Malcolm Gladwell slams working from home: ‘What have you reduced your life to?’

This smacks of so much privelidge. As a food service worker who had no choice but to continue working through the pandemic, exposing myself to much unnecessary danger and general unpleasantness in dealing woth the public, I am offended. Anyone able to isolate during this time should have done so. If everyone had, we wouldn't still be in this mess.

“As we face the battle that all organizations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary.”

Fun fact: feeling necessary is unrelated to the location in which we do our work. If you want us to feel necessary, then give us responsibilities and show genuine appreciation when we fulfill them. Let us contribute our own ideas and let them manifest so we feel like more than a tool to be used for your profits. THAT is how you make employees feel necessary, not by treating them the same way in a different building.

“I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live? Don’t you want to feel part of something?”

You know what I feel part of when I come into the office? A corporate entity run by people with skewed priorities. I'd much rather be comfortable while working for those skewed priority folks.

“If we don’t feel like we’re part of something important, what’s the point? If it’s just a paycheck, then it’s like what have you reduced your life to?”

Again, this has NOTHING to do with the location of work, and EVERYTHING to do with its content. Your job becomes "just a paycheck" when you no longer enjoy it and no longer feel useful. That has NOTHING to do with whether you're working from an office desk or your living room couch. It's about WHAT you're doing, not WHERE you're doing it.

I say all this as someone who is burned out at work, no longer fulfilled, and starting the first steps towards a full career change -- and who has recently been threatened with unemployment (read: potential poverty) unless I abandon WFH entirely and come into the office 5 days a week. Literally, "next time you WFH, you may be immediately terminated." So now I'm in the office every day, and guess what? I feel just as burned out, the job feels just as pointless, only now I'm additionally frustrated by being threatened by corporate overlords.

Mr. Gladwell, with all the respect earned by the thing you've said in this article: fuck you, you have no clue what you're talking about.

So, Malcolm, do you work in an office? I thought not. Maybe, just maybe, people don't get their sense of belonging and self-worth from a corporation.

Can't say that I get a sense of "Feeling like something bigger" from whatever work it is that I am being paid for. Rather, what I am paid for allows me to do the work that makes me feel like I can be a part of something larger. The work, in other words, is just an annoying stepping stone.

As a Data Scientist working at a Publicly Listed Company I've really started to feel siloed and alienated by WFH. I think that my colleagues feel the same, but they just don't voice it. Shameless plug but, I wrote a blog post about it on my personal website here: https://michaelgv.uk/posts/2022/08/what-tech-workers-dont-un...

“If it’s just a paycheck, then it’s like what have you reduced your life to?”

But Malcolm, everyone is comfortable just being a wage whore now. A few years back, you’d have accused us of being in denial.