the killing of George Floyd, #BlackLivesMatter became the message. While people are still arguing about racism and sexism and let us not forget the various intersections of the two, the bigger issue these days would appear to be transgender rights. Yes, brains bigger than mine have broken over the topic of transgender people, what their deal is, and where they came from (for even though they existed before five minutes ago, they were less in the news). Are they the frontier in a post-gender utopia, an existen- tial threat to feminism as we know it, or just people trying to go about their lives — lives that have been saddled, by others, with tre- mendous symbolic significance? The past year, then, saw debates about who gets to participate in women’s sports, and about which authors are too transphobic to appear at a library. It also saw anti-trans legislation in the United States, and pushback to drag queen story hours in southern Ontario. Some posed sensible-sounding questions about youth gender medicine, while others de- compensated over the fact that young people today are dyeing their hair purple. (They’ve been doing so for decades, but apparently
Balancing remote work with the rising cost of everything
that 45-year-olds are living in their parents’ basements for lack of other options.
neon hair now reads as a stance in the culture wars. I can’t keep up.) Everyone will go on talking about trans people, often to the detriment of actual trans people, until cultural preoccupations, as they always do, shift to the next topic. The rising price of... everything There was a time not that long ago when, if someone told me I’d be spending $10 on bread, I’d have said that this loaf better have been personally baked by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and autographed by my favourite actors. Yet I now regularly tap my credit card for this amount, for a loaf that, while on the large side, has no special fea- tures worth highlighting. People of all ages have become the elderly person who cannot be- lieve coffee no longer costs a nickel, because the cost of everything seems so untethered what it was even a year ago. Lunch at a bare- bones restaurant is $15 before tax and tip. Rent for a one-bedroom Toronto apartment is, at the time of my writing, approximately ten trillion dollars. Whatever you want to blame it on—inflation, continued supply chain disruptions, or rapacious supermarket magnates— everything costs like three times what it feels like it possibly would. Meanwhile, incomes have not tripled. These developments have led some to food banks, others to vegetarianism, and others still (ahem) to the nihilism of buying the nice cheese regardless. Cost-of-living increases have had a disproportionate impact on many Jews. If you want to live in a larger Jewish community, you’re effectively restricted to these higher-priced residential areas. When the price of groceries goes up, that of kosher food shoots higher still. And for the subset of Jews for whom continuity is a major concern, there are one or two implications there as well. The age keeps creeping up at which it becomes financially plausible for a young or not-so-young adult to live independently. A trend towards adulthood starting later seems at odds with a more-Jewish-babies mission. One can rail against intermarriage but this will do little to address the fact
The office you never leave The pandemic brought with it the work-from-home revolution. While plenty of people (emergency room physicians, delivery workers, etc.) did, unavoidably, continue doing their jobs in person throughout, white-collar office workers s were first forced into, and then discov- ered that they often enjoyed, the home office. Gone were the open- plan offices where every birthday was acknowledged with cake and the after-work happy hours with colleagues. The time had come to put up a shower curtain room divider between yourself and whoever you lived with, and hope the blurred-background Zoom function ob- scured the reality of your living situation. In the pauses between more existential concerns, many began reflecting on what the post-pandemic future would look like. Would downtowns survive? What would come of office buildings? Who would buy the rayon business suits, the $14 prepackaged salads? But also: What would come of sick days once staying home was the default? Would the parents of young kids appreciate the ability to work from home, or be too busy clamouring for irl childcare? How would things go for people with office-requiring jobs but no quiet space to work? Remote work seems like it will stick around in many sectors—at least in part, at least for a while. A lot of people seem to like it, and it allows employers to hire from a larger geographic pool. But the longer-term impact on how we live remains to be seen. It’s not clear if people will still meet friends and maybe even spouses through professional networks that exist solely on Zoom and Slack. Also unclear: whether white collar work will survive the arrival of AI. If a computer can play the role of lawyer, designer, or accountant, that’s going to more drastically alter the future of the labour market than where any of us have parked our laptops. n
68
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator