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Interesting and good read; and this is one of the reasons full time stay-at-home parents suffer burnout. Home *is* work; you’re on call 24/7 with no down time. Tasks are completed and then have to be done again with regularity; a never ending cycle.

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Case in point: Was working on a documentary project with a company who was filled with vibrant, happy folk in February of 2020. Cut to August of 2020, working with them to release the project we saw the same people on Zoom after they had worked exclusively from home for five months and it was catastrophic.

All looked pale and demoralized, many didn't even bother to wash hair or tend to makeup. It was an incredibly depressing experience to see people so transformed and I'm 100% convinced it was due to them sitting at home and communicating via digitized voices and faces.

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I used to have a full-time job where I worked through lunches and stayed late to complete projects when needed, but when I got home, my husband and I enjoyed a creative explosion of writing, artmaking, documentary film editing, music composition, and whatever else we could cram into our evenings and weekends. Then we started our own business, and all private boundaries disappeared, and I found myself working around the clock to meet deadlines, answering emails from clients in the middle of the night, and springing into action as soon as anything was needed. I put off my own creative work for over a decade.

Then, last year, I started a Substack, and now I spend every possible moment writing, researching, and participating in this community, and I dread when I have to drag myself to work on a client project. Same workspace, same workaholism, but now I am doing my own passion work, and I leap out of bed in the morning and stay up for marathon sessions to finish an article and can’t wait to start on the next one.

I realize this is not the lesson you are stressing in this article, el gato, but for me, this is bliss, and I feel like I’m finally able to fulfill my life’s purpose—provided I can make it sustainable, because there are all those cats to feed.

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My great resignation story is that I refused to get the clot shot. I loved working from home. My ex-company refused to allow me to do that without poisoning myself for no reason. I bet alot of resigned people have the same story.

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One of the best decisions our construction company made at the beginning of the "pandemic" was to keep everyone possible working in the office. We debated sending office folks home, as that's what the "health experts" recommended. Ultimately, we decided if our field guys were deemed essential and had to go out and do their jobs, we should too. So many peers went the opposite direction and were miserable because of their new WFH status.

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The WEF wants you to eat bugs and soylent in your co-working and co-living space (aka gulag). Metaverse will provide the latest NPC updates.

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Completely disagree with this take on teleworking. I've worked remote for over 15 years with various companies and groups. I've never seen burnout as a result of working remotely. I've definitely seen burnout from terrible managers (generally bad people overall) and their unrealistic expectations. All it takes, is good communication and properly set expectations. I work fewer hours than I ever have working remote, yet everything gets done, and nobody is bitching. My recommendation to people struggling with this is: "be an adult! learn to say No!"

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I'd love to go back to the office, but my employer requires the 2-year-old, 2-dose, EUA regimen still. It's a joke.

And, before that, they screwed everything up by converting all our private offices into open space. Everyone used to have a (small) office with a door and a whiteboard and lots of quiet time. They took the wheels off that, too. Because Zuckerberg liked to wear a hoodie and hack around other people or something.

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Mar 22, 2022·edited Mar 22, 2022

"unremitting bludgeoning and intrusion is what drives despair."

Confiscatory taxation, regulation, inflation, over-reaching legal risk... as a doc so many of my colleagues express frustration. The professional class in this country is a captured and subdued cadre . A lot of us make higher than average incomes and dont want to do anything to buck the system. Because of massive government intrusion into the practice of medicine, the administrative burdens and costs have become too much for one or even a small group of doctors to handle. More and more doctors sell out to private equity and large not for profit medical systems. The docs become cogs in a giant crony fascist machine. We swore an oath, many of us are well meaning and well intentioned but now many of us feel trapped in a dysfunctional system; dependent on the state for licensure and income. The cognitive dissonance is disturbing to many. Many choose to simply ignore the perverse incentives and conflicts of interest and keep their heads down, follow the script and do the best they can.

Most of the docs I know in NNJ who are younger and healthy took the covid shot and allowed their minor children to get it as well. If they didnt get the shot they risked losing hospital privileges . Their children would not be able to attend colleges.

Almost everybody caved in to fear and peer pressure and were infected with group think.

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I completely agree. The always on is a huge trap that I fell into myself early in the pandemic. I'm a manager of a team of software engineers. I liked the boundary that the office brought between my professional and personal life, however, it always seemed to invade during times of emergency. I'm on call 24/7 to be able to support those folk that pay the bills. I can live with that. What I struggled with was getting up early (was an early riser) and instead of doing personal things, I would hit my laptop at 7am to get some work done. And then still being "at work" until 6-7 pm. It made for a very long and exhausting day. Even a type A workaholic personality like myself couldn't keep it up for long. 10 months in I had a moment of clarity and starting setting boundaries. I won't sit down at the laptop before 9AM. I have an hour block daily on my calendar for a lunch time break even if I don't eat as time away from work. Finally unless something is on fire, I log off at 5-5:30 and just keep my phone nearby. It did wonders for my mental health.

Are there other stresses? Sure. Like the landscapers that always seem to be on my block with their infernal leaf blowers. The housekeeper (g-d bless her) who comes once a week to do the bits I don't like to do, has a habit of chasing me from room to room. Fortunately my kids are 18 and don't require constant attention to keep them from killing themselves or setting fire to the house. My elderly parents are another story and always traipsing through my home office. Fortunately they are now trained to think before interrupting me with "is this something you would have called me at the office for?" The cats I can't do anything about and my team has become accustomed to periodic gibberish text via Slack and just greet the cat who just said hello to them.

I do miss being in the office. The organic, social aspect of the interaction. I don't miss the hour commute into NYC, nor do I ever want to step foot in that destroyed city again until saner heads prevail and put it back together again like Giuliani did years ago (I'm old enough to remember the city before him). And now my company has closed the office in the city and converted us all to remote workers so I couldn't go anywhere even if I so chose. When my little corner of crazy blue lib bergen county becomes sane again, I might pick up my laptop and go sit at Starbucks for a change of scenery and cast.

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We're gonna need a better number system because calling this 100% correct doesn't encompass a fraction of it. The ravaging hordes came with a router and a company laptop so we'd be distracted from the stink.

This is serfdom and all the young 'uns stuck their necks out eagerly for the iron collar and didn't realize no one ever hands you its key. You gotta cut off the hand holding it and free yourself.

Thank God you've got cats at home to help defuse the rage because the feel of that fur and the sound of those purrs are probably essential to keeping you sane. Ain't it like being eaten from the inside out, watching the destruction of a full generation and the one rising?

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Also another downside of being at home all the time is access to 24/7 mainstream news. That will destroy your mental health. Boundaries are the key to all happiness.

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It seems like everything in the past 2+ years has been a descent into madness.

When the state shut down in March 2020, our office told us we could work from home or office, & for the first few weeks, I was the only person in the office. I knew myself well enough to know that w/out the external structure of coming up to the office, sitting @ my desk & working on the computer for the requisite 8 hour day, I’d be a complete failure @ working from home. From home, I knew I’d find all sorts of excuses to do things I wanted or needed to do instead of work. Plus, my bosses knew they could contact me during those 8 hours & nothing more unless it was really urgent or important. “Home” would never have remained a refuge if I’d been working from there

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My husband recently started a new job and their policy has always been WFH. We were delighted by this as I'm a homemaker (homeschool our son) and can keep everything running quietly and smoothly. A spare bedroom on the second floor has been turned into an office and has two windows that look out over trees so his office is nicer than many offices he's had over the years. I fix meals and he takes breaks when he's able to and on nice days takes the dogs out to the backyard for some frisbee catching. And not to forget: the people he comes across in the hallway are always people he wants to see. 😀

Our situation is ideal and certainly not one that everyone can replicate but we consider it a blessing.

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I’ve never had to deal with the work from home thing, because I’m an ICU nurse. Burn out has been a hot topic in the medical world too though. And I’ve wondered for months how much of that was basically self sabotage. I work in pediatrics, so we never experienced covid the way adult ICU’s did. But I assume that a normal respiratory season for adults is similar to kids, you stay busy for several months and get really smacked for a couple of those. Packed ER’s, every room full, diverting patients…business as usual. So if we had gone through covid minus the media/government involvement, how likely is it that people would have just chugged through without giving it much extra thought? I think it’s pretty likely

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WFH also steals the personal/social part of work (and post-work gathering), which is key especially for the younger people in the work force, those without family lives at their homes. More recent college and law school grads who have not even seen their “coworkers” in person.

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