Now That We Do Everything Else From Home, Why Don't We Try Living In It?

An idea whose time has come back.

The idea first began to form in my mind one holy Friday night a few years back; I don’t observe the Sabbath, but Friday night, marking as it does the beginning of the forty-eight blessed hours of freedom before the next work week begins, is holier to me now than it was when I was observant.

I was working for an advertising agency at the time, and the hellish week that had just ended had gone like every hellish week that came before it: tense meetings, heated discussions, pressing deadlines. Technology had made it possible for me to work from home, but lately it was beginning to feel as if work had gone from being a miserable but fixed portion of my day, to becoming a burden that never ceased. Phone calls all day, texts and emails all night. I wondered if this was all part of some larger plan, if granting us freedom from being at the office was really just part of a push to enslave us to work even more. Was this all there was to life? Working? Making money? I imagined a tombstone for myself, and perhaps us all, that read simply, “Hunted. Gathered. Died.” I was beginning to feel like some faceless worker bee, born into a life of dull service for the Queen who never got off her own ass except to reproduce now and then.

I had just opened a bottle of wine and was sitting down to dinner with my family - had it really been a whole week since the last weekend? - when my phone rang. It was Bill, the Creative Director of the agency. The Queen Bee.

“Do you have a sec?” Bill asked.

Bee Fun Fact #1: Queen bees live up to two years; worker bees drop dead after a few weeks.

Bill had used the casual “sec” to pretend this wasn’t a rude imposition, but to no avail. The fire of anger within me had been stoked. I was feeling suffocated. I was feeling trapped. Some invisible, irresistible force was slowly taking over my life, one minute at a time, until there would soon be no time left at all that wasn’t work time. And so this is what I said:

“No.”

“No?” he asked.

“No. I don’t have a sec.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because, Bill, I’m home.”

“So?”

Bee Fun Fact #2 - Worker bees start work at 5:15 and work until 6:30PM. I’d kill for a day that ended at 6:30PM.

“So when I’m home,” I said, “I do home things. I cook, I talk to my kids, I play with my dog. Sometimes me and Orli fuck. Sometimes I don’t do any thing at all, Bill: sometimes I just sit on the couch with my fucking feet on the fucking table and I don’t do shit.”

There was a long pause.

“It will only take five minutes,” he said flatly.

And that’s when I had my radical idea.

I call it “Living From Home,” and here’s the pitch:

Today, thanks to technology and the soulless money junkies who created it, you can do just about everything from home: you can work from home, you can have meetings from home, you can multitask from home, you can brainstorm with your team from home, you can collaborate with the team on the same document at home. We can bank from home, do our taxes from home, do our office jobs from home. And please pay no attention to the skyrocketing rates of depression ad suicide.

So here’s my idea:

What if we could live from home?

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Just… live.

Not hunt, not gather. Just… be.

Here’s the slogan:

Enjoy the comfort of your home… right from the comfort of your home!

We put in front of some focus groups, but nobody under 35 knew what the word “home” meant.

Remember “home?”

Home was good.

I liked home.

Home was an oasis, a respite, a break. Home was base in the relentless game of Tag that is this modern life. But today, home feels like a thing of the past. Home is just another place to work; it’s a field office; it’s Starbucks without the Egg Bites and the schizophrenic in the corner. Yes, I realize that technology has its benefits, and it’s nice to be able to work from home, but it seems to me we are way past the “benefits” part of technology, and tumbling headfirst down some sort of bottomless work pit.

As troubling as AI is, I’m less concerned about technology turning machines into people than I am about technology turning people into machines.

And we’re fast becoming so. And not just machines - we’re machines who want to work even more than we already do. We want to work better, harder, smarter. “No,” the forklift never begged at the end of the day, “I want to keep lifting.” But we do. We read books about how to work more, we watch TED Talks about how to be more productive, we listen to podcasts that promise to increase our work efficiency - we even judge ourselves by the criteria for which we used to judge machines: how well we “performed,” what our “output” has been like.

We’re not even pursuing happiness at this point. We’re just pursuing pursuit. This is not normal, as

Kirsten Powers

shows in a recent post. This is literally abnormal.

You are not a “badass” for wanting to be more productive in the workplace.

You’re a dumbass.

Hunted. Gathered. Died.

Bee fun fact #3: Workers bees constitute over 98% of the colony's population. They could rise up and kill the Queen any time they want.

I remember an episode of That 70’s Show in which Red Forman has been fired and it’s caused him to rethink the whole idea of career and work. At a party a few days later, someone asks him, “So, what do you do?”

Red glares at the man.

“About what?” he replies.

Amen, brother.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

(PS: A quick note for anyone who’s going to comment that worker bees are quite happy, that they work so that all the bees survive and that within those deceptively simple hives they build astonishingly successful societies: shut up.)

illustrations by Orli Auslander