My team at work has been told that the age of working from home is over and that we must now work our full working weeks in the office. The company’s owners believe that anyone working from home is not working, despite the evidence of the last two years. They do take most of their work meetings from home themselves, despite living less than five minutes from the central London office.
Our managers tried to reconcile us to this announcement by telling us that we would soon become accustomed to the daily grind of commuting. This folksy wisdom struck a bum note with us, as I discussed afterwards with one of my colleagues.
One way in which it was such a poor argument was that it didn’t address the problem: it simply promised us happiness (or rather, that the unhappiness would fade). Like opium, religion or wild-eyed, overenthusiastic, reality-denying self-help mantras this ‘advice’ tried to address our emotions directly.
In our conversation afterwards we ended up discussing this, and I confided to my colleague that I don’t drink, eat or game to make myself feel better. I do these things because they feel good, but not because there is some sort of immediate deficit to make good. I don’t do things to correct a mood. I think that that way of approaching life is fundamentally flawed.
A few days later I ended up in a(nother) argument with my sister, who was angry when I mentioned that the prospect of commuting to the office was looming over me. She thought that I was focussing on the negative, making a mountain out of a molehill and wallowing in misery. I mentioned my boss’ ‘advice’, and she thought it reasonable. We are creatures of emotion, she seemed to think, and we shouldn’t ignore or distance ourselves from that. If the direct emotional impact will be small, because we adapt to situations we find ourselves in, why would I ignore that fact and 'choose' to be upset about something that will not end up displeasing me that much?
Amongst the multitude of answers I wanted to give but couldn’t because I didn’t want to anger her even more is to refer this real-life situation back to the concept of higher values. Is mere hedonism all there is in life, or are there other, more important things? Because the truth is that working from home is far more convenient for all of my team, barely hinders productivity at all (and if only for the part of the week, not at all) and that coming to the office is merely the owners’ unjustifiable whim. If humans adapt, why can he not adapt to the truth and find that actually having us work from home is not so bad? Truth matters to me. Things are right or wrong, and things that are wrong rankle. This doesn’t stop: I don’t just forget that things are not true. I do have other things to do in life apart from ponder all the untruths out there, but every so often I’m forced to face one, or it pops into my mind. And the more there are, the more this happens.
Should I abandon the core part of my being and chase the latest pleasure, never caring about truth or justice? Should I give up on fulfilment, the peak of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, and accept that drugs, or their equivalent, are fine? Is it nobler to ignore the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and suffer them? Am I homo sapiens, or homo sentiens?
Apparently there is a therapist who persuaded my sister to abandon the idea that emotions are outside influences and to embrace her emotions as a core part of her being. I’m at a bit of a loss to understand what this really means, but it seems to be in opposition to what I think is true:
Emotions come with experiences. When I see the road outside, I see grey tarmac and paving stones. When I look at a pretty face it feels good. When I stop looking at the road I no longer see grey, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I stop looking at a pretty face the good feeling stops, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I remember my mother, I can remember great times, but it is always tainted by the immeasurable sorrow that she is dead. When I’m not remembering my mother, that sorrow fades away again.
If someone were to tell me not to see grey when I look
outside, we would all laugh. The grey is there, even though lush green valleys are a better view. The same applies to the emotional impact of being commanded
not to work from home. It is a bad thing, even though perceiving good things is more fun. I am devoted to seeing the truth in
such things; it matters to me. It makes me fulfilled beyond the everyday hedonism of spirits, chocolate and computer games.
Where other people adapt to good and bad fortune, I remember whether things are good or bad. It is something I am proud of, and aspire to maintain. I like seeing the truth of things. I work at it. Tell me about cognitive biases and every time you will find that I have been overcoming such errors all my life. I am sadly familiar with them; my commitment to truth is not a bias to be abandoned in favour of wallowing in hedonism and accepting my animal nature. I avoid immediately-pleasing emotional bias in favour of fulfilment.
Other people in my situation might have other priorities: they might care about the fact that my company’s owners work from home themselves, and own far more than the brightest poor person could hope to earn in a lifetime. They might care about the liberty of choosing for themselves how to live parts of their life irrelevant to the work they have promised to perform. They might care about the extreme lack of goodwill that demands things from workers despite their obvious objections. All these points carry weight with me.
This is how we should think. The world would be better if people didn’t adapt to unpleasantness; if we carried the knowledge of wrongness inside us. Instead evil or thoughtless people continue to commit unpleasantness and outright crime unchallenged, and the rest of us muddle along, adapting to a world that other people shape. And we therefore indirectly shape it too, implicitly supporting anything that is wrong in life.
Death is horrific, but we just accept it until we, too, die. Climate change will destroy the world as we know it, but we just muddle along. Inequality is a disgrace, but we survive and ignore it. People who speak up are shouted down for disturbing our frail peace of mind: something that campaigners about sexism, racism and similar injustices have railed against for decades. Keep quiet and accept a problem, or speak up and be called a problem for being so negative and nasty.
My personal issues are hardly on the same scale (although they are mini-examples of wider issues in the world), but the principle is the same. If you hate someone in your life talking openly about their problems and you’d rather life were just a happy sequence of fun times, then you might be a hedonist. That’s your choice, although many people seduced by hedonism later find that they’re not as happy as they hoped. But other people don’t have to be hedonists too. Fulfilment comes from confronting what is wrong in life, no matter how powerful it is.
It's better to fight tyranny. Stand up and be counted.
The mind is its own place and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. It doesn’t matter if the outside world is awful, as long as you are content with yourself. And the way to be content with yourself is not to pretend that bad things are not bad: it is to acknowledge them, to see them for what they really are. There is no virtue in delusion. You will fail: you will get things wrong and make mistakes. We are all only human, and mistakes are inevitable. We must forgive our mistakes, but only if we’re actively trying our best not to make them.
Commuting is awful and will always be so. This does not mean that life is not worth living. It is because I have not given up on life that I confront and acknowledge unpleasantness. Some day, when I’m old and tired, I’ll forget the problems of the world. When I chase emotion instead of reality you know I've ceased to care. My spirit will be gone, and soon after, my body. But that day isn’t here yet.
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