WeLose Ourselves, WeBecome One
A New York Times feature piece recently focused on WeWork, a real-estate company that runs co-working spaces. While the Times provided a thorough insight into the character of the company’s wide-eyed leadership team and their strange obsession with a frat-bro lifestyle mixed with collectivism, they never seemed to touch on the underlying principle of what makes living and working in the same place so terrible.
In 2015 I was assigned to work on a client project based out of New York City, which would require me to either commute from my (rarely visited) apartment in Palo Alto to the Big Apple every Monday through Friday, or stay at a company-sponsored apartment for the 4 week duration of my assignment. Rather than waste the precious hours of my life on transcontinental flights I chose corporate housing. As it happened, much of our New York office was closed for renovation and the company had rented out several floors of a 5-star hotel to act as its temporary office.
I had been unintentionally thrown into a WeWork lookalike, with a team of coworkers all thrown into a lavish accommodation where we lived, worked, ate, slept, and did everything else. There were many problems with this situation.
At the surface level, the convenience seemed to balance with the obvious downsides. I could get from my room to my office in 10 seconds, and I always knew where to find a coworker if I needed them. Likewise, the building concierge service was helpful and accommodating. The clear downside was that I would often go without leaving the building for multiple days at a time, which disrupted my sleep cycle, as well as making me antsy and contributing to an extraordinary lack of physical activity that left me feeling down and gaining weight.
The social aspect of being surrounded by coworkers 24/7 brought much bigger downsides. I don’t drink, so I was excluded from nearly every social activity that my work team undertook. Being socially separated from coworkers in this way not only made me feel isolated and alone (on top of being 3000 miles from my girlfriend, my home, all my friends, and everyone and everything I cared about), but impacted my ability to collaborate with people at work. It felt like the ice needed to be broken every time I needed to work with someone on even a small task.
On top of that, one of my coworkers and I didn’t get along spectacularly. There wasn’t a strong sense of enmity, per se, but he and I had an awkward working relationship at best. Without a separation of work and home, there was no escape: he was always just around the corner. I could never unwind away from his presence.
While social awkwardness and isolation are the building blocks of a Kafkaesque nightmare, the true demon of the combined living and working space is the total loss of the notion of “work hours.” When your home and the office are one, meaning you sleep in the office every night, you can reasonably be expected to work at any moment of any day and for any reason. With the modern age of telecommuting, being “in the office” has come to primarily be a signifier that you are ready and available to work. So when you cannot leave the office, when can you stop working?
The vision of a person externalizing their meaning and identity into work is inherently absurd. When we define ourselves only through our jobs, who are we really? We forfeit our internal selves for an ephemeral externalization of our worth, seeking a purpose and definition that exists in absolute. That absolute purpose doesn’t exist: if you lose your job, the meaning you projected and worked so hard for is lost with it, and then what’s left if you’ve given up everything else? Or even worse, what if you meet someone whose validation you want and they don’t care about where you work? We become nothing more than Willy Loman, unable to reclaim ourselves as we gradually and irreversibly slip away.
Spaces that integrate work and home do more than deindividualize us or provide us with convenience. They go beyond collectivizing employees into an indistinguishable unit. They blend your work, your home, and your identity into one, efficiently removing any facet of your life that can prevent you from working. Coating it in Silicon Valley buzzwords, grandiose machinations of world-changing utopia and trendy ironwork furniture is a cynical way of extracting extra work from employees, but WeWork hardly invented it.
