In my defense, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
Driving 40 minutes through traffic with my whole family in tow to a rain-soaked picnic and then deciding to leave my wife and infant son in the car while I ran over to the tents to say a quick hi-bye—and then driving 40 minutes back home?
Yeah, doesn't seem right. For one, that travel to event time ratio is egregious: a 4:1 ratio is acceptable for a doctor's appointment and practically nothing else.
But more importantly, there was the stated reason that we slogged around the Denver metro area on a rainy Friday afternoon:
I needed to show my face.
The impulse I had—and, to my family's disastrously, acted—is further fodder for my recent reflections on the return to the office, specifically the culture aspect of it.
It's the thing I like least about the argument for "culture" put forward for returning to the office—this idea that something magical happens when you put a group of people in the same room.
The reality, obviously (although this may not be so obvious to all), is that magic doesn't always happen.
It looks like foolish utopian thinking to claim that there's something special about putting people together in a room.
The premise here presupposes that everyone wants to be around other people for eight hours a day, five days a week. I'm not sure I need to spend any time explaining that this assumption is absurd. (The fact of everyone having done this for many, many years is no more than that: a fact—and a fact reflective of economic reality and labor management than of employees' actual desires.)
That magic doesn't always happen, of course. So if it's not the mere presence of people, what is it?
One answer is that people want to be there.
Feeling preemptive guilt for not doing something, by the way, doesn't seem equivalent to a desire, by the way. I didn't want to go to the picnic as much as I thought I needed to go to this picnic.
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