Transcript: The Future of Telecommuting – The New Republic

Richard: Right, exactly. Rather thanjust looking into the abyss of Zoom.

Alex: Did you work from home prior toCovid-19? What was your work setup before all this?

Richard: So Ive been a freelance writerfor quite a long time. Ive had periods where I would work in an office on TVproductions, and I remember distinctly this feeling of going out at 11 a.m., earlyon in my freelancing career, and there just kind of being nobody around. Its asensation which is almost like guiltyoure out of step with the rest of howthings work, youre out of that diurnal commute, the only other people around are old people or unemployed people, and you almost feel like otheroffice workers start to think that what you do is not real. And that sort ofillegitimacywell, thats one of the things that I loved about it: I didntwant to have the feeling of having a real jobbut then the times when I did goto an office, Id sometimes realize almost retrospectively that Id been lonelyfor a period, and you have this almost elation of talking to colleagues. Ithink people who do work from home are familiar with those feelings.

Alex: My experience has been justthat maybe we should try to be more flexible in general, and not make itan all-or-nothing.

Richard: Thats right. And I mean, thehistory of remote work is littered with incorrect predictions, so we might aswell add some more, but

Alex: Lets add some more.

Richard: That seems to be whats goingto happen. I dont think everybody is going to jump into remote work full-timewhen they have the option. Its just that things like working from home whenyou need to or want to are going to become more socially acceptable, and thatshould be beneficial, depending on how much surveillance is involved.

Alex: Thats the optimistic future.And I think youve described very well how these things that are pitched asthings that will help liberate the employee, like a policy of saying you canwork from home when you want to or need to, these things can then be turnedright around by bosses and turned into another way to heavily monitor what theemployee does.

Laura: Right. I was also thinking, somany people were actually already working from home before the pandemic, butthey were also working a full day at the office, too. There was an incrediblestatistic I read that before the great recession, it was incredibly rare for someoneto check email before they went into the office. And after, something like 50percent of people who answered the survey said they checked email before theygot out of bed. If that isnt working from home, what is?

Richard: Yeah, and its almost alwaysunpaid working from home. People arent submitting a time sheet at the end ofthat week, saying, I spent all this time checking emails in bed, on mysmartphone, but that is work.

Laura: Right, and you wonder if thissurveillance software that tracks you between nine and five, if it counted someof the stuff that you do on the train and in bed in the morning, then it mightnot look so good for the employer. You might be owed overtime.

Richard: One of the weirdest thingsabout some of this surveillance and team management softwarethis is true ofMicrosoft Teamsis that some of it has started to introduce what iseffectively a commute into remote working. People are still performingcommuting behaviors of having time, a few minutes, before their work starts. Ihave seen people, and Ive read stories, about people who do stuff like put on asuit, get in their car, drive around the block, come home, and then go intotheir home office.

Alex: The early clerks office had fireplaces and easy chairs to resemble a home, right? That stuck out to mebecause it reminded me of big tech company offices that have essentiallyrecreated some version of that, where its fun to go to the office. So when Ithink about the future of work from home, I remember that Facebook, to use oneexample, has not just held onto their Manhattan real estate, but theyve rentedmore Manhattan real estate. Do you think that that is a harbinger of, like,this is not the beginning of the work-from-home era?

Richard: I mean, with tech companies, thiswas part of the reason why Yahoo got spooked into spiking a lot of their remotework. They were looking at companies like Google, where theres an electronicdrum kit and a pool table. Anna Wieners book, Silicon Valley, is, is full of these incredible details, whereshell go into the office, and theres just, like, a guy with no shoes onstrumming an acoustic guitar, and there always seems to be someone mixingcocktails. Its almost like, in her life, people are going home to get work doneand going to the office to hang out. And part of the thinking behind that comesfrom this sort of frat bro mentality, where if you set up a sort of dorm roomsession with the right people, their ideas will spring off each other. And atGoogle that was taken seriously enough that my understanding is they did thingslike made sure that there was a little queue for food so that people didnt gettheir food from the canteen too quickly, because that way you would have thisincidental contact, where you start sharing ideas and, you know, Watson wouldmeet Crick. The story of technology is full of these kind of meet-cutespeoplejust happening to run into each other, working on a similar thing. And those corridorconversations were what they were trying to generate.

Alex: Again, if were talking abouthow this is going to look in a few years, I think the unequally distributedfuture is it, because people who work for companies like Google are going tohave the freedom to choose how they decide to work. And for other people, Ithink its going to be a lot more limited going forward.

Richard: You can already see thatsplit if you think about the difference between working at an Amazon campusstyleoffice and working in an Amazon warehouse. The amount of initiative and leisureafforded to one versus the sort of mechanization of the otherthose are very,very extreme differences now.

Alex: Well, thank you so much fortalking to us today, Richard.

Richard: Its a pleasure, Alex.

Alex: Richard Cookes article iscalled The Perpetual Disappointment of Working From Home, and you can find iton NewRepublic.com.

Laura: After a short break, well beback to talk to Katie McDonough about the seductive fantasy of earlyretirement.

Alex: The U.S. has a contradictory relationshipwith work. Our civic religion valorizes working hard, and our popular cultureromanticizes slackers. Today, the American economy seems to demand perpetualhustle. Many young people have no real expectation of ever enjoying acomfortable retirement. But what if leaving work behind werent such animpossible dream? What if you could retire decades before you qualify forsocial security? More leisure time and a decent retirement have been centraldemands of the labor movement basically since it came into existence. In recentyears, though, a loosely affiliated group has turned the collective demand offreedom from work into something more like a collection of life hacks.

Were joined now by Katie McDonough, a deputy editor at The New Republic who recently wrote aboutfantasies of retiring early.

Hi Katie. Thanks for coming on the show.

Katie McDonough: Hi,thanks for having me.

Alex: You wrote about this whole sortof cottage industry thats grown up around giving people financial advice abouthow to retire early. It has an acronym to describe it, FIRE, which stands for financialindependence, retire early. So before we get into your own dreams ofretirement, give us an idea of what FIRE is about. What does the successful FIRE retirees lifestyle look like?

Katie: So one thing that I heard inresponse to my piece, and that I will tell you, is that there are so manyvarieties of FIRE, and its really reductive to say that they are only onething. So some people do genuinely really emphasize the FI part: The financialindependence part ends up being the main goal; the retire early ends up becomingkind of secondary. And so you see different people, based on where theirinterests are, do different things. Some people are retiring early because theymade hundreds of millions of dollars at scammy startups, and they spend theirdays microdosing in and around San Francisco, and it seems really fun. Otherpeople move to parts of the country with comparatively low costs of living andthey seem to, like, blog a lot. It seems like FIRE becomes almost their secondjob because so much of this is self-help advice and podcast-blog industry, inaddition to the financial advice itself. And so it varies depending on what youwant from it, but its a set of advice that supposedly everyone can accessequally. Its meant to be a code that, once you have the tools and ingredients,its just completely democratic and everybody can do it.

Alex: How does everyone do it? Whatare the basics of how you get to do it?

Katie: Theres really practical stuffthat makes sense. Its like: Dont eat takeout, maybe ride your bike instead ofpaying for gas, other things like that. And if it works for you, thats great.Theres nothing wrong with that. But then theres this really specializedinvestment part that is the actual thing that unlocks the wealth thats wildlyinaccessible. Maybe Im just projecting my own deficiencies onto much of therest of the country, but it feels like something thats very difficult to masterand is actually really time-consuming and needs a lot of expert insightfinancialconsultancies and other things like that. Not the kind of thing that you canfigure out on your own.

Laura: But you talk in the articleabout fat and lean versions of this. What was the difference between those two,and what kinds of income are you looking at if youre on the fat version versusthe lean version?

Katie: I think it varies so muchdepending on where in the country you live, but the lean version is that youlook at what the average person spends in the United States annually, andyoure supposed to go way under that. There are some FIRE people who are like, Ihave two children, I spend $16,000 a year, by making really lean budgets forthemselves. And then theres fat FIRE, which is more of the type ofperson who made many millions of dollars and can just live well because theyactually dont have to think too much about their spending because they justhave what seems like endless reserves of money.

Laura: You also talk about two sort ofcultures among the early retirees. One is a kind of tech bro type, and thenanother is a sort of gentler, more wholesome version of this. How would youcharacterize them?

Katie: I think the first variety involvesa lot of ketamine. Its just people taking drugs and living in nice apartmentsand going on vacations and living what seems like very well. And then there isthe version that is more commonly associated with the genrebutwebsites that aggregate a lot of these stories tend to just include themtogetherbut the more wholesome version is someone who retired at 50and spends more time with their kids. And there are actually these reallyreassuring and warm and appealing narratives about what it means to reclaimmore of your time. I would call it the soft genre: I ride my bike a lot, Iread books more.

Alex: It seemslike this advice just assumes you have a paycheck large enough to sock away aportion of it that is significant and that youre not then spending that entireportion on servicing your own debt, right?

Laura: Yeah,there are a lot of people who are not buying lattes, andtheyre also not getting to save that money.

Katie: I think whatgets regarded as, Oh, look at this amazing frugality, look at us making responsiblechoices is really just what it is to live with really low income, right? Youactually dont get to do a lot of things, like eat out nice dinners or buy bighouses or take cabs everywhere. The kind of comic version of it that getsrepeated a lot is, Oh, millennials and their avocado toast or theirlattes, or something. But this level of discretionary spendinga lot of peoplearent buying those kinds of things and they stay broke because they startedbroke.

Alex: Every three or four months, you know, a Wall Street Journal or Business Insiderpiece will go around Twitter thats like, This 26-year-old just bought hisfirst house: Heres how. Paragraph one is like, Stopped going out to themovies.Paragraph 15 is like, Parents gave him a loan.

Laura: It seems to me to fit in with acouple of other trends. One is the tiny housetrend, one is van lifelike, these ideas that you can just escape fromthe usual system that everyones in and go off and define yourself. Doyou think that those forms of behavior are a response to something bigger? Whatdo they tell you about the economy?

Alex: I wonder if theres a sort ofunconscious nostalgia here. Thats what made me think about the tiny housething, because there actually was a time in living memory in the United Stateswhen you didnt need a large income to get by, as it were. It wasactually possible for much of the twentieth century to have a modest income and livemodestly but have no debts. You didnt have to strive to be rising up someladder, but just the basic necessities of housing, health care, and foodthethings you need to stay alivewere attainable at this very low level. So I dowonder if part of this is trying to recreate that, but now it requiresaccumulating a base of capital first before you can then recreate thatlifestyle.

Katie: I think thats right. And I alsothink thats where the part where, if you apply these same critiques and thenincorporate a structural analysis, it becomes the liberatory project that existselsewhere.

Alex: You should start a FIREnewsletter or podcast that slowly begins introducing that. Youve got to getthem to think structurally. But what would the substantive version of FIRE looklike? The one that actually involved the critique youre talking about?

Katie: The gentlest entry point is basicsocial democracy, right? Reinvesting in public pensions and retirement,increased wages, reduced work hours across the board, a robust labor movementthat can achieve these things. They have these critiques of, We work too hardhere, were in the rat race, but theres no sense of the ways in which leisureand autonomy are systematically denied people, too. So, very structurally, beinga Black woman worker whos doing home health care versus being a tech workerliving in San Franciscothe means through which you can do cost-cutting andsavings and investment from those two positions are quite different. Not onlyeven the means that you have to build wealth but the kind of daily experienceof your labor being fundamentally different. It doesnt really come into the literature.

Alex: None of the FIRE blogs havethat chart that shows productivity and wages diverging in the 70s andjust getting further and further apart?

Katie: Maybe you can join me in thispodcast.

Alex: And then we can retire earlytogether.

Laura: One question on that, thoughImean, Ive seen that graph, and we all know that real wages have been goingdown since the 1970s; household incomes have been going down, even thoughusually a two-person household now has double the income because maybe thewoman is working too. We know all of that, but its a very long road fromknowing that to actually having any kind of change based on that knowledge. AndFIRE is like, you read this one book and maybe you could start to do it for yourself.Isnt that the appeal, that its something you can actually enact? You donthave to wait for Congress.

Katie: Oh, totally. I think people enterinto the literature from so many different places that its veryreasonable to expectand you see this reflected in some of the people writingabout their journeys to financial independencebut it very much was born of aplace of, I am never going to get this any other way, the only thing that I cando is this, so here I am kind of trying to take my piece of it. And so its notas if I think that a person cant practice different financial habits whilealso having these larger structural critiques or participating in collectivemovements that would help accelerate the process through which more of us canget more of that. But I think that as a genre, it doesnt really account forany of that. In a lot of these blogs, theres an almost entire absence ofpolitics. Its as if there is no president in FIRE world, there is no Congress.I think thats a really interesting absence.

Alex: Thats funnythinking about itin another way, FIRE, financial independence retire early, as a sort of blogand podcast trend, its very individualistic. But if you would just imaginethat same phrase as a demand from a political movement, its revolutionary,like independence from the market is actually sort ofrevolution.

Katie Yes!

Laura: But then isnt that a differentacronym? Thats UBI.

Katie: I mean, there are a lot ofdifferent versions of what this has looked like historically. Eight hours forwork, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will is one version of anarticulation of, like, Your entire day should not be consumed with labor. So, yeah, I think part of what Im so drawn to, or just fascinated by, is that thethings being articulated through this writing do feel almost like a funhouse-mirrorversion of left ideas or left critique of the way that we live, and how wereexpected to live. But then the answer is, Well, just figure your way out of it, and youll be fine.

Alex: Katie, thank you so much fortalking to us today.

Katie: Thank you so much for having me.And also, this is my notice of resignation from The New Republic. Ive accumulated millions in savings and Imretiring.

Alex: Well, congratulations! Katiesarticle, The Long Plot to Escape From Work, is part of Work Sucks Month at The New Republic, a series exploring howand why we work and why we dont want to. You can read Katies piece and othersin the series at newrepublic.com.

Read the original post:

Transcript: The Future of Telecommuting - The New Republic