we can see if we have a connection, it requires minimal makeup, I can throw on a cute top with sweatpants, and it takes 45 minutes. You have much more control over the environment and the situation that you don’t feel like you need a drink. There’s no risk involved. When I do decide to leave my house, it’s not for the possibility of something, it’s for something real.
I’ll definitely keep doing things this way post-pandemic. As you get older, carving out time to date takes more of a commitment. It’s about prioritizing my own time, deciding what’s worth the effort and what isn’t.