Microdosing American Office Culture
Recently read https://longreads.com/2022/06/16/love-song-to-costco/
I can't imagine being American without a 'fallback' culture. American coworkers have parents and grandparents, but no familial pressure to support the older generations in their family (anecdotally observed by me while working in American IT offices). It is the norm for young, American offspring to move out as quickly as they can to obtain social status and start their own families. That is true American hustle grindset-mindset culture. Of course, America is made of immigrants and America's strongest influence is its ability to accept anyone as an American to partake in America's pursuit of happiness. Can I be happy without being American? Americans visit family on (American) holidays and go back to working. I almost became this American stereotype if covid had not happened. I would be living in Virginia and visiting my family in Texas only on major American holidays; I did this from 2017-2020 and moved back home when covid hit.
The work from home option is a huge opportunity for Americans who belong to cultures with stronger generational bonds. We get our cake and eat it too; a big city job while being surrounded by our aging family in smaller cities. Pressure to move back into offices comes from executives who don't understand the cultural importance of remote work. I can start a family and have the support of my parents and grandparents. My children will know my parents and grandparents and will be able to visit them often. I've seen this graph a few times on twitter showing the return-to-office plateauing; I would like to imagine the plateau at ~48% is due to young American families, or for Americans supporting their older generations:
I do miss offices, though. The offices I used to work in were: a riverfront building shared with Lockheed Martin in Crystal City, Virginia (Who won Amazon's bid for their HQ2 location. Construction had already started by the time I moved to -> ); FCC's "old" building in DC near the Wharf (one time I was able to leave work and walk a block to a Wilco show there); and a WeWork in Rosslyn before their fallout. The building the WeWork was located in was especially nice: it's lobby floor and walls we're white marble and I had a keycard that let me enter the building and use the elevators. WeWork took up an entire upper floor, and the building also had a cafeteria in one of the middle floors. I would take the DC metro to and from this building and my apartment.
In the middle of writing this I found another graph indicating people around my age actually prefer to return to offices. It makes sense some younger people want to bond with coworkers more, but they're a considerably smaller group in comparison to 30+ year olds.
It was a nice time in my life, but I was disconnected from my family and cost of living was expensive. Some people have the luxury(?) of having family near a big city. As always, the answer is in the middle