My gf basically does 3-4 hours of work a day including meetings and then literally naps or watches TV all day. She’s taught herself how to crochet and she’s done like half a cardigan in a week because she has so much down time
Boy i sure fucking wish I could get a gig like that. Instead i’m paid 2/3rds as much to sweat my dick, balls and ass off in a kitchen, standing all day, one unpaid break that i’m forced to take. 30 minute commute each way.
I can’t even look for work like that because even if I could find a job i couldn’t pass a drug test. I want endless, hell like torment for the people responsible for marijuana drug tests precluding people from employment in fucking 2025
they drug test for kitchen work now? fuck me when i was young restaurant work was the best place to find a drug dealer and half the people were high on the job wtf happened
They probably do test at some places but no i meant i can’t look for work-from-home work because of it. And although I love cooking for people, commuting sucks, not being in control of my environment sucks (the A/C breaks all the time, the school Im at apparently has literally only 2 maintenance guys), putting on clothes sucks. I’m just insanely jealous of my partner, her biggest complaints are just that her coworkers do dumb shit and she’s frequently bored. She also gets bonuses and shit, i’m staggered by how jealous i am
I think the only way I could work from home is if I manage to not smoke weed for 3-4 months (i’ll want to die because i’ll be unable to sleep and even if weed doesn’t always put me to sleep it at least helps me not feel like i’m sitting in bed uncomfortable trapped inside my own thoughts) and i manage to find something that doesn’t care I have 0 on paper office worker qualifications, or if I do some streamer shit but let’s be real, I’m not knowledgeable enough to teach anybody cooking info they couldn’t get elsewhere and while I’m ok looking i’m not charismatic and i’m an asshole, i’m not getting that hasan piker mega fan base even if i could tolerate the public scrutiny (i couldn’t)
If your biggest concern really is just a piss test weed there ways to pass it even if you only take a couple days off smoking.
It’s even easier if you can get clean piss from someone and just smuggle it in. It’s hilariously easy to do as long as you keep it between 90-100F
I know someone who got a job at a prison (medical, not a guard) and successfully used synthetic piss they bought somewhere
I have a friend who’s a cook. For a long time, he hid his depression and didn’t know he had adhd and self medicated with weed. But it stopped working at some point. Luckily, he got into therapy, before something worse happened, but it got close. Now he’s got a family and is doing great. Not saying this is comparable and of course, in an ideal world, they just wouldn’t do those stupid tests. But maybe you can find something else for your sleep and your thoughts? Medication/therapy/exercises/meditation/journaling or anything? Wish you luck.
Get your partner to get you some entryish level office role
White collar jobs are way less likely to drug test, fwiw. Entry level still might, for anything above that it’s very uncommon, outside of specific roles.
drug testing is another form of class warfare and turning societal ills into individualistic moral failings.
30 minute commute each way.
Lucky. My commute is 2-3 hours one way.
if that’s every day idk how you even have time to eat and sleep
3 days a week. Only plus is that I leave at like 3 and travel on “company time” since we don’t have any card punching mechanism in place. I just have to show my face in the morning and attend teams meetings.
is it at least a well-paid job? or do you have to make that commute to like, work at starbucks?
450$ per month in India. Not great not terrible.
like the four day work week’s benefits to productivity, any conclusion of this sort (i.e. easing the boot actually helps both sides) will be summarily disregarded because the point is labor discipline
I really hope I live long enough to see somewhere on the globe make a 24hr work week the norm (4x6)
24 hour work day you say?
sadly true
Is it not a contradiction? Why don’t we see hogs ripping each others faces off fighting about whether labor discipline or squeezing more profit out is more important?
It might be, but until the day when a company that publicly embraces work-from-home as the preferred norm defeats another company that does not, it won’t be acknowledged as such by the actors in the system.
Is it not a contradiction? Why don’t we see hogs ripping each others faces off fighting about whether labor discipline or squeezing more profit out is more important?
Doing something out of the ordinary as a manager will get you blamed if anything goes wrong. Doing the ordinary will not. There is pressure on management in companies to continue doing things like this even if they are known to reduce productivity.
disclaimer, this is a rough observation, definitely not a robust analysis.
the other flank exists, but it’s largely cordoned off to start-ups and the odd private company. some companies implement these policies, but because competition is very much not real for most of the economy in the current stage of capitalism (especially in America), work policy is ordained mainly by a cadre of coordinated monopolists.
beyond this, class interest writ large of the western bourgeoisie currently is to stamp out any working class momentum that could form, given the heightening contradictions coming to roost with China’s ascendance and America’s stagnation. There’s a new cadre unwilling to make the social concessions of their forefathers to combat socialism, instead taking an even more militant approach and embracing domestic fascism. Throw in deeply-rooted ideology w/rt the protestant work ethic and grind culture as well as the need to be able to assert hierarchy on their subordinates.
okay but like have you thought about the poor poor landlords who will lose out on rent for commercial districts
Yeah, we will send them in to kolkhoz and put them into a hard labor to earn their life.
If they’re so worried they can just sell the buildings to someone else! That’s da free market baybeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
maybe they should ask the job creators to start creating rent
They shuttered some large buildings and parking garages in the downtown by me because the landlord finally kicked it - and had essentially never done maintenance or paid utilities - and their estate refuses to as well. They’re just liquidating what they can. So now it sits boarded up while homeless people live in the rain across the street.
Also bonus points because the landleach owned a majority of commercial real estate in the downtown, and used that status to kill transit projects, affordable housing, etc.
Amazingly we had a HR ghoul organizational hour about “worklife health and well being” with an open chat today and some people in the organization posted gems like:
You should make sure that people don’t suffer from boredout (a new term for not having enough to do, supposedly just as bad as a burnout)
People being allowed to do remote and hybrid work has been the single worst thing in “worklife health and well being” as it ruins cohesion in the workplace
The HR ghouls themselves made a whole speech about “sick leave culture” and how they are trying to combat that. The organization is basically the entire healthcare and social sector of a huge area and the conditions suck in most places, people have been let go, the workloads are unbearable across the board and the environments we are in are open offices, old buildings with mold issues etc. Yet they talk about “sick leave culture” like there are no material things making people sick. They could start by mentioning covid even once, but they won’t. They could embrace remote work without mentioning how performance must stay the same every time it comes up. Everyone who does remote days performs better on it.
But what is most surprising are these supposedly fellow workers who anonymously shit on those who need remote work to even be able to work. I bet they are medical field types because those rehab people, therapists etc. often harbor the most toxic views on other humans and muh performance. I could have posted something myself about how not everyone thrives in the same environment, but decided not to in case they can somehow see who is behind the comments.
I like not being tied to an office but I really enjoy interactions with people. I quite liked working remotely in medtech where I was bouncing from hospital, cadaver lab etc
Cadaver lab interactions can be a little one-sided, though.
Not necessarily
I like going for planning and meetings but everything else can be done at home. I had more time for after work hobbies when I was home, now I use it to commute
Exactly. 1-2 days in office per month is PEAK. I once worked at a place that was basically just 2 meeting rooms that we’d pack twice a month. Amazing
Yeah I have one friend who still works remote and she’s doing really well in her personal life and won’t give it up unless the other option is unemployment. I really miss not having to commute, and I’m sure the environment misses it more than I do.
I still have the (now) privilege of working from home. Even though I’m struggling to handle everything in my life, I don’t even know how I would be able to do everything I do today if without wfh.
I’m sorry you’re struggling but I’m glad you still have wfh at least. I’m job hunting for somewhere closer to home right now at least.
It doesn’t make me thrive, I hated it. The office was about all the social interaction I ever got and my alcoholism got a million times worse when it got taken away for WFM. I’m not saying we should make policy based on my neuroses but until a company pays my rent because they’re using my apartment as an office I will never consider doing it.
Meanwhile I will never consider going into the office unless the alternative is starving to death because it’s much harder to be sexually harassed in a remote job.
I mean the pro-remote work stance is completely valid especially that one. This is just a me hangup which wouldn’t be an issue if I had actual friends. Just mad I got fired over alcoholism made worse by the company forcing me remote for Covid.
Couldn’t hurt to have some friends. True.
And for the record the forced remote work was the correct covid policy. I just caught a stray.
Same, we didn’t have a choice, I just coped with it really poorly
Same here and it got me fired from my six figure tech job
I didn’t get fired (stopped a few months ago), but I definitely would have. I just got caught by the right person instead of the wrong one
hope you do better with the alcoholism, I need to quit drinking too
I am doing better with it at this exact moment by having a beer tbh.
I’m drinking but I’m telling myself it’s a treat because I also exercised today
I’m doing that because i cleaned the stovetop and one dish today.
I hate office socializing because saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could get me fired. It’s a minefield lmao
My coworkers were mostly all on H1Bs soooo
This is basically me. I do all my work remote apart from client visits that are either in office or somewhere around town and I thrive doing this. But I only get to do this because my current manager gets my type of neurospicy and the public sector wants to cut down on office costs, in the private sector it’s all RTO now.
I could not do this work otherwise and I dread the day they decide to end this. I have no trust that this will continue. It is the first time in my life where I’ve felt like I can do paid work without burning myself out.
I schedule my client work for the afternoons and in the morning I just go from bed to the laptop in my jammies and a cup of tea and start from emails etc. I always have more clients and more downtime than my office loving coworkers (who I love to see in short burts).
A whole office day feels like a spesific type of torture in getting bored and faking it to me. It drains me.
The only day of the week that I hate with a passion is the one where the manager wants us all to come to the main office for a team meeting in the morning which means waking up very early and an hour long commute both ways. Every single one of these meetings have been ones that could have been an email or a Teams meeting.
It’s the masking that gets to me the worst. And the stealthing/boymoding. The funny part is that I’ve been there long enough that most of my teammates know me from before I started transitioning, so I’m pretty sure they’re just clueless and think I’m just a long-haired metalhead with a wall of guitars. But they always feel this subconscious need to interject “sir” into damn near every interaction at least once
It’s tiring, especially the long and pointless meetings that actively detract from getting any actually-important tasks done.
I miss it soooo much. My current job is hybrid, but everyone is so office brained it makes it hard to keep a consistent schedule. So basically they ruin it. Ugh I miss full remote.
I find it very strange that remote work does not enforce atomization of labor and have a chilling effect on labor organizing. I would think a brain in an individual cell where you can turn on and off its access to other brains at will would be the ideal work arrangement from the boss’s perspective. Whereas a company cannot control where its assembled workers meet up after work
I think it’s because people connect online, so you no longer have to be physically present in the same space.
Yes but when working remotely you are often using company equipment and company-monitored software to connect, unlike a public meeting place off campus. Not arguing with you just elaborating on my confusion.
That’s not always the case, I’m working from my own machine at my current job. But even when you work on company owned computers, you can always connect with people out of band using your phone, etc. I never use work channels to talk about non work things, but if I hit it off with coworkers then we just find a chat platform we both use and connect there.
Interesting. Feels like I’ve met and spent a lot of time with random people bc they are either coworkers or know my coworkers in some way, social cross pollination that would never happen remotely.
Also I would never put company shit on my personal computer. What if they get sued or go bankrupt and go through discovery, and now your personal hard drive contains company evidence? That’s just me tho.
I feel like the impact of the labor atomization thing is greatly mitigated by the fact that 1) the types of workers who have fully-remote capability are, in my uneducated guess, probably not unionized anyway, and 2) remote work is so cushy that people aren’t agitating in their workplace for better conditions
I do agree that seeing people in person makes it easier to make connections, but it’s definitely possible to do with remote work too. And yeah I guess if a company got sued then that could be a problem. I got kinda lucky cause I got laid off a few years ago when the SV bank crash happened, but they let me keep my work laptop. So, I’ve just been using it as my dedicated work computer.
And yeah, I think you’re right that remote workers tend to be relatively cushy and hence there’s less tension between them and the company.
Can anyone find the actual study? The fact that I couldn’t easily find it myself and the disclaimer that “This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies” makes me suspicious this might have been fabricated out of whole cloth by an LLM.
I did more digging and here are some more sources
The findings look to be based on data from a long-term study that tracked 375 Australian adults using fitness trackers starting in 2019, which provided a baseline of data from before the pandemic https://academic.oup.com/abm/article/58/4/286/7613320
And here’s one of the specific papers published from the ARIA data. It analyzes the direct impact of the initial COVID-19 lockdowns and is the source of the “extra sleep” finding. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0248008
Thanks for doing the extra legwork—there’s a lot of great studies in there!
O7
As long as I don’t have to do video calls which makes the experience way worse than working onsite for me because for some reason I become extremely anxious on camera.
I work with two teams, and one of the teams we just all go camera off as the default.
This should be the norm
