Work should be who you are, not where you live
Work Near Home will unleash a wave of opportunity for the long tail of overlooked talent, and a better quality of life for all of us.
Work has long been an existential threat to my quality of life, one that I have to manage daily. I had this revelation about three years ago, having just nagged my wife about the dangers of doom scrolling Instagram.
She calmly pointed out that I was giving LinkedIn exactly the same treatment.
Except it was much worse. It was the thin end of a toxic wedge that I’d been conditioned to aspire too. Status at work first, everything else second.
Before long, you end up with more of the office things (commuting, facetime, a bad back) and less of the home things (exercise, family, culture). It starts with just one late meeting, then it eats everything.
The results aren’t great. Bad for your health, your head and your heart.
Fortunately, my wife’s patience and the monotony of the daily commute eventually inspired something that at first seemed unattainable, too big to imagine was possible: Building a life I actually want to live, near to the people and places I love.
It’s not that I didn’t want to succeed in my work, rather, my aspirations took on a much broader horizon, centred on my physical and emotional health, and the health of the community on my doorstep.
In fact, a balanced life is a better way to get more from both. Work and life in concert, not in competition. Surely just a dream, the kind that you read in aspirational blogs but doesn’t change your Monday morning.
And yet suddenly, the last 18 months presents perhaps the most important choice to live more fulfilling lives we’ve ever faced. And it’s right in front of us, right now.
Collectively, our society has been questioning some of the foundational assumptions of our daily experience. Doing so together, we have a rare and collective opportunity to change the narrative.
We’ve all re-evaluated what the point of even being a human is. Suddenly, something as simple as hugging your mum is a core need. Or just going to the local shop. Or trying to find a moment of calm in a green space outdoors.
In this time of deep threat, we’ve retreated in many ways to the basic, human needs of our safety, being near to where we live, near to who we love.
Sure, you had to go into the office most days for ‘office kind of work’ before the pandemic. But not because of an immutable law of physics. It was because some people said so. People for whom commuting to an office was probably just fine.
‘Do what you love’ has a subtext, and it sounds exhausting.
But having lived through this awful time together, we can now make something better. We are united in our cause, aligned in our interests and attitudes.
That future is both something radical in the extreme to yesterday’s truth, and extraordinary in its simplicity.
The future of work is human centric, not office centric. It’s who you are, not where you live.
It’s ripping up the spaghetti bowl of bad reasons to congregate in factory-like environments, and instead starting from first principles.
It’s about you and me, and our friends, and the people who make up our local communities of shops, cafes, council workers, bus drivers and florists.
We’ve learned more about community and human connection than any of us can remember.
Let’s imagine a better life, a more balanced life, that reflects the nuance of human experience. This used to be the subject of speculative op eds, thoughtful health care practitioners and niche lifestyle coaches. Now, it’s all of us. It’s even our bosses.
We can give it a name, the world of work near home, a new category that builds work in harmony around your life to help you get better from both.
Not too close for comfort, not too far from remaining productive. After all, what’s the point of living in a place you love, if you spend the majority of your week getting out?
The best part is that it’s now all too obvious that the world had been missing out on its best talent. Work near home is perhaps the single most important enabler of people’s individual opportunity in the age of the internet.
Who you are, not where you are, should define your success.
It’s become alarmingly obvious now that the nineteenth century concept of daily workers migrating to the factory should have gone out of fashion a long time ago.
Every day, I used to have a very strange ritual. I would assemble a collection of these incredible feats of human ingenuity and design, small devices that enable me to be productive, and communicate from anywhere I wanted, in the palm of my hand. I’d put them in a bag, and pay to sit in a crowded metal tube for 40 minutes.
I won’t be doing that again. The work near home world is upon us.
