All Remote Work And No Work Wife Makes Jack A Dull Boy

Why teleworking is not the workers' paradise it's cracked up to be.

Pardon me for illustrating a Backbencher entry with a still from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film I don’t even particularly like, for the second time in the space of two weeks. But Jack Torrance is unavoidably the poster child for the perils of remote work, which happens to be the subject of my latest New Republic essay.

I don’t mean to overstate my case. I’ve been working on the hybrid model myself since the dawn of the 21st century and even a little bit earlier. I think everybody should be allowed some work time at home, either in the morning (my habit before Covid) or 2-3 days a week. And, sure, some limited number of employees (for instance, my son Will) should be allowed to work from another city or country, provided they aren’t in upper management.

The problem arises when everybody does it pretty much all the time, as is happening, for instance, in my own office. Washington is the nation’s remote-work capital, with about half of us working from home. Half smokes, go-go music, and remote work: These are DC’s gifts to American culture. I go to my office twice a week and feel like (to mix movie metaphors) the young Christian Bale riding a bicycle through his parents’ abandoned Shanghai house after the Japanese invasion of China in Empire of the Sun.

There’s mounting evidence that maximum freedom to work remotely is not in workers’ best interests, not least because if Joe can work from Sarasota what’s to stop him from being replaced by Kamal who can work from Bangalore for 40 percent less? That’s actually happening! Also, people start to treat each other savagely when they aren’t reminded through daily face to face contact that their coworkers belong to the same species. Also … well, you can read my piece here.

PS I quit Twitter yesterday because I could no longer abide the narcissistic toad who owns it. So please subscribe to Backbencher!

PPS I hope no one takes offense at my headline’s reference to work wives, a concept first articulated in 1987 by the witty Atlantic writer turned New Yorker writer David Owen. No sexism is intended. Indeed, work-wifery was gender-fluid before gender fluidity was cool. At Slate, where I worked a dozen years, my work wife was Jack Shafer and my work husband was Dana Stevens. Shafer came back for more at Politico, and now we manage as best we can through near-daily phone calls and, until yesterday, a routine exchange of spirited insults on Twitter.