I couldn't get over the amount of time lost to commuting. Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result. The time most people spend commuting, I spend going on hikes with my dog in a forest or working out. For those who lack social activities as a result of working from home I suggest making friends to go out with or join activities that are positively minded towards strangers chatting, like indoor bouldering, which is my workout of choice, and every workout session is always filled with great conversations and fun.
I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that.
Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever.
So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of reading time (or podcast time, if I were driving in) which realistically would not materialize any other way.
I think many dads that are my fellow commuters see the commute as a sort of sacred solo space that's hard to maintain otherwise (eg the unspoken etiquette is if you see someone you know on the train you don't sit next to them so they can have their peace and quiet)
I understand your point completely, as I used to feel the same way in the past. Then I realized it's just that being forced to do a commute for work makes it OK to potentially put extra load on your spouse, or to leave your kids with some other caretaker, but this doesn't have to be this way. It should be fine to take some time if you need it even if there's no job-related reason behind it.
So now both my wife and myself take time for ourselves to get that decompression time when needed.
haha, when the weather is really bad, the bathroom with the lights off and headphones is great. Growing up with a single bathroom, a multi-bathroom home is just amazing.
I do wonder if having a single bathroom as a child played any part in my reasonably good grasp of concurrency control though!
Sounds like your wife needs to be more accommodating or understanding. My spouse understands decompression time and enables it, despite me working remotely.
Come on! Who is forcing whom here? Women traditionally bear many child-rearing duties and it's the "unemployed" spouse, whatever their sex, who stays at home to do household chores, and that's the way it is.
If anyone's forcing anyone, it's the employer and "the system" that conspire to force people into cars and onto the road for far too much of the workday. I didn't have children, but when I lived with family, friends, or significant other, I felt robbed. I felt robbed by my career because the commute was unpaid time, off-the-clock, where I was denied the time to be present, at home, with my loved ones, or doing chores, or hobbies. So, I was robbed; I wasn't forcing my girlfriend to cook or clean or be alone. I didn't have the agency to make that decision: it is made for me and all men like me.
When I drove a car, at least the commute was as fast as possible. When I ride public transit on a commute, the times become ungodly, and they truly eat away at your unpaid free time! At least public transit costs pennies compared to maintaining and driving a car!
Wives and mothers deserve some alone-time. It's incumbent on the husband to carve this out so that she doesn't burn out. It's incumbent on fathers to make time, quality time, for their children. But it's even more incumbent on these couples to earn money, do chores, and put in the work for raising their children. That's why we've got schools, because they step in and do the childcare, in loco parentis, and hopefully children have extended families that also participate in those duties.
I am materially not a morning person. I will push until the last second in the morning to get ready. Forcing myself to wake up an hour earlier to drive in, get my coffee and let it percolate did wonders for my morning productivity. WFH lacks that so instead I got a dog which makes me get up at the ass crack but it's still not like a good mental workout of commuting in rush hour on i95 in a 80's sedan
Yes, and somehow commuting week after week is so much better than having a conversation with your wife. It's not like the kids just stop existing when you're commuting. The solution is there, but it can't be used unless you're suffering.
> Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable.
That assumes you can meaningfully decompress. In a car, it's almost impossible (or at the very least, reckless) if you are the driver, and on most crowded stop-and-go routes even as a passenger. In any kind of public transit you have to deal with anything from rowdy children over beggars, drunks, thieves and other undesirables to keeping up with the latest construction BS and delays. Basically the only thing left is biking or walking, but that only works out on specific routes (i.e. well built sidewalks and separate, wide bike lanes)...
I found public transit commuting to be quite peaceful most days. The rowdy children happened infrequently enough that they were often a nice change of pace, and the "drunks and thieves and undesirables" simply didn't happen with a 9-5 commute. The worst part indeed was the random delays from construction, but on those days, car traffic was also crawling.
I did the math during COVID. I was putting in about 30% more hours when I had to go to an office, and all of them were unproductive. I wasn't being paid any extra to do that - which was especially unfair since I also had additional wear and tear on the car, lunches out, fancier clothes to buy, etc.
I may go back to the office someday if I'm forced to, but I won't do it for free. Companies need to compensate in office employees not just for the extra work, but for the expense.
Now I use some of those extra hours for the company, and some to work on my side projects. It's glorious. I'm both more productive at work and happier than I've ever been. I also don't get sick when all the cube-dwellers do a few times per year.
For me, I take the bus to work, so my commute time is spent on pleasant things like reading library books, or working through Chinese lessons on my phone, or just looking out the window, or occasionally chatting with other commuters. I actually enjoy my commute, it's some nice time set aside entirely for myself each day.
If I had to be stuck in a car for my commute, I'd definitely resent it.
Being in a disease-ridden tuna can that is often filled to the brim so you don't even get a seat is not exactly something that I would call pleasant. My friends who commute to work via public transport get sick multiple times per year, I don't.
I feel the same way about my bus commute. Strange tangent, but I also donate plasma once a month and it's perfect for reading a book because there's literally nothing else you can do for the 45 minutes or so that the donation takes.
Doing good, enforced reading time, plus free snacks. What's not to love? (other than the vein spiking, for some people).
It’s not time lost to commuting. For some people, without the structure of a workday imposed by commuting, they devolve into doing other time-wasting activities. In fact the author said without this commute they would “be on my phone/on Reddit/read HN comments all day/etc.” From this light, a commute doesn’t cause any more time to be lost, but rather it restricts the amount of time lost to be the commute itself, rather than the entire workday. This is something I’m seen very often in people who are dissatisfied with WFH. They lose focus, lose the sense of time, and waste the entire day without the commute.
> Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result.
They have to find a job that allows them to do that, and such jobs are increasingly difficult to find.
Where I'm based, even though it might be the smallest startup that could save a good bit by getting rid of their office costs if they gave people WFH, they won't.
I've been in multiple car accidents this year, none of them my fault. Commuting might actually be the death of me, I can't express to a future employer how much I'm willing to trade just to not have to do it anymore. Doesn't help that I deal with some of the worst traffic in America...
I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train.
Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.
I commuted into the city a few days a week for about 18 months quite a while back. I'd normally take the train unless I were doing something in the evening at which point the commuter rail timetable didn't work very well.
Yes, it was better than driving but still wasn't that great. I had to catch the train at about 6:30 AM. And it was still a good 3 hours on the train any given day. Wasn't really very relaxing and I never found it an environment conducive to getting real work done.
I lived in the Toronto area for ~20 years. I could commute by car in anywhere form 1-1.5 hours each way, OR, drive 30 minutes to a train station and spend 5-10 minutes looking for parking, wait 10 minutes to board, take an hour to get downtown, then walk for 10-15 minutes, then do that in reverse, plus $18 dollars a day for a train ticket. So 4 hours a day by train or 2-3 hours a day by car.
Yeah, I'm more like you. I also agree with "to each their own" and like that we're so different that someone like the author enjoys going to an office and struggles with phone/device usage when working from home, and others like us prefer remote work.
To me, it's not just the commute. I actually prefer working from home. I enjoyed his description of Miyazaki greeting the ghosts though, I think I could work from an office if it was my studio, but I'd want it to be very close to my home.
Remote work also makes it possible for me to follow my natural "productivity cycle," which means I often get to work until late in the evening while still being able to have dinner with my family and then just have a short commute to my bedroom when they're (usually) already asleep. I did late-night (and even all-night) work too from offices when I was young, but it's one thing to do that in your very early 20s and with only your parents as family, than as an almost 50 with a spouse and kids.
As for enshittification defenses, besides having a family (including cats, used to have a dog too), having musical instruments within reach is great for when I need a quick break. Some breaks can also involve devices and still not be about dopamine, like when I reach out for my personal laptop to open renoise. Lately I've also taken up drawing a bit. I suck at it, but I still enjoy the activity.
I agree on the benefits of social activities. My workout of choice is weightlifting and I do have regulars that I talk to (plus for some exercises you really do need someone around if you want to safely get to your breaking point).
The one thing I miss from my youth days is social music playing. I hope I'll get back to that someday, but everybody's life is busy in different ways and, unlike getting together for coffee or beer, getting together to play music does require a bigger logistical effort and time budget. While I wait for the opportunity to arise, playing along to records is an OK way to get by.
During the course of my sorry career, beginning in college in fact, my minimum commute time was 20 minutes. I had some commutes that were much longer and complex.
Driving a motor vehicle was perhaps an opportunity for focus and solitude, but the act of driving itself is too active, too demanding, to be zen or deeply contemplative. The most I could do was rock out to a custom mixtape or the radio, and ignore my troubles.
One commute was across a treacherous mountain pass with switchbacks and deadly fog. I once deliberately caused an accident there on the highway. I once came six inches from wrapping myself and my Integra around a pine tree. I don't miss driving to work.
Later in life, when I was denied ownership of a vehicle, I commuted by public transit. This could be heaven or this could be hell. If there was a disturbance or complication on the bus, it was a daily trauma and I arrived at my destination as a triggered, frazzled, bundle of nerves. If the voyage was uneventful, I truly had a chance to space out, watch the scenery, and arrive relaxed and calm.
Nowadays, I'm more likely to use a taxi or a rideshare. Waymo is the calmest and most efficient transport for solitude and silence. But taxis travel very fast, and being rushed is not conducive to contemplation. So, I do try to mix in some public transit wherever possible, and during those times, I pray it's on the uneventful side.
This was a very pleasant read. There's (justifiably) a lot of debate about AI prose on this forum, which has become tiring. It's refreshing to read something so grounded. Doubly so while looking at a packet of Belvita breakfast biscuits on my own desk.
As far as lo-fi goes, I must recommend Leavv. Mind Garden and Tales of a Flowing Forest. Both pre-AI music albums that are lovely to work/study to.
To each their own of course, but I personally don’t get the point of avoiding AI music when what you’re listening to (lofi beats) is essentially elevator background tier noise anyway. I listen to various types of it all the time and I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between AI or not in this genre.
Listening to Tokyo Echo Sounds right now, is it AI? Probably, but how tf would I even know if I did care?
There’s the chance that you notice patterns emerging that become quite grating after listening to it for awhile, in the same way that LLMs tend to have subtle but eventually noticeable patterns in writing. Some people care, some don’t.
Will that be the case for the music that you are listening to that’s generated by AI, maybe? Maybe not?
By highlighting that the music predates generative AI, at least that’s something that you won’t have to think about.
At least, that’s how I read it. It’s like a ‘no artificial sweeteners’ label on a drink.
Couldn't it just be a moral thing? Ie "This thing was trained on the work of people it's now replacing and I think that sucks". (NB I'm not looking to get into an argument about the actual impact of these kinds of small moral stances)
I’ve been talking about this a lot on here. It’s because the product isn’t the audio file going into your ears. It’s the process that got it into that audio file. It’s knowing someone was passionate enough to put something together for others to hear. It’s knowing that someone out there in the world made this thing you’re getting beamed into your ears. It’s the soul of the thing that makes the difference.
Clinically, that doesn’t matter. However to a listener who is being intentional, it most definitely matters.
For one, I think AI music is ontologically evil and have extreme opinions on the matter.
More than that though, I completely disagree that anything I'd ever choose to listen to is elevator tier / background noise. Just because it is playing while other things are happening does not mean it never receives focus or active listening.
AI music makes my head feel like I'm wearing noise cancelling headphones. That sort of weird 'pressure' sensation. It's as if even the silent bits are still pushing on my eardrums. I can spot it instantly and I hate it.
Gemini speculated that it might have to do with the AI not mimicking the audios phase properly.
I agree if it's clearly labeled. I like lofi or vaporwave or neo 80s beats for a while. But I definitely don't want it mixed with any genre that has vocals or mixed with human produced music.
It's interesting that this article is mostly focused on the merits of living a simple / predictable life, whereas I get the impression that the main improvement here might be just not working from home anymore (I guess the author agrees since they link to this older post: https://mrmarket.bearblog.dev/remote-work-is-bad-for-you/).
Like the author, I enjoyed wfh for some time, but also found this creeping crushing loneliness settling on my brain after some years. My solution was to find a co-working space that actually has a community (most spaces are just places to rent a desk). It's helped me set up a routine and get some water cooler talk in a few times a week.
But more importantly, through the community I've met some new friends, so my social life blew up. Now I rely less on the co-working space and more on meeting with the new friend group for sports and debates.
It's been an adventure in finding out what makes me tick and finding ways of addressing it in healthy ways.
Nice! Any tips for finding spaces like that? I guess it's mostly finding coworking spaces that are focused around a specific discipline (I know there are a few gamedev ones for example) so that you already have a lot in common?
But taking comfort in activities that deliver small drips of dopamine slowly instead of a truckload of it instantly is helping me a lot, I think
Would be pretty interesting to figure out if the amount of dopamine really is smaller. I'm not convinced.
But anyway: the bigger picture I've been wondering a lot about lately is whether this dopamine addiction is ok to begin with. I've never had much issues with the 'truckloads' OP names but all things considered my life is basically a journey from one dopamine shot (coffee ritual, sport, problem solving, sex, music, drugs) to the next and everything in between feels not too interesting. And I'm fearful for what's going to happen when I can't do some of those anymore when getting older.
Yeah starting to feel the need to play Defense here too. Especially on YouTube. Even with a subscribe driven flow of known creators it’s getting bad. Everything is about something negative with emotive thumbnails and clickbait titles even from the better creators. And Google has now crammed their unwanted “relevant for you” along with shorts into the top of the subscribe feed. So now even that last trick to get a non algo feed is infested.
It’s rapidly getting unusable even with Adblock etc
There's a nice extension called unhook which blocks a ton of the YouTube trash, you can configure it to hide different things. At this point, they only thing I see on YouTube is a search box and my subscriptions.
Now that Shorts removed the dislike button it seems to have gone to complete shit. I used to get shorts that were obviously a bit engagement-bait but also relevant and interesting. Now it's just 100% engagement slop and there's no way to give negative feedback. I tried "liking" everything that wasn't slop - made no difference.
Having a routine itself is incredibly useful to me as well. On my WFH days I don’t have a routine so my time devolves into something amorphous, resulting in me spending time without fully understanding where the time gets spent. Having a routine changes that. When you do things consistently on a schedule, you become more aware of time itself. For the same reason, a commute by train is better than a commute by car or by bike because the train forces a schedule.
I like the idea of a fixed 3pm tea time. This is another fun way to inject more structure into the passing of time. I’m going to try it.
I've been wfh for about 5 years now. I go to a nearby coworking space with a dedicated desk. It's the best compromise for separating home and work-life.
I remember years ago my office had an issue and I worked from a cafe. It was so relaxing. I asked my boss at the time and he freaked out and that was the end of that.
The worst feeling of working in an office is feeling like you have to be there when you're not doing anything. That's outside of the commute.
This was a beautiful read. I work from home 100% but I do enjoy occasional trips into the office to see people in 3D. I completely relate to the decompression time of the commute - I used to have a 20 minute bus ride (no transfers) which was perfect.
Saving my brain from attention fracture via smartphone is a big theme for me right now as well. That's a whole other effort, but I appreciate the use of workday routine as a countermeasure against phone addiction.
> Approach the impossibly tall black glass that is my office building. Badge in. A dozen or so floors later, step off the elevator and swing into the day: say hi to coworkers, settle into my cubicle, plug into monitors, sip coffee, gradually get subsumed by unstoppable vibrancy of caffeine high, and we're off to the races.
Every part of his day except for this part was awesome. Family, Train ride, etc... But the glass building and cubicle. I'm desperately trying to get out of knowledge work and into something else. Enshittification is knowledge work now. I would rather be in an excavator digging footings.
I have a "rich" life outside of work - guitar, gardening, prairie restoration, gym 3 times a week, dogs, and I work security or bartend 1 event per week (typically music).
I can only have this "rich" life outside of work because I don't commute to an office daily.
But we're all different. Kudos to the poster for a good read and for finding something that works for them.
I was about to say something similar: OP talks about how in office days support their routine but adding the office to my day would do more to disrupt a routine than solidify it. As of right now my workdays, despite being WFH, are shockingly rigid in their form. Wake up, coffee, weightlifting and a podcast, start work, coffee break around 1030, lunch at noon with wifey, back to work until the afternoon doldrums set it, then exercise bike to try to force some oxygen up above my shoulders, then finish out the day, then dinner. Adding everything that an in-office day entails would mean developing two routines, one for office days and one for wfh days, and also that the number of ways that my routine could be disrupted on office days going up significantly. I'm not here to prescribe my way of life for everyone, I'm actually quite strange, but I do think that it's important to point out that there are ways to get the stability that people thrive on in WFH situations or in the office.
> These exercises in slight discomfort tolerance throughout the day increase my defense against going full vegetable...
As much as I absolutely wanted to veg out doing full WFH, I saw the light and was inevitably forced to do the same.
I was enjoying a social life that revolved around drinking and staying out late. It caught up with me in the form of some mild health symptoms, but it caused significant anxiety.
I was suddenly hyper aware of the damage I was doing and had to drop the bad habits. I'm doing much better now, but can only wonder in horror what that very well-traveled road looked like. Many generations before me would have grit their teeth and suffered under that inescapable inertia for decades.
The symptoms that come with obesity, drinking, and a terrible diet like an elevated A1C, high cholesterol, hypertension, etc. are easy to ignore when you are stuck running the hamster wheel to earn a living. I had to admit they weren't just temporary from the hangover anymore and could become permanent.
I'm very thankful I got to turn things around in private without the office peer pressure.
I want to work at a company like that someday. All I've known are factory equipment call-outs, temporary container offices, bosses threatening to kill me if the equipment stops, and clients saying they'll bankrupt me if the code fails. I wonder what it feels like to work in a proper downtown office.
What I experience is being sent as a contractor to good companies, writing the code that generates their core revenue, but then eating at cheap restaurants nearby with my own money. I wonder when I'll ever get to feel those small everyday happinesses.
It's a rarer and rarer thing. Most people's experience of work is nothing like this, just a desperate struggle to stay employed at all, ideally in an industry where their skills give them some kind of leverage.
Don't glamorize it too much in your head, the modern downtown office isn't too great in my opinion
Big open office spaces crammed with people working elbow to elbow. Very noisy. The problem of bosses threatening to kill you still might exist, asshole bosses exist in every work setting
It's probably still a better workplace than factories but probably not as much better as you're imagining
Edit: My favorite workplace ever was located at an industrial building. We had our own secured parking lot we didn't have to pay for, we had actual cubicles, and lots of space between people and teams. It was awesome not having to spend all day with headphones in to block out the sound of people on sales calls. We had a gym that was just for people at the company! It was awesome
Then they moved us downtown and it sucked. My commute got so much longer and my workspace got so much worse
If you find yourself starting to glamorize it just remember what it's like to share toilets with 25 strangers, some of whom have poor habits. In exchange for the shared toilet experience you get to be constantly distracted by noise because they did away with grown-up offices but still expect you to focus like you weren't in a room full of people making zoom calls.
> The floor plan of my office is basically glass doors along the perimeter with private offices for executives and cubicles throughout for the rest of us. Highly normcore.
It’s normie these days to have cubicles, instead of being in an open floorplan? Not in Silicon Valley, I don’t think.
I couldn't get over the amount of time lost to commuting. Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result. The time most people spend commuting, I spend going on hikes with my dog in a forest or working out. For those who lack social activities as a result of working from home I suggest making friends to go out with or join activities that are positively minded towards strangers chatting, like indoor bouldering, which is my workout of choice, and every workout session is always filled with great conversations and fun.
I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that.
Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever.
So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of reading time (or podcast time, if I were driving in) which realistically would not materialize any other way.
I think many dads that are my fellow commuters see the commute as a sort of sacred solo space that's hard to maintain otherwise (eg the unspoken etiquette is if you see someone you know on the train you don't sit next to them so they can have their peace and quiet)
I understand your point completely, as I used to feel the same way in the past. Then I realized it's just that being forced to do a commute for work makes it OK to potentially put extra load on your spouse, or to leave your kids with some other caretaker, but this doesn't have to be this way. It should be fine to take some time if you need it even if there's no job-related reason behind it.
So now both my wife and myself take time for ourselves to get that decompression time when needed.
That's why you just lock yourself in the bathroom like the rest of us! /s
haha, when the weather is really bad, the bathroom with the lights off and headphones is great. Growing up with a single bathroom, a multi-bathroom home is just amazing.
I do wonder if having a single bathroom as a child played any part in my reasonably good grasp of concurrency control though!
Yeah there's nothing like that sweet hour of zen decompressing while fighting my way through rush hour traffic.
Does your wife get 2 hours per day to decompress?
Sounds like your wife needs to be more accommodating or understanding. My spouse understands decompression time and enables it, despite me working remotely.
So, the same thing plus excuses and being stuck in a train?
> I think many dads that are my fellow commuters see the commute as a sort of sacred solo space that's hard to maintain otherwise
You said the quiet part out loud: During your commute you force your female partner to do more of the work tending kids and doing household chores.
I agree that many dads enjoy this privileged escape of parenting duties.
Come on! Who is forcing whom here? Women traditionally bear many child-rearing duties and it's the "unemployed" spouse, whatever their sex, who stays at home to do household chores, and that's the way it is.
If anyone's forcing anyone, it's the employer and "the system" that conspire to force people into cars and onto the road for far too much of the workday. I didn't have children, but when I lived with family, friends, or significant other, I felt robbed. I felt robbed by my career because the commute was unpaid time, off-the-clock, where I was denied the time to be present, at home, with my loved ones, or doing chores, or hobbies. So, I was robbed; I wasn't forcing my girlfriend to cook or clean or be alone. I didn't have the agency to make that decision: it is made for me and all men like me.
When I drove a car, at least the commute was as fast as possible. When I ride public transit on a commute, the times become ungodly, and they truly eat away at your unpaid free time! At least public transit costs pennies compared to maintaining and driving a car!
Wives and mothers deserve some alone-time. It's incumbent on the husband to carve this out so that she doesn't burn out. It's incumbent on fathers to make time, quality time, for their children. But it's even more incumbent on these couples to earn money, do chores, and put in the work for raising their children. That's why we've got schools, because they step in and do the childcare, in loco parentis, and hopefully children have extended families that also participate in those duties.
> (eg the unspoken etiquette is if you see someone you know on the train you don't sit next to them so they can have their peace and quiet)
Fanjambo!
I am materially not a morning person. I will push until the last second in the morning to get ready. Forcing myself to wake up an hour earlier to drive in, get my coffee and let it percolate did wonders for my morning productivity. WFH lacks that so instead I got a dog which makes me get up at the ass crack but it's still not like a good mental workout of commuting in rush hour on i95 in a 80's sedan
Ooo which 80's sedan? I had an E28 20 years ago that I still think about
saab 900 turbo
It's interesting that the only way your wife will let you have some time to yourself is if you're spending it commuting.
There's small children involved, you have to coordinate that kind of thing.
Yes, and somehow commuting week after week is so much better than having a conversation with your wife. It's not like the kids just stop existing when you're commuting. The solution is there, but it can't be used unless you're suffering.
> Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable.
That assumes you can meaningfully decompress. In a car, it's almost impossible (or at the very least, reckless) if you are the driver, and on most crowded stop-and-go routes even as a passenger. In any kind of public transit you have to deal with anything from rowdy children over beggars, drunks, thieves and other undesirables to keeping up with the latest construction BS and delays. Basically the only thing left is biking or walking, but that only works out on specific routes (i.e. well built sidewalks and separate, wide bike lanes)...
I found public transit commuting to be quite peaceful most days. The rowdy children happened infrequently enough that they were often a nice change of pace, and the "drunks and thieves and undesirables" simply didn't happen with a 9-5 commute. The worst part indeed was the random delays from construction, but on those days, car traffic was also crawling.
I did the math during COVID. I was putting in about 30% more hours when I had to go to an office, and all of them were unproductive. I wasn't being paid any extra to do that - which was especially unfair since I also had additional wear and tear on the car, lunches out, fancier clothes to buy, etc.
I may go back to the office someday if I'm forced to, but I won't do it for free. Companies need to compensate in office employees not just for the extra work, but for the expense.
Now I use some of those extra hours for the company, and some to work on my side projects. It's glorious. I'm both more productive at work and happier than I've ever been. I also don't get sick when all the cube-dwellers do a few times per year.
For me, I take the bus to work, so my commute time is spent on pleasant things like reading library books, or working through Chinese lessons on my phone, or just looking out the window, or occasionally chatting with other commuters. I actually enjoy my commute, it's some nice time set aside entirely for myself each day.
If I had to be stuck in a car for my commute, I'd definitely resent it.
Being in a disease-ridden tuna can that is often filled to the brim so you don't even get a seat is not exactly something that I would call pleasant. My friends who commute to work via public transport get sick multiple times per year, I don't.
And 40,000 Americans die due to cars every year. Everything's got tradeoffs, I choose the one that makes me happy.
I was constantly sick when I worked in downtown Seattle and rode the bus. I've been sick exactly once since I started WFH full time in 2019.
I feel the same way about my bus commute. Strange tangent, but I also donate plasma once a month and it's perfect for reading a book because there's literally nothing else you can do for the 45 minutes or so that the donation takes.
Doing good, enforced reading time, plus free snacks. What's not to love? (other than the vein spiking, for some people).
It’s not time lost to commuting. For some people, without the structure of a workday imposed by commuting, they devolve into doing other time-wasting activities. In fact the author said without this commute they would “be on my phone/on Reddit/read HN comments all day/etc.” From this light, a commute doesn’t cause any more time to be lost, but rather it restricts the amount of time lost to be the commute itself, rather than the entire workday. This is something I’m seen very often in people who are dissatisfied with WFH. They lose focus, lose the sense of time, and waste the entire day without the commute.
> Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result.
They have to find a job that allows them to do that, and such jobs are increasingly difficult to find.
Where I'm based, even though it might be the smallest startup that could save a good bit by getting rid of their office costs if they gave people WFH, they won't.
I've been in multiple car accidents this year, none of them my fault. Commuting might actually be the death of me, I can't express to a future employer how much I'm willing to trade just to not have to do it anymore. Doesn't help that I deal with some of the worst traffic in America...
I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train. Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.
I commuted into the city a few days a week for about 18 months quite a while back. I'd normally take the train unless I were doing something in the evening at which point the commuter rail timetable didn't work very well.
Yes, it was better than driving but still wasn't that great. I had to catch the train at about 6:30 AM. And it was still a good 3 hours on the train any given day. Wasn't really very relaxing and I never found it an environment conducive to getting real work done.
I've had four long-term commutes before working from a home office since COVID.
1) Five minute walk. 2)
I lived in the Toronto area for ~20 years. I could commute by car in anywhere form 1-1.5 hours each way, OR, drive 30 minutes to a train station and spend 5-10 minutes looking for parking, wait 10 minutes to board, take an hour to get downtown, then walk for 10-15 minutes, then do that in reverse, plus $18 dollars a day for a train ticket. So 4 hours a day by train or 2-3 hours a day by car.
I mostly drove.
I think I once read that commute distance happened to be a strong predictor of adult happiness.
I don't know if the source was reputable or not.
Minutes spent transporting to work is one of the best single factor predictors of turnover and workplace dissatisfaction.
Yeah, I'm more like you. I also agree with "to each their own" and like that we're so different that someone like the author enjoys going to an office and struggles with phone/device usage when working from home, and others like us prefer remote work.
To me, it's not just the commute. I actually prefer working from home. I enjoyed his description of Miyazaki greeting the ghosts though, I think I could work from an office if it was my studio, but I'd want it to be very close to my home.
Remote work also makes it possible for me to follow my natural "productivity cycle," which means I often get to work until late in the evening while still being able to have dinner with my family and then just have a short commute to my bedroom when they're (usually) already asleep. I did late-night (and even all-night) work too from offices when I was young, but it's one thing to do that in your very early 20s and with only your parents as family, than as an almost 50 with a spouse and kids.
As for enshittification defenses, besides having a family (including cats, used to have a dog too), having musical instruments within reach is great for when I need a quick break. Some breaks can also involve devices and still not be about dopamine, like when I reach out for my personal laptop to open renoise. Lately I've also taken up drawing a bit. I suck at it, but I still enjoy the activity.
I agree on the benefits of social activities. My workout of choice is weightlifting and I do have regulars that I talk to (plus for some exercises you really do need someone around if you want to safely get to your breaking point).
The one thing I miss from my youth days is social music playing. I hope I'll get back to that someday, but everybody's life is busy in different ways and, unlike getting together for coffee or beer, getting together to play music does require a bigger logistical effort and time budget. While I wait for the opportunity to arise, playing along to records is an OK way to get by.
During the course of my sorry career, beginning in college in fact, my minimum commute time was 20 minutes. I had some commutes that were much longer and complex.
Driving a motor vehicle was perhaps an opportunity for focus and solitude, but the act of driving itself is too active, too demanding, to be zen or deeply contemplative. The most I could do was rock out to a custom mixtape or the radio, and ignore my troubles.
One commute was across a treacherous mountain pass with switchbacks and deadly fog. I once deliberately caused an accident there on the highway. I once came six inches from wrapping myself and my Integra around a pine tree. I don't miss driving to work.
Later in life, when I was denied ownership of a vehicle, I commuted by public transit. This could be heaven or this could be hell. If there was a disturbance or complication on the bus, it was a daily trauma and I arrived at my destination as a triggered, frazzled, bundle of nerves. If the voyage was uneventful, I truly had a chance to space out, watch the scenery, and arrive relaxed and calm.
Nowadays, I'm more likely to use a taxi or a rideshare. Waymo is the calmest and most efficient transport for solitude and silence. But taxis travel very fast, and being rushed is not conducive to contemplation. So, I do try to mix in some public transit wherever possible, and during those times, I pray it's on the uneventful side.
Lol - I should have read your post before writing mine.
This was a very pleasant read. There's (justifiably) a lot of debate about AI prose on this forum, which has become tiring. It's refreshing to read something so grounded. Doubly so while looking at a packet of Belvita breakfast biscuits on my own desk.
As far as lo-fi goes, I must recommend Leavv. Mind Garden and Tales of a Flowing Forest. Both pre-AI music albums that are lovely to work/study to.
To each their own of course, but I personally don’t get the point of avoiding AI music when what you’re listening to (lofi beats) is essentially elevator background tier noise anyway. I listen to various types of it all the time and I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between AI or not in this genre.
Listening to Tokyo Echo Sounds right now, is it AI? Probably, but how tf would I even know if I did care?
There’s the chance that you notice patterns emerging that become quite grating after listening to it for awhile, in the same way that LLMs tend to have subtle but eventually noticeable patterns in writing. Some people care, some don’t.
Will that be the case for the music that you are listening to that’s generated by AI, maybe? Maybe not?
By highlighting that the music predates generative AI, at least that’s something that you won’t have to think about.
At least, that’s how I read it. It’s like a ‘no artificial sweeteners’ label on a drink.
I listen to a lot of ambient and other genres that are AI-amenable. I still try to avoid listening to AI generated music.
Knowing I'm sitting there consuming the uncaring out of a machine just makes me feel sad and alone and I'd rather avoid that feeling.
Couldn't it just be a moral thing? Ie "This thing was trained on the work of people it's now replacing and I think that sucks". (NB I'm not looking to get into an argument about the actual impact of these kinds of small moral stances)
I’ve been talking about this a lot on here. It’s because the product isn’t the audio file going into your ears. It’s the process that got it into that audio file. It’s knowing someone was passionate enough to put something together for others to hear. It’s knowing that someone out there in the world made this thing you’re getting beamed into your ears. It’s the soul of the thing that makes the difference.
Clinically, that doesn’t matter. However to a listener who is being intentional, it most definitely matters.
For one, I think AI music is ontologically evil and have extreme opinions on the matter.
More than that though, I completely disagree that anything I'd ever choose to listen to is elevator tier / background noise. Just because it is playing while other things are happening does not mean it never receives focus or active listening.
You can focus on elevator music, doesn't make it not elevator music.
AI music makes my head feel like I'm wearing noise cancelling headphones. That sort of weird 'pressure' sensation. It's as if even the silent bits are still pushing on my eardrums. I can spot it instantly and I hate it.
Gemini speculated that it might have to do with the AI not mimicking the audios phase properly.
You’re hearing the wave form of the load-bearing emdash
A web app for blind testing this would be an interesting project
"The load-bearing emdash" made me chuckle, thank you.
Not sure why you got downvoted, but I too think it would be interesting. I vaguely remember a story about it posted here a while ago.
I prefer my elevator music to be human created, and not a moral failing of techbros who don't believe in creativity.
I agree if it's clearly labeled. I like lofi or vaporwave or neo 80s beats for a while. But I definitely don't want it mixed with any genre that has vocals or mixed with human produced music.
It's interesting that this article is mostly focused on the merits of living a simple / predictable life, whereas I get the impression that the main improvement here might be just not working from home anymore (I guess the author agrees since they link to this older post: https://mrmarket.bearblog.dev/remote-work-is-bad-for-you/).
Like the author, I enjoyed wfh for some time, but also found this creeping crushing loneliness settling on my brain after some years. My solution was to find a co-working space that actually has a community (most spaces are just places to rent a desk). It's helped me set up a routine and get some water cooler talk in a few times a week.
But more importantly, through the community I've met some new friends, so my social life blew up. Now I rely less on the co-working space and more on meeting with the new friend group for sports and debates.
It's been an adventure in finding out what makes me tick and finding ways of addressing it in healthy ways.
Nice! Any tips for finding spaces like that? I guess it's mostly finding coworking spaces that are focused around a specific discipline (I know there are a few gamedev ones for example) so that you already have a lot in common?
But taking comfort in activities that deliver small drips of dopamine slowly instead of a truckload of it instantly is helping me a lot, I think
Would be pretty interesting to figure out if the amount of dopamine really is smaller. I'm not convinced.
But anyway: the bigger picture I've been wondering a lot about lately is whether this dopamine addiction is ok to begin with. I've never had much issues with the 'truckloads' OP names but all things considered my life is basically a journey from one dopamine shot (coffee ritual, sport, problem solving, sex, music, drugs) to the next and everything in between feels not too interesting. And I'm fearful for what's going to happen when I can't do some of those anymore when getting older.
Yeah starting to feel the need to play Defense here too. Especially on YouTube. Even with a subscribe driven flow of known creators it’s getting bad. Everything is about something negative with emotive thumbnails and clickbait titles even from the better creators. And Google has now crammed their unwanted “relevant for you” along with shorts into the top of the subscribe feed. So now even that last trick to get a non algo feed is infested.
It’s rapidly getting unusable even with Adblock etc
There's a nice extension called unhook which blocks a ton of the YouTube trash, you can configure it to hide different things. At this point, they only thing I see on YouTube is a search box and my subscriptions.
Thanks! Will have a look
Now that Shorts removed the dislike button it seems to have gone to complete shit. I used to get shorts that were obviously a bit engagement-bait but also relevant and interesting. Now it's just 100% engagement slop and there's no way to give negative feedback. I tried "liking" everything that wasn't slop - made no difference.
Having a routine itself is incredibly useful to me as well. On my WFH days I don’t have a routine so my time devolves into something amorphous, resulting in me spending time without fully understanding where the time gets spent. Having a routine changes that. When you do things consistently on a schedule, you become more aware of time itself. For the same reason, a commute by train is better than a commute by car or by bike because the train forces a schedule.
I like the idea of a fixed 3pm tea time. This is another fun way to inject more structure into the passing of time. I’m going to try it.
I've been wfh for about 5 years now. I go to a nearby coworking space with a dedicated desk. It's the best compromise for separating home and work-life.
I remember years ago my office had an issue and I worked from a cafe. It was so relaxing. I asked my boss at the time and he freaked out and that was the end of that.
The worst feeling of working in an office is feeling like you have to be there when you're not doing anything. That's outside of the commute.
This was a beautiful read. I work from home 100% but I do enjoy occasional trips into the office to see people in 3D. I completely relate to the decompression time of the commute - I used to have a 20 minute bus ride (no transfers) which was perfect.
Saving my brain from attention fracture via smartphone is a big theme for me right now as well. That's a whole other effort, but I appreciate the use of workday routine as a countermeasure against phone addiction.
Dissing Biscoff cookies in the opening paragraph? Not sure I can read the rest...
This was well written and easy to read. I will have to look into Miyazaki now.
Other than the NHK World documentary series, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness was quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24wViGZKVu8
> Approach the impossibly tall black glass that is my office building. Badge in. A dozen or so floors later, step off the elevator and swing into the day: say hi to coworkers, settle into my cubicle, plug into monitors, sip coffee, gradually get subsumed by unstoppable vibrancy of caffeine high, and we're off to the races.
Every part of his day except for this part was awesome. Family, Train ride, etc... But the glass building and cubicle. I'm desperately trying to get out of knowledge work and into something else. Enshittification is knowledge work now. I would rather be in an excavator digging footings.
> enshittification
I was a little worried that "Belvita" was an ai-inserted advertisement in a blog post that had been enshittified.
I have a "rich" life outside of work - guitar, gardening, prairie restoration, gym 3 times a week, dogs, and I work security or bartend 1 event per week (typically music).
I can only have this "rich" life outside of work because I don't commute to an office daily.
But we're all different. Kudos to the poster for a good read and for finding something that works for them.
I was about to say something similar: OP talks about how in office days support their routine but adding the office to my day would do more to disrupt a routine than solidify it. As of right now my workdays, despite being WFH, are shockingly rigid in their form. Wake up, coffee, weightlifting and a podcast, start work, coffee break around 1030, lunch at noon with wifey, back to work until the afternoon doldrums set it, then exercise bike to try to force some oxygen up above my shoulders, then finish out the day, then dinner. Adding everything that an in-office day entails would mean developing two routines, one for office days and one for wfh days, and also that the number of ways that my routine could be disrupted on office days going up significantly. I'm not here to prescribe my way of life for everyone, I'm actually quite strange, but I do think that it's important to point out that there are ways to get the stability that people thrive on in WFH situations or in the office.
I very much like the idea that tolerating discomfort and inconvenience is something we have to actively train ourselves to do.
> These exercises in slight discomfort tolerance throughout the day increase my defense against going full vegetable...
As much as I absolutely wanted to veg out doing full WFH, I saw the light and was inevitably forced to do the same.
I was enjoying a social life that revolved around drinking and staying out late. It caught up with me in the form of some mild health symptoms, but it caused significant anxiety.
I was suddenly hyper aware of the damage I was doing and had to drop the bad habits. I'm doing much better now, but can only wonder in horror what that very well-traveled road looked like. Many generations before me would have grit their teeth and suffered under that inescapable inertia for decades.
The symptoms that come with obesity, drinking, and a terrible diet like an elevated A1C, high cholesterol, hypertension, etc. are easy to ignore when you are stuck running the hamster wheel to earn a living. I had to admit they weren't just temporary from the hangover anymore and could become permanent.
I'm very thankful I got to turn things around in private without the office peer pressure.
I want to work at a company like that someday. All I've known are factory equipment call-outs, temporary container offices, bosses threatening to kill me if the equipment stops, and clients saying they'll bankrupt me if the code fails. I wonder what it feels like to work in a proper downtown office. What I experience is being sent as a contractor to good companies, writing the code that generates their core revenue, but then eating at cheap restaurants nearby with my own money. I wonder when I'll ever get to feel those small everyday happinesses.
It's a rarer and rarer thing. Most people's experience of work is nothing like this, just a desperate struggle to stay employed at all, ideally in an industry where their skills give them some kind of leverage.
Don't glamorize it too much in your head, the modern downtown office isn't too great in my opinion
Big open office spaces crammed with people working elbow to elbow. Very noisy. The problem of bosses threatening to kill you still might exist, asshole bosses exist in every work setting
It's probably still a better workplace than factories but probably not as much better as you're imagining
Edit: My favorite workplace ever was located at an industrial building. We had our own secured parking lot we didn't have to pay for, we had actual cubicles, and lots of space between people and teams. It was awesome not having to spend all day with headphones in to block out the sound of people on sales calls. We had a gym that was just for people at the company! It was awesome
Then they moved us downtown and it sucked. My commute got so much longer and my workspace got so much worse
> Don't glamorize it too much in your head
If you find yourself starting to glamorize it just remember what it's like to share toilets with 25 strangers, some of whom have poor habits. In exchange for the shared toilet experience you get to be constantly distracted by noise because they did away with grown-up offices but still expect you to focus like you weren't in a room full of people making zoom calls.
> The floor plan of my office is basically glass doors along the perimeter with private offices for executives and cubicles throughout for the rest of us. Highly normcore.
It’s normie these days to have cubicles, instead of being in an open floorplan? Not in Silicon Valley, I don’t think.