Now, home is where we do everything. Home is where we work. It’s also where we play with our children and take long hot baths. As everything gets jumbled together, it becomes so much harder to disconnect, to dissociate, to recharge. When you finish a day of work in these circumstances, you meet your family with work pressures still lingering on your mind and body. You no longer have that commute to calm you down and help you transition into the person you want to be at home. So the anxieties stay on the surface, make you irritable and glum, seeping through in your dealings with family. But it’s not like there’smore stress; it’s just that the stress used to be confined within the walls of a far-off space away from home. Now it’s there where you are and have to be. You cannot escape it no matter what. So as you sit at your dinner table and write an email to an annoying colleague, or scramble to finish a super urgent task that everyone’s waiting for you to complete, or try to keep yourself level-headed under the layers of bureaucracy that control and constrain you, that dinner table no longer becomes the place where you eat delicious homemade meals and laugh with your family. When you sit on that chair again, you cannot help but remember work and its associated displeasures. When work follows you to your dinner table, your sofa, your bed, your child’s room, your kitchen, it has invaded your sanctuary. It will always be there to haunt you, to bring you out of your homely comfort and solace. When the spatial divide fails, you’d hope that the temporal divide would hold strong; but the two divides had been so interconnected in work culture, that the fall of one compromises the other. We used to leave the office when our eight-hour shifts ended, but now that there is no office to leave, it feels as if those nine-to-five timings have become arbitrary as well. Hence the e-meetings at 6pm. Emails received at midnight. Colleagues calling your personal phone when you’re supposed to be spending time with people who actually matter. Working hours no longer apply. I had always hated the office because of the pressure and anxiety
60
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online