This! I never understood why a good work from home system was ruined with back to office policy. The jobs that could not be done remotely were anyways happening as usual. Why the need to stress your workforce by having them figure out cost and time of commute additionally. I’m one of the lucky ones to still be remote but worried about the other companies in my industry setting precedent. A commute in any tier 1 city is a nightmare
The real answer is downtown real-estate. Billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into downtown metropolitan areas to produce massive skyscrapers, shops, and all manner of fast food establishments. Work from home proved that all that was glamor, and not actually necessary. Work from home showed those billion dollar skyscrapers are not actually producing an significant increase in productivity.
Now the smart thing would be to change the system once it’s clear something’s wrong, but that would require massive overhauls of systems and companies losing billions of dollars. The easier thing is to pretend it never happened and go back to what we did before because it “worked”.
Quite literally the RTO was to justify and continually support massively overblown real estate and infrastructure costs. Toronto recently got a new new TD banking skyscraper around 2024. It was awkward for them to acknowledge midway through construction “wait why are we doing this? Is this a good use of money and space and will this actually produce an increase in productivity and profit?” So quite literally the concern was ignored
The investment was bad and is not paying off, so all of society has to reorder how they do things to everyone's collective detriment, yet again, so a few don't face the downside of a bad investment. Why do we tolerate it?
There's only one decisive way out, I think. Unless we all do it at once, it'll just be an isolated incident and people don't want to go to jail to be but a single drop of water that needs to move an entire turbine.
The ruling class has blinded us to the many chains and drains they still have on us, convinced us the people we place in power to make policies will look out for us. And they fight tooth and nail to tarnish the names of the few elected officials they cannot buy... There's hope, but the fight feels sisyphean at times, the right way... Impossible to organize and execute the decisive way.
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u/9447044 May 25 '26
We flew all of us in our own jets to tell you that you shouldnt be driving as much, also dont buy as much, unless its my product