To some workers, the cubicle "never looked so good;" to others, home sweet home!

 Author Amanda Mull ponders the advantages of the corporate office building as the placement of an employee's desk over its location at the employee's domicile.  Actually, the employee could make use of them both, if he had two locations of his workplace.  Her article, appearing in October's Atlantic is entitled, "A Cubicle Never Looked So Good."

I've worked both locations--the home for the past 30+ years living in semi-retirement.  I can tell you that Ms. Mull is correct in her implied criticism of the home: it's isolated from where the action occurs--viz., at the corporate building.  You experience feelings of lonliness.  But that just leads to the employee's greater attention and spotlight on what he is doing to further the goals of the corporation rather than upon his being liked at the place he performs on the company's behalf.  

And working at home has just as long a history:  in the Middle Ages, the craftsman, e.g., a cobbler, sold his shoes where he made them: his home.  Today, the salesman may have an office at corporate, but he is there infrequently. for he knows his worth to the company is in the places he secures a sale of his company's products.

Also what analysts have noted, during the present period of the pandemic and economic slowdown, is that workers who primarily work at home have greater impact on their neighborhood and locale than when they habitually commuted to the big city.  It has led to the theory that the suburbs will eventually become more "citified" in the goods and services available to those who live and work primarily near home.

Moreover, there is a distinct advantage, which if you've worked in both as a primary location, you're probably well aware.  And that is, the office politics that, when you primarily worked there, can have little effect on your productivity and steps you take toward meeting your assignments and work responsibilities, working from afar.  Whereas you worried over what others around you thought how you proceeded to handle your assignments, you now concentrate on how meaningful those actions are to achieve corporate aims, forgetting what others in the chain of command think about you!

      

What's really driving the stacking of the Supreme Court with conservative justices?

If we really think about it, I think we're led to an underlying basic desire that causes us to want to control the world in which we live no matter what we may be confronting at the moment to the contrary.  We want to think that the carbon fuels upon which our lust for energy depends is not harmful to our environment; that the pandemic virus we're currently facing isn't a major threat to our lives; that we can just go on living like most times we've found has been the successful modi operandi in the past; and things will be okay for us.  So that climate change is just a minor shift in temperature which our planet is now recording; nothing really to get all alarmed about--we're just talking a matter of a few degrees.

And if there's one thing that we're sure able to control is the rules and laws we live by:  they really can be regarded by us as the immutable givens--because we've made them and have dedicated ourselves to live by them!

Ah, but wait.  Times change.  We think nothing really is different, but at least the calendar dates aren't revisited.  Time marches on!  

Yet by thinking that the current situation is just a repeat of situations we've handled in the past by laws and regulations we've instituted, we can come a cropper to just some simple delusions.  The facts of some present event certainly are not the same as we had before: we confess the dates are not repeats.  But should we then conclude, so what!

Well, to a degree we humans, being creatures of habits, are led to believe the present resembles the past.  To a degree that assumption works for us; but occasionally we're led to become dogmatic adherents to our habits, and not recognize this principle of regularity in experience has its limitations, that are forced upon us by the details of our current perceptions we ought to be taking very seriously.

In general, to believe the future will be a repeat of the past is as a matter of public policy a willing subjugation of our thinking to that of a dictator or tyrant, whether he wear a judge's robe or a military uniform or a business suit.  It's crap!

What we need to take on the future rationally rather than emotionally is to carefully analyze what we face and determine how best to handle it.  For no rational person can come away with thinking climate change is just the same thing we have come upon when there's a recurring hurricane or temporary dry spell.  And, there's no amount of rationalizing that will lead one to the justifiable conclusion that an unarmed man in handcuffs should be shot dead by a policeman who has detained him for a parking infraction.