My Quiet Life

When I worked at AT&T, I used to work at home some days, and I found I was easily distracted, and I would compensate for that by extending my work hours. The end result was that I spent all my time drifting in and out of the work state, without any boundaries that would give me a chunk of time that was really my own.

Didn’t like that much.

These days I’m working from home a day or two each week, being at least as conscientious about actually working as I am at the office, and basically coping, because I have enough going on in my life that I just don’t have time to let my workday expand. Also not working on Wednesdays, which has been pretty great.

I am inclined to agree with you — to some extent. I agree that working from home “blurs the lines” between “work” and “not-work”, but this raises all sorts of issues to me about why we should feel compelled to divide this line so harshly.

It reminds me of Kevin Carson’s “commodified rebellion for the wage-slave” post (I read it every morning before work to get me pumped up!):

This insistent denial, this clutching at any psychological defense against the sheer repugnance of a “job,” this desperate need to believe that “this is not really us, this is not what we really do,” is quite understandable. We don’t cut loose our values, our priorities, our judgment, and our dignity, and leave them at the door when we enter our homes; but that’s exactly what we do in our existence on the job. For the majority of people throughout history, for the majority of Americans until around a hundred years ago, “work” was something we did on our own turf: the farmer or tradesman planned the order of his tasks as he saw fit, and carried them out from beginning to end in accordance with his own judgment and sense of workmanship. A “job,” on the other hand, amounts (as Berry said) to being somebody else’s tool. And the main reason for the change, a dead horse I’ve spent a considerable amount of time beating in this blog, is: We Was Robbed!

What’s more, it’s utterly unnatural. As a commentator on the local public access channel recently pointed out, we’re biologically designed to respond, when somebody won’t stop following us around and bugging us, by either kicking the crap out of them or getting away from them. But for eight hours or more at a time, we’re put into a situation where we’re expected to smile and nod, instead. No wonder so many people who get tired of smiling and nodding show up on the six o’clock news.

When I worked in an office, I had to be there from 8am to 5pm. Some days were very busy, and I would be there past 5, with every minute of the day crammed with activity.

Other days were Cubicle Drift days. I would kill time by blogging, chatting with other bored employees, etc. For every 70 hour deadline week, there were 3 weeks that could have legitimately been 25 hour weeks. The nice thing about working from home is that when you have a 25 hour week, you can use the other 15 hours to do your laundry, vacuum, go to the grocery, etc. I read fewer blogs now, but my house is cleaner.

For the majority of people throughout history, for the majority of Americans until around a hundred years ago, “work” was something we did on our own turf…

Utter nonsense, Chris. Tell that to a hundred generations of European serfs.

Well, note the careful wording of his sentence.. I think he’s saying “the majority of people throughout history” and “the majority of Americans until around a hundred years ago” as separate entities — not to imply that all people up until “Americans until around a hundred years ago” fit that bill.

But yeah, I have a feeling he’s molding his rant around an idealized cross-section of history that fits his vision of utopia.

In fact, in that “We Was Robbed” essay he links to, he talks a little about serfdom and his libertarian ideal:

Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc recounted a process in the high Middle Ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been “a system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures.”