October 8, 2025
For the first ten years of my career I went to the office every day. I sat next to smart colleagues, nice colleagues, annoying colleagues, grumpy colleagues, all kinds of colleagues. (Yes, often I was the grumpy or annoying colleague.) They taught me how to do my job and we taught others how to do their job. We laughed and argued and feuded, we went to lunch or to get coffee or to the bar after work. Sometimes we talked too loudly or put on headphones in as performative a manner as possible to tune it out. The interns came and we crammed together to make space for several months, and then they left again. We debugged and solved problems and explained things and drew pictures on the whiteboard and complained about management or about how things used to be easier or whatever.
Work was a thing we did as humans, together. Every day. Some days were irritating. Never once did I wish to replace these human interactions with a fucking chat app, or trade weeks of irritation in an open space for my living room. I worked with people.
This is gone. It’s been gone for more than five years now. I can go days or sometimes weeks without talking in-person to someone I work with. I don’t work with people, I don’t have a human job now. Even people who work at companies that have RTO policies tell me that it’s not so different, nobody really does it, you scan in and leave.
I’m sad. It’s difficult to explain how profoundly sad this makes me. Sometimes I really just sit and think about it and it makes me very sad. My job was a thing I used to do with people, that was my daily work life, a thing I did with other people who I got to know and learned from and shared things with as human beings in the real world. Gone.