Today I want to bring back the topic of work. A while ago I wrote about how I believed our current lifestyles and work culture were the enemy of sustainability. Then , of course, things changed massively when the pandemic hit. At least , in terms of where we worked . Home working became the norm , and in many cases the new norm is not budging away. Interestingly, according to this episode of hidden brain (a great podcast by the way) , not everyone is so happy with keeping on working from home. And I don’t blame them , home working can be tough , filled with isolation and ‘please take me away from zoom’ moments. It can feel tight to be sharing a home with other people working (and having to time your 'calls' so you don't end up speaking over one another if you share your apartment. . And then again , it’s not even that working from home is directly more sustainable.Because we are using more heating and electricity, and well because this zoom thing is very heavy on data , and data pollute !
But - if we just for a moment decouple home working and the pandemic, and imagine that this situation just accelerated some practices and made some new habits , we have a situation where we can have a much more creative working life , if we want it. For example, depending on the job we have, we can work from anywhere we want to ! More of us can be 'digital nomads’, so if we were 'jealous' of those who could, now, it is possible. One can finally travel and not sacrifice the career, or finally leave that ugly town to let's say, go live in the countryside , make that ‘long distance’ relationship a ‘close distance’ one. There are many benefits, and the greatest one I see is 'decentralisation'. And yes, one may say 'only some people could'. And yes, true but in time, more people moving, meaning more services needed in other areas, meaning slowly the re-distribution of the economy from a few central points to wider areas. Who knows, maybe it will bring back a flourishing of the countryside areas. So yes, I hear the arguments: maybe home working is not perceived as great by everybody , because there can be a tendency to be more isolated , but that’s only because it is not been seen as an opportunity and there is a tendency to get stuck in old habits , just from home instead of an office. But , if we open our eyes and start considering it as an opportunity for change it can definitely be beneficial. We can be happier. And, I think that if you are happy you need less stuff, because usually we fill our life with ‘stuff’ and are often in search of the ‘new toy’ to fill the happiness cup. And they just fill it temporarily. So then we go buy more and so on and so on... remember that i think that happiness and sustainability have 'minimalism' in common! Maybe I am writing this because I am one of those ‘lucky’ people, and frankly I am able to concentrate on working pretty much anywhere, whether it is on a 26 hour ferry journey or a parking lot in the middle of an industrial area balancing my computer on my knees (that’s why it’s so easy to convince my supervisor that the ‘ i am off for a few weeks, I will work no worries’ is true) , but I believe that when the ‘game is worth the candle’ anyone would be capable of the same . So here it is our time to challenge old systems , and stop the cycle designed to only have production and consumption and make us miserable so we consume more and then go away on pointless holidays which are also based on the consumption of ‘fun’…
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