Commuter Rail

The unanticipated 15-month experiment many knowledge workers have undertaken in working from home has yielded a resounding negative verdict against that soul-sucking necessity of working in person, which is the daily commute to and from the office.  People are reveling in the time they've gained back into their lives, not to mention replacing gas money and road rage with more serene morning and evening routines.

I've noted previously in this space that a benefit of commuting is the serendipitous connections you make with people and places in between work and home.  But that mostly applies to urban settings, and even for us city dwellers this doesn't feel sufficient enough to compensate for all of the positives listed above.  So for sure the value proposition is even less for suburban and rural folk.

Of course, the big difference is that there are tons of advantages for an office when all its workers are together.  I've written in the past that even a seemingly remote-able job like coding video games is made more powerful in a co-located set-up.  And that's just talking about the work itself; there's also the social aspect of sharing office space, social in terms of personal enjoyment as well as in terms of the inter-personal dynamics that aid a worker contributing more to their firm and advancing their career further in the process.

But is that enough to overcome many people's desire to not have to commute, and in the process to be able to live wherever they want?  And, with 15 months to play with, app developers and companies alike have figured out interesting tech-based ways to replicate some of the buzz and camaraderie of a physical office.  A recent Wired article reported on Teamflow as an early example of this.

When the Internet first became a thing in the 1990's, people predicted a spreading out of our knowledge workers.  Why pay Manhattan rents when you could enjoy wide open spaces and still be plugged in?  Of course, what actually happened was the opposite.  It turns out people wanted to be physically near other people, not just for the enjoyment of social get-togethers but also the knowledge work itself depended on constant interactions - both planned and serendipitous - to make it go.

Ah, but this time around, we have more and better tech.  And, we've had 15 months of practice, as well as 15 months of being scared to death of a killer virus.  

My hunch is still that people want to be near other people, and that therefore cities will continue to be popular, downtown office space will still be in demand, and knowledge work and cultural flourishing and social vibrancy will still happen in the places where the most people are together in the same space.  And my hunch is that while recency bias is a powerful thing, over time our hatred of commuting and our fear of COVID will eventually abate.  But I know that isn't necessarily true.  We will have to see.