I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.
Sometimes I just want to be at home to do deep thinking without anyone bothering me.
Sometimes the weather makes it so I don't leave the house.
Just let me decide where I work from.
I think the thing people miss about RTO is that management are more likely to be extroverted. They’re the kind of people who thrive on being surrounded by people. I don’t think RTO is as nefarious as people here make out - it’s just extroverts wanting to mold the workplace to for them.
That makes them bad managers, but not necessarily bad people.
But what if they can't? The options aren't great:
1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.
2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.
3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.
With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.
RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.
Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.
I don’t think it’s the be-all end-all explanation, but the shoe fits.
Those meme-level DITL and older hustle culture stuff are two completely different things, targeting different audiences, and using different methods, so it makes sense that people would have two different reactions to them, even if you think both of them are stupid?
Are there any reports of someone moving their company from WFH to full RTO in order to get women writ large to leave their company? I think it's much more likely that capital owners just want their building full so they don't lose their investments, business owners and executives don't like WFH for various reasons including the extremely overblown risk of overemployment, managers on average want to micromanage and find it easier in-office, and there's no public health backstop to justify WFH like there was 5 years ago.
Separately but related, I don't think there's anything wrong with a factory worker getting paid $18/hr watching someone spread 2 hours of work over 7 hours in the office with two catered meals plus snacks and making jokes about "email jobs" not being real. I probably watched all the DITL things that went truly viral and the comments were never any more sexist than any other viral video on the internet.
You know what else is socially conservative?
RTO makes relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family more difficult. It discourages career building which, because of the patriarchy and our history, is going to primarily affect women.
Sexism and misogyny is actually very complicated. It's built-in to just about every system that exists in America. It's not the sort of simple "woman bad" some people think. It's the choices we make when we design structures. It's part of our DNA, it's not a symptom.
(That being said, this isn't an excuse to be an absentee, deadbeat dad. Traditionally, most people lived in villages, living agrarian lives. Family life was much more involved. That meant both parents were generally present throughout the day. And with age, the fatherly role becomes increasingly important for development. The strict division of mom-in-suburban-home/dad-away-at-urban-office is hardly traditional or representative of historical realities.)
Not on all dimensions, of course. People with kids e.g. will have to find a solution for who gets to work how much, it's a similar conflict WFH addresses partly at best.
Doctors can find a clinic to work at nearly anywhere. If their partner needs to move they can go with.
If both can WFH, they can even choose the place they want to live in regardless of where their optimal employment options are based.
I enjoy sitting on the tram/bus, reading a book and getting into the "work time now" mindset. Having half an hour to relax, look at the scenery, the people, and so on, is always nice.
> getting into the "work time now" mindset
This is actually the reason I never liked WFH. I don't want to be in the work mindset at home, it degrades my ability to relax at home.
Commute "distance" is definitely measured in minutes and not kilometers.
Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.