This week my company officially returned to the office. For the first time in exactly two years, there were more people commuting into work than staying home; more people talking around a table than on video. The office is no longer on life-support, but actually thriving – if only for a few days a week. After a handful of fits and starts, I wasn’t sure the day would ever come.
For the most part, it’s been easy to slip back into the office I’m used to. The “old way of work” might be gone forever, but it was impossible to ignore the familiarity of it all this past week. I’m wearing my old outfits, listening to the same podcasts on my commute and eating in the cafeteria again. I’m staying later than I should to catch up with colleagues, and making excuses to print decks. It turns out that even the things I said I wouldn’t miss about the office, I was quick to get back to.
Most familiar of all is the energy. I’m starting my day surrounded by other people, instead of alone at my computer. I’m unloading two years of pent-up office talk – workout routines, favorite fast food, good TV shows – and listening in on so much more. I’m bumping into colleagues in the hallway and reminiscing about old times.
At some point the novelty will wear off. The commute will be a drag, and all those little chats will start to feel unproductive. But for now, it’s comforting to revisit the past. Being back in the office felt a lot like a college reunion, and after five years at the company, it is a sort of homecoming to be back where it all started – particularly for those who spent much longer in the office pre-COVID than I did.
But then I realize that many of my coworkers are no longer at the company. Two years have gone by – two years! – since we were all together, and more has changed than stayed the same. My entire team in 2019 has moved on to new roles in disparate parts of the company. There are waves of new recruits who have never seen the office, and by the time we’ve settled into this new normal, two more of my best work friends will be gone. Where did all the time go?
Nowhere else in my life is there such clear delineation between pre- and post-COVID. We left the office in March 2020 and did not return in earnest until March 2022. Our work timeline collapsed. And if there’s one common thread in my conversations with colleagues, it’s the feeling that no time has passed at all. The last two years were just lost.
It’s easy, back in a familiar setting, to mourn that lost time. As I’ve written before, “the common inclination among all of us is to rush towards nostalgia, whose Greek roots, nostos – return home – and algos – pain – connote a sort of wounded remembering.” Particularly during the excitement and energy of this past week, it’s easy to focus on what we lost by being apart.
But our nostalgia ignores something critical: When one timeline collapses, another expands. Those two years gave us the opportunity to extract more time from things we’d been neglecting. One coworker established a standing breakfast date each Friday with their kids. Another took over school drop offs. I found time for this newsletter and coffees with my grandfather. Everyone has their own thing.
How we think about the last two years is up to us. We can treat it as lost time, or we can treat it as repurposed time. We can be excited for the return of old, familiar things without expecting them to have stayed exactly the same. To paraphrase a colleague, “there are seasons in life for everything.” We’re all entering a new season, in which we sew together pieces from our old lives and our pandemic ones: We come back to the office, but the breakfast dates at home stay.
Our natural instinct is to swing from one extreme to the other. On Wednesday, surrounded by people, it was hard not to wish for that same office environment every day of the week. But I don’t wish for that every day. The office comes with tradeoffs, just like anything else. As we come back to it – and to all the other “lost” parts of our lives – we would do well to remember that.
We shouldn’t run blindly towards the familiar.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Training Update, March 13th – Training for a new race and working towards a challenging goal
What I’m Reading:
Low Expectations – Morgan Housel
“Be OK with things staying roughly the way they are right now, or worse. Because for most people the way things are right now is indistinguishable from magic relative to how things used to be.”
A Case of Zoom Dysmorphia – Anne Helen Peterson
“A full day of meetings is always draining. But it is even more draining when you’re in constant self-surveillance mode.”
What I’m Listening To:
Patty McCord on Transforming the Conversation on Company Culture – Elevate Podcast
Discord: Jason Citron – How I Built This Podcast