Did you forget what the office looked like? Did you visit the office sometime this year and see old, browning newspapers from March 2020?
Did you convert your guest room into a home office? Have you given up your khakis for sweatpants? Are you working from your house, never seeing your colleagues?
This is not one of those cases where the writer can connect you to data by saying, “You are not alone.”
Because you are alone, in a very personal sense, and you’re in the minority in a societal sense.
Only 1 in 8 adults in the United States was teleworking this past summer. At the peak of the pandemic, it only got as high as 1 in 3.
If this shocks you, you may be in the bubble bubble.
Follow the elite media, and you’ll believe that the story of 2020 and 2021 was a story of all of us being home — home for work, home for school, home all the time.
Oh no, adults forgot how to have conversations!
Oh no! My boss might make me return to work in late 2021!
It was the story for a large and very influential slice of society: the college-educated “knowledge workers,” which include the media and academia classes, where the belief in 2020 was that “staying at home at watching Netflix” was no sacrifice at all.
For the working class, however, pandemic work has looked different. Many men and women simply lost their jobs for a few months, and then, the lucky ones went back to work a few months later. Others went jobless for as long as a year until their children were allowed back in school.
Being at work (or out of work) was the majority experience for most of the pandemic, a fact that must shock most elites.
“Seventy-three percent of survey respondents who had teleworked because of the pandemic guessed that at least half of Americans had done the same,” Elaine Godfrey reported in the Atlantic. At the same time, the actual peak was about 35%.
That 35% just happened to include the most educated, wealthiest, and most influential people in the U.S. All of them are increasingly likely to live in Super ZIPs (to use Charles Murray’s term) and isolate into socioeconomically homogenous bubbles.
And in the past two years, a defining trait of the elite bubble was eschewing the workplace for a bubble.
