A Different Kind of Infection
I’ll never forget how happy everyone at the office was when they announced that we had to work from home: the wide smiles on everyone’s faces, the bustling excitement of collecting all the laptops and equipment to take home, the impromptu trainings on fancy new meeting software. It was exciting; we all thought that working from home meant getting away from all the stress and scrutiny we feel within the office walls. We never imagined that it would mean bringing that stress and scrutiny home with us. Work ends where home begins. Our brains had been hard-wired to associate the home with family and leisure: home is where we sleep, where we play with our children, where we take long hot baths, where we invite our family and friends. At home, we are genuine; we are what we want to be, not what we are paid to be. The office is where we work. It is where we straighten our backs and sit without putting our feet up on the table. It is where our brains remain on high alert, ready to work in overdrive if the situation requires it. It is where we smile at people we don’t really like, where we trap our frustrations, only letting them peek through carefully worded emails that overuse the word “kindly.” The office is the place for stress, the place for restraint, the place for productivity. That’s how we used to function. There was a clear, spatial divide between home and work. It made it easy for us to strike a balance between the two. We were used to the routine: the office was where we activated our mental engines; home was where we took our foot off of the gas pedal and let the engine rest and recharge. Not anymore. Now, the pandemic has disintegrated that spatial divide, and we’ve realized how much we had taken it for granted.
59
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online