Fun at Home

Guest Post by Todd Hayen

So working at home is a dream come true, eh? I’ll bet. What fun! A permanent snow day for all! Stay in your PJs all day, go at your own pace, play a few vid games here and there, take a nap once in a while, raid the fridge, have a beer. (Unless you are monitored constantly by Big Brother, which I believe in most “work at home” situations you are).

I doubt if it is as fun as all that. Wife or husband is around 24/7, kids are definitely nonstop, Big Brother, as mentioned, is breathing down your neck. But still, it’s better than dealing with traffic or the train every day and going into the brick and mortar day in and day out. Right? Right.

I’ve asked a few people in this “work at home predicament” what they think about it. Most said, “its great!”…thus the title for this article. A few said they were going crazy due to all of its drawbacks. But it seems the majority are just fine with it—for now.

I say “for now” because like most things Covid has changed in our lives, it seems some time has to pass before we start feeling the ill effects. By then most people don’t seem able to connect the dots. They get anxious, depressed, and unsure of a happy future—but seem to have no idea why.

That is always a difficult thing to nail down in any situation, the “why” of it. In mental health I would say it is probably one of the biggest difficulties—is all that misery due to a traumatic childhood? A tyrant father, a doting mother? Is it drugs or alcohol? Is it adolescent bullying? Is it the environment? Health? A mean and abusive spouse, an asshole boss? Genetics?

Is it all the insanity we have been subjected to since Covid appeared out of a Chinese clear blue sky three years ago? That last one is seldom seen as the culprit. Well, take it from me, when it comes to general anxiety and depression, it is probably more often the culprit than not.

By extension I’d say that about the work-at-home situation as well. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

I’ll tell ‘ya.

Now, this may seem like a stretch to some, and maybe it is, but you’ve got to keep in mind that all this, in my opinion, is planned. And when something this massive is planned, with a very clear intended result, then just about anything could be part of the plan.

I think shutting down the work world and forcing everyone to sit in their little domestic cubby holes isolated from just about everything all day long is definitely part of the agenda. That’s just me folks, but you know me pretty well by now. Dr. Doom.

But, as Dr. Freud once apocryphally said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” meaning: maybe the shift of the workforce into home office mode might not be anything at all nefarious. Cough, cough.

So what is important in the care and feeding of a human being? One vital thing is to avoid too much isolation. Sometimes being alone in nature is a great thing, but obviously I am not talking about that sort of isolation. I am curious to know if management has noticed a drop in creativity from their at home work force?

Of course we have Zoom, and Chat, and other forms of mingling with the cyber versions of humans. But I can’t quite wrap my head around how that sort of “cyber contact” is as healthy, and thus as conducive to good work output, than hanging out at the water cooler yakking about the project your team is working on.

Maybe I’m wrong.

But that’s just making a comment on work productivity. How about human mental health? A lot has been written about this, usually from the standpoint of “pros vs. cons.” Needless to say there certainly are advantages to working at home. I don’t need to list them here. And probably the healthiest arrangement is a little bit of both, which seems now to be the trend (for now.)

As with everything else we are experiencing in today’s movement toward the “new tomorrow,” we are at the early stages of it all. At this point in time there is not all that much that would be considered mentally or spiritually destructive. But don’t kid yourself. This movement toward leaving the workplace situated in a downtown high-rise, to your little spare bedroom, basement or garage at home, is not an organic movement due to social evolution. This phenomenon marches more to the drum of “the agenda,” and as such there is plenty to worry about.

Exactly what that looks like I can’t say, but watch the Bruce Willis film “Surrogates” to get a little taste of it. Common sense tells us that big business cannot possibly believe having all their employees at the end of a Zoom wire (well, that is an archaic metaphor) is a good idea. Look at any photograph of a big city skyline and tell yourself that all of those skyscrapers can easily be given up.

I don’t think so. Something is going on here that we don’t really see a clear picture of, and it probably isn’t pretty. Maybe, like so much else, it has something to do with control—imprisoning the work force in an electronically surveilled environment with a careful and watchful electronic eye monitoring every move. Sure, you can do that in an office building too, but there is something exceedingly sinister about the isolation.

When people are isolated from other people for huge expanses of time, things typically do not go all that well. We need socialization, interaction, and human comradeship. Read Oliver Onion’s The Beckoning Fair One to get an eerie (it is a ghost story) take on what can go wrong with an isolated psychology—pretty much all serial killers were loners. I know, I know, your kids, wife/husband, and maybe a few others are always around, eh? Well, I don’t need to tell you that that is crazy making in its own right.

We have to roll with the times, right? Well, destroying the physical work place was not a result of a natural evolution. It was implemented due to a totally fabricated “emergency” and really has no reality or basis beyond that. Yet here it is to stay. Why is that? While you ponder that one I’ll list a few more things that make this a dicey idea, especially as it evolves into something much more sinister than it is starting out as.

My list: Isolation. Tendency to work too much for too long of a stretch. No creative interaction with other employees. Lack of camaraderie. Less changing stimuli. Friends. Meeting members of the opposite sex. Too much time at home (no separation between work and home.) Image of work as prison. Big Brother watching electronically. Fewer humans to laugh with. Less opportunity to integrate with the culture.

There are a lot more…give some more in the comments.

I’ll say it again; it isn’t all that bad yet. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Even though you might have more of a chance to goof off if working at home, most people say the work there is much more intense than at the office.

The sort of “play” one encounters at the work place is subtle, but it is psychologically healthier: interaction with other humans on breaks, stretching your legs with a walk around the office and mingling with different stimuli, going to lunch with the gang, etc. Choosing what to wear every day. What all this will eventually evolve into is anyone’s guess, so if you think about that, be creative.

What you come up with is probably far less frightening than the reality that eventually faces us.

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