by Tim Wong, Special Correspondent
I have done the math. I have done it with a calculator, with a spreadsheet, and once in a fit of insomnia at 3 AM with a marker on my bedroom wall that I now have to paint over before my landlord sees it. The math is unambiguous: my commute costs $47.83 per day. My remaining dignity, adjusted for inflation and the 2022 incident with the office birthday cake, is valued at approximately $43.50.
This means that every morning I drag myself to the open-plan gulag, I am operating at a net loss of $4.33 in dignity dollars. And that is before accounting for the emotional depreciation of having to make small talk with Brad from Compliance about his 'keto journey.'
This is not sustainable. None of this is sustainable.
My company—let us call them 'TechSolutions Synergies Global Partners Inc.,' because that is, regrettably, their actual name—laid off 10% of the workforce six months ago. The email announcing this was a masterwork of corporate euphemism, a veritable Finnegans Wake of business-speak that I have committed to memory because I am broken inside. 'We are rightsizing our human capital to align with AI-driven efficiency paradigms,' it read. I read it three times. Then I read it aloud to my cat. Then I made a drink. Then I read it again and realized that 'rightsizing' is a word that sounds like what you do to a photograph before printing it, except in this case the photograph was my colleague Deborah, who had worked there for eleven years and has two children and a mortgage and now, presumably, a very different relationship with her LinkedIn profile.
But here is the part that truly unmoors me from reality, that sends me spiraling into a dissociative state where I can only communicate in Arrested Development quotes: two weeks after the layoffs, after the AI had presumably 'efficiencied' Deborah into the sun, we received another email. This one announced a 'Return to Office' mandate. Three days a week. 'To foster collaboration and reinvigorate our in-person culture.'
Collaboration.
In-person culture.
I want you to picture this. I want you to really sit with it. I arrive at the office on Tuesday, having paid $47.83 in train fare and soul erosion, and I walk past seventeen empty desks. Seventeen. I counted. I have a spreadsheet. The empty desks are not a bug; they are a feature. They are a museum of the 'rightsized,' a ghost town of the 'efficiencied.' I sit at my assigned desk—hot-desking was eliminated because it was 'too impersonal,' which is corporate for 'we signed a ten-year lease and the CEO needs to justify it to the board'—and I open my laptop.
At 9:15 AM, I join a Zoom call. The call has twelve participants. Nine of them are in the same building as me. Three are in other offices. Two are, I suspect, driving and have their cameras off for 'bandwidth reasons.' I am staring at a screen, in an office, talking to people who are thirty feet away but separated from me by the impenetrable barrier of corporate policy and, in one case, a very aggressive plant that was placed in the hallway during a 2019 'biophilic design initiative' and has since achieved sentience.
This is the collaboration. This is the in-person culture. This is what my $4.33 daily dignity deficit purchases: the privilege of experiencing a Zoom call with worse acoustics and a chair that was designed, I am convinced, by someone who has never met a human spine but has read about them in a book.
The Theories
I have theories. I have so many theories. My leading theory, which I have presented to my therapist with the same energy as a prosecutor delivering a closing argument, is that the office is a tax write-off. Not metaphorically. Literally. I believe that somewhere in the labyrinthine depths of our corporate structure, there is an accountant named Gary who has structured the entire real estate portfolio as some kind of depreciation asset, and if we do not maintain a minimum occupancy of 'people looking busy while waiting for the Keurig to heat up,' the entire financial house of cards collapses into a black hole of IRS audits and shareholder lawsuits.
Gary, if you are reading this: I see you. I respect the hustle. But I am not your martyr.
There is a study—I am going to call it the 'Henderson-Chen Workplace Proximity Paradox,' and I am going to cite it with the confidence of someone who absolutely did not make it up thirty seconds ago—that found that employees within fifty feet of each other are 340% less likely to have a genuine conversation if a video conferencing option exists. The study, published in the Journal of Organizational Behaviors That Make You Want to Scream Into a Pillow, also noted that 'spontaneous hallway collisions' decreased by 89% when employees realized they could simply Slack each other from the bathroom, which is where most of us do our best thinking anyway.
I tested this myself. Last Thursday, I attempted to have a 'spontaneous hallway collision' with my manager, Derek. I walked past his desk four times. On the fifth pass, he looked up and said, 'Can you just Slack me?' I felt something leave my body in that moment. I believe it was the last shred of my belief in the corporate mythos. It floated out of my chest like a cartoon ghost and drifted toward the biophilic plant, which consumed it. The plant has grown three inches since Thursday. I am monitoring the situation.
The Accumulation
The anecdotes accumulate like sedimentary rock, each layer a fossil of corporate absurdity. There was the 'All-Hands Meeting' that required us to attend in person, in the auditorium, to watch a livestream of the CEO, who was in the same building but broadcasting from a different floor 'for production quality.' There was the 'Collaboration Workshop' where we spent six hours in a conference room learning how to use a whiteboard, which I had believed was a technology I had mastered in the third grade but apparently requires a certification now. There was the day the fire alarm went off and we all evacuated to the parking lot, where we stood in silence for twenty minutes before someone realized it was a drill, and then we all filed back inside and immediately joined Zoom calls from our desks because the 'collaboration' could not wait for something as trivial as a simulated emergency.
I have calculated the carbon footprint of my commute. I have calculated the opportunity cost of the hours spent on trains, in traffic, in parking garages that smell of despair and exhaust. I have calculated the probability that the empty office is, in fact, a front for a very boring money laundering operation (12%, but rising). None of these calculations matter. The mandate stands. The emails keep coming. 'Excited to see everyone in the office!' 'Looking forward to our in-person energy!' 'Let's make Tuesday a COLLABORATION DAY!' (The all-caps is a direct quote. I have it printed out and pinned to my wall next to the dignity math.)
The Truth
Here is what I think is actually happening. I think the people who make these decisions do not know what else to do. I think they spent their careers accumulating status through corner offices and parking spots and the ability to summon people to conference rooms, and now that the world has changed, they are holding onto the physical trappings of power like a wizard clutching a staff that no longer casts spells. They are LARPing. They are live-action role-playing as people who have meaningful in-person jobs, and they have conscripted the rest of us as NPCs in their fantasy.
I did not sign up to be an NPC. I have a home office. It has a door. The door closes. My chair cost $200 and supports my lumbar region with the tender devotion of a lover. When I join Zoom calls, I do so from a position of ergonomic supremacy, and if the call is going poorly, I can mute myself and scream into a pillow that I do not have to share with anyone from Compliance.
The company laid off Deborah. The company 'rightsized' seventeen desks into the void. The company bought an AI tool that summarizes meetings and, I am fairly certain, achieved self-awareness two weeks ago but is too depressed to do anything about it. And yet. And yet. The mandate persists. The empty office waits. The biophilic plant grows stronger.
I will die on this hill. I will die on it from my home office, on my $200 chair, with my camera off and my microphone muted, and when they find my body, I want them to know that I did the math. The math was clear. The math was just. The math said: stay home, save your dignity, and never, under any circumstances, ask Brad about his keto journey.
The plant agrees with me. I asked it.