The loneliness of A Room of One’s Own | Hacker News Reader

The loneliness of A Room of One’s Own

newrepublic.com

58 pointsprismatic16 comments

The loneliness of a home office - and everything in the article would be equally true

Yeah, how could anyone forget Woolf's legendary sequel "A House Office of One's Own"

I thought my coworkers were insane during covid, living in their home offices and moving to the outer suburbs. My bosses office was literally his bedroom closet, and he would go entire days without seeing light.^ Maybe taking prescribed speed every day helped with the loneliness. When covid hit I moved into a house with 5 other people and got a job working at a factory. I realized the only person who would get me the social time I require is me.

^ I know this because it snowed 6 inches in Seattle and he was unaware until the next day

Everyone is different. Living with five strangers or even anyone who is more distant than a super-close near-lifelong friend (my assumption - apologies beforehand if I’m wrong) sounds like a nightmare to me.

Completely understood. Im an electrician now, Covid made me realize how much more social I was than my coworkers

It's endlessly interesting to me that despite the fact that the modern educated middle class are overwhelmingly left wing and dominate the "cultural sphere" (because they can afford to), there's still a reluctance to really talk about class and their own position in the class system in favour of lip service supporting minorities and marketable individual identities. Originally the struggles of the labour class and gaining support and solidarity from those that had more wealth and opportunities was the most central core concern of the left wing. It's probably also the primary reason for the rise of reactionary right wing parties.

> reluctance to really talk about class and their own position in the class system in favour of lip service

That's by design, obvs.

Writing can be the output of the labor class.

That might be true in your experience, but in the UK, issues of class were a huge part of cultural life throughout the 80s and 90s, with people like Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach etc.

If you've never seen any of this, I would recommend "Kes" as a great place to start, also "Abigail's Party" as a satire of noveau-riche middle class aspiration, and "High Hopes" as a very moving examination of class aspiration and clashes of beliefs about social mobility in Thatcher's Britain.

> issues of class were a huge part of cultural life throughout the 80s and 90s

Yes, and this is much less the case now. Changes to the economics of culture have closed a lot of doors. As well as the massive expansion of university, which magically conveys "middle class" status on people even if they are still heavily indebted wage slaves.

Lurking under a lot of this stuff are two nasty questions:

- whether the word "white" is attached to "working class", even invisibly

- whether people who are retired count as "working class", even if they are property owners with private pensions

Classism may have diminished, but the subjugation of the working classes via abhorrences like "the gig economy" are almost Victorian in their draconian bureaucracy and dehumanisation. These are most ably depicted in Ken Loach's scathing critique Sorry We Missed You (2019), or Roddy Doyle's Rosie (2018).

Left is talking about those and pushing for those. It just does not matter what left does, only thing that does matter in many peoples minds (like yours) is what right wing says bout left.

> It's probably also the primary reason for the rise of reactionary right wing parties.

Can we stop whitewashing their motivations constantly and blaming them constantly on the left? No it is not reason for that. Plus, your definition of labor must be quite ... selective aesthetic based to arrive to "it is about labor" conclusion.

It's hard to say someone is "left wing" unless their main political lens is class. That's really the absolute minimum requirement to be considered "left wing" IMO.

That relative who dutifully donates to the SPLC, asks you your pronouns at Thanksgiving, and has an AOC 2028 bumper sticker? They're a Liberal. They have bourgeois, Liberal values. They can be valuable allies in a left coalition, but they are fundamentally not interested in class struggle, or possibly even find it abhorrent, and can be equally at home in a right coalition with race chauvinists and concentration camp boosters.

https://archive.ph/2026.03.16-124144/https://newrepublic.com...

The title is clickbait, unfortunately.

Jonah,

How? She literally builds the case that one hundred years later there is more work to do and that Wolfe’s prescience only went so far. It’s a salient continuation.

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