I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
| Henry David Thoreau
…
I am alone at home for a week, as my partner Sarah is away visiting her mother and workationing at her friend’s beach place, closing it up for the winter. My younger son lives across the street from me, and I see him daily. My older son is now living in Chicago.
Like Thoreau, I love to be alone. I will be glad to see her back, but I am happy to spend a week with my old companion, solitude.
Fake Work
I might have to start reading Linkedin, if these discussions are talking place there. Annie Dean, of Atlassian, weighs in on the return-to-office controversy that Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, has stirred up:
Return to office mandates aren't the solution to the real problem: fake work.
“Fake work” is a phrase that Airbnb’s Brian Chesky used to describe activities that feel like work, but don’t actually create value for the business — and employees are drowning in it. They are lost in endless meetings and messages and spending so much time trying to get the information they need and coordinating their work that they get very little actual work done.
Office attendance does not fix fake work. Rigorously adopted set of working norms that increase coordination and improve communication and focus fix fake work.
A business seeking to “operate like the world’s largest startup” — as Andy Jassy wrote in an Amazon company memo announcing a 5 day return to office yesterday — should be pioneering new, more efficient modes of work, not wilfully endorsing the old way as a solution to new problems.
This moment demands more.
There are dozens (hundreds?) of great comments, like this Nicole Rivers:
It’s interesting to me that leaders of companies who have disrupted entire industries by “breaking the box” and solving problems in new ways are so committed to “doing work” the same way it’s been done for the last 50 years.
With the demands for return to work very few are asking why this has to be a demand. The answer is a lot more nuanced than “employees are lazy or want to slack off.” In many cases there could work culture issues or accessibility challenges. Why not look at this issue with the eyes of an innovator rather than the eyes of a follower?
Yes, it is a looking-back response to what could be a looking-ahead opportunity.
Only a few make the ecological, humanist case, that all those hundreds of thousands of Amazonians will be back to commuting 5 days a week, and there is never any mention of Jassy’s complicity in that loss of personal time, pollution, congestion, and some unknowable increase in car accidents, and injuries in exchange for shareholder profits. For more on that, see Commuting is Evil, below.
China is ahead of the decarbonized energy transition.
Nearly two-thirds of all big solar and wind plants being built globally this year are in China, which is deploying green energy at more than eight times the scale of any other country in the world. Together, all the Group of 7 powers — the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain — managed barely one-quarter as many new installations in 2023 as did China. In 2023, China installed 74 gigawatts of new wind capacity; the rest of the world installed 43 gigawatts, and the United States just 6. In 2023, 8.1 million electric vehicles were sold in China, compared to 5.6 million everywhere else in the world and 1.4 million in America.
There is an obfuscation involved in talking about ‘the global' when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.
…
A lot of churches becoming gyms, restaurants, and spas.
As many as 100,000 Protestant church properties to close by 2030. That figure, which may come close to 20 percent of all existing Protestant churches, is a significant increase over the past decade. The closings stem largely from a drop in church attendance during the Covid pandemic and fewer people, especially younger adults, affiliated with religious organizations than in the past. The decline has been happening for decades. In the late 1940s, 76 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, but by 2020 that number had dropped to 47 percent.
In June of 2022, I wrote about how commuting is evil in an ecological sense:
The arguments in favor of returning to the office for work dwindle to insignificance when compared to the environmental damage -- especially CO2 pollution -- caused by commuting, at least until we have zero-emissions commuting.
How much CO2 does commuting create?
I will string together a few factoids to come up with a general estimate of just how much carbon emissions come from commuting in America.
The average American commutes to work by car just under one hour each day – roughly 32 miles, which equates to about 3.2 tonnes of CO2 per person every year.
130 million Americans commuted (2016) by car, truck, or van. I calculate: 3.2 tonnes/per driving commuter * 130 million commuters (2017 numbers) = 416 million tonnes/year.
There are approximately 100 million knowledge workers in the US (2017). Overall, the US produced (2019) 6,558 million metric tons (14.5 trillion pounds) of carbon dioxide equivalents.
So, the bottom line: commuting accounts for approximately 16% of US emissions. We can’t stop retail and other workers from commuting to their jobs, but 100 million knowledge workers could stay home.
In Physical proximity has big effects in the workplace, The Economist’s Bartleby columnist does not mention Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, who just announced a sweeping new RTO mandate, requiring nearly all corporate workers back in to the office 5 days a week. But this column provides some support for the arguments Jassy (and others) make for the supposed benefits of colocating workers, without referring to any CEOs.
But the real findings in many studies — like those I cited recently — is that physical proximity is important at the start of projects, and less so later on. But most of the discourse ignores that, treats all work as a steady-state process, like a steel mill, or a factory. Most of knowledge workers time is project- or initiative-centered.
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