11 ms·

A monk’s guide to office life

177 points by elorant 5y ago

zwirbl 5y ago
https://archive.is/u8CkK https://archive.is/u8CkK
- Trex_Egg 5y ago
  Thank you
- qx80 5y ago
  Thank you, I hate compensating content creators for their work
anthropodie 5y ago
> We might think we invented WFH, but for the first monks remote working was standard. After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. Yet the Benedictine guide makes clear that this privileged existence is often a struggle. Some early monks wept, constantly. Many said it was a sign of their faith – but, having experienced several lockdowns, some of us might be more tempted to diagnose the depression of enforced isolation and flat days on repeat, time without end. It seems the author does not know anything about monks, people, WFH and whole lot of other things. The title is Hell is other people and yet in article it is said that it's better to go to office because experiencing hell through other people is better than personal hell. WFH is not like being a monk for God's sake. In fact, you can have very active social life and you get to choose people who you spend time with. Unlike in office where you are forced to get along with people you know nothing about.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Can you though? For most of mass, forced WFH experiment social activities were literally forbidden by law. To venture out the house after 8pm meant risking arrest or tear gassing by the government. In America.
  - roflc0ptic 5y ago
    Examples of people being tear gassed for being out past curfew?
    - mkr-hn 5y ago
      Mostly people peaceably assembling to protest police violence. Sometimes they were just having a vigil, not even protesting. This was big news all through 2020, so the poster probably reasonably assumed it didn't need citation. Example: that time Capitol police tear gassed protestors so Trump could go have a photo op with a bible at a church. They weren't even out past curfew, but that was the way the police justified it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._John%27s_Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J... Even people who usually defend the police were taken aback by the relatively tame response by the same police to pro-Trump protestors later on before the January 6th coup attempt.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    In California there were lots of people walking around outside after curfew. And you were always allowed to leave your home at any time to exercise. There was often a police presence down at the beach, but they didn't enforce anything. Not even fines.
    - vibrato2 5y ago
      There’s a lot of video evidence to the contrary on your beach claim. Personally I was nearly run over by a police suv and tackled off my skateboard at noon by an officer in a major American city for violating park closure.
      - asdff 5y ago
        It depends on the city. In LA people still played pickup basketball and soccer despite whatever the mayor was saying and the police only got serious about the beaches a few times. Surfers never stopped going out naturally.
- the-dude 5y ago
  It seems to me you are taking the piece a bit too literal.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    > After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. That was funny and I'm pretty sure 100% tongue in cheek.
  - high_5 5y ago
    I for one, can't really make anything out of this article. Is it a joke or just a poor attempt at comparing monasticism with corporate life? Or is it both?
    - dustintrex 5y ago
      It's both! This is the style of all the pieces in Economist's year-end 1843 magazine: thought-provoking, but entertaining and not meant to taken terribly seriously.
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      It's not poor. It seems a lot of people on HN are dismissing the advice in the story because they have mistaken ideas about what monastic life is like and, for some reason God only knows, conclude that the author doesn't know what she's talking about. As someone who actually lived as a monastic for a time, I can tell you that a. monastic life is not like what HN wags think it is and b. the article is insightful
- saalweachter 5y ago
  I would also note that, etymology of the term and famous examples notwithstanding, the monastic lifestyle is a fraternal one, such as rarely exists anymore: you are living and working within a community of people doing and living the same way as you. "Brother" is even the common title for a monk. This used to be the most common way to live; a farmer with 10-40 acres finds himself in a community of other farmers, but there aren't many farmers today and industrialization has pushed them far apart. Aside from the military, most of us just have day jobs, and go home to our separate lives at night.
  - neaden 5y ago
    Traditional farming in Europe and most of the world wasn't even a farmer having their own plot of land. Most farming was collaborative, fields were held in common and individuals owned certain portions of the fields mixed with others. Much of the work of weeding, plowing, etc had to be done as a community. 10-40 acres is also far more than someone would be capable of farming as an individual household before modern technology.
    - dexwiz 5y ago
      Correct. Most villages had one large field surround a few buildings. The split was split up some standard ways. If the village was on a road, the divisions usually fanned out from the road, making the division map look striped. I’d the village sat on a river, often the divisions would radiate out making the map look like a corner of a pie with many slices.
  - watwut 5y ago
    The Christian monastic life is nothing like living in farming community. The monasteries rules every detail of your life. There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything. On the extreme end, you have monks who can see other people for like 1 hour a day or did wow of silence. Oh, and they dont get to pick person they will be with during that 1 hour of socialization. The rest of time is in isolation and activities for every minute are prescribed. And even in more moderate monasteries, you still have whole day prescribed. Who you socialize with is controlled too. You don't get to voice opinion about rules. You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  As the text you are quoting (!) says, the first monks were solo: stylites on pillars, hermits in caves, etc. Communal monastic living came later, and brought with it the inevitable social tensions you see in any group of people living and working together.
  - eigengrau5150 5y ago
    anchorites vs cenobites
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cratermoon 5y ago
  It's surprisingly similar. Source: I lived as a Zen Buddhist monk for a time in my life. The article is quite insightful.
episode0x01 5y ago
> Oh, the temptation to swan into the office wearing sweatpants and slippers. Don’t do it! The costumes of the corporate world – the heels, the pressed trousers – may seem antiquated and absurd. They all feel so 2020. But why? The author just mentions that the monk's robes were surely worse. And that might be, but so what?
- navbaker 5y ago
  From the next two paragraphs: "Despite that, there is a power to performance dressing and no one knows this better than monastic orders. Many monkish rules on dress would not be out of place in a modern company handbook <clip> ... <clip> One of the first things a new monk did on entering the monastery was to step out of their old clothes at the door and into new robes. The two worlds were separate, and dressing accordingly helped keep them that way."
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Ever watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood? Remember how he'd change his shoes and sweater in the intro and outro? Transitions like that are part of a healthy routine. WFH I've maintained a morning "get dressed for work" and evening "change out of my work clothes" routine, even though I might just wear shorts and a t-shirt for work. The point is to psychologically frame the different aspects of our lives
weatherlight 5y ago
"Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre As you can see, this does not mean other people are the worst and you should hide yourself in a dark, lonely room so that you don't have to put up with them. It's because of how we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us, whether you work from home or not. "By there mere appearance of the Other," says Sartre in Being and Nothingness, "I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other." Side note, the Economist is a rag.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  I mean isn't that kind of the same thing just a little bit more specific? It seems to me that he basically clarifies why other people are hellish. We absorb the critiques and judgements of others into our psyche and use them to forge our own identity. Which by definition is limiting our own self-actualization and freedom and torturous if that person we're influenced by is dysfunctional. Then you start to think of this in a modern mass media world where the scale of influence is global and things get even more insane.
  - amouat 5y ago
    So I largely agree, but it's not that "other people are hellish", it's that they are, in fact, hell. Satre is using the word hell to mean "the afterlife" i.e. we live on in other people's minds and opinions whether we like it or not. Also people don't have to be dysfunctional for it to be a form of torture, we are trapped in their minds (gaze?) no matter what.
    - weatherlight 5y ago
stepbeek 5y ago
"The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong." - Marko Corrigan, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Except that monasticism and monastics still exist today, and they still follow the same Rules that were laid down by the early Church (or other faith) founders. There are still Benedictines, Trappists, Redemptorists, Jesuits, and so forth in Catholicism, as well as extensive communities in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and other faiths. Many of them have adapted quite well to modernity.
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    My original comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think the underlying sentiment is a reasonable one. Joining a monastery - from an outsiders view - is fundamentally a pursuit of a higher purpose. Joining a corporation is often anything but. While there will be crossover in human group dynamics, I’m (perhaps naively) viewing corporate life to have a completely incompatible incentive structure coupled with a bent towards generally self-serving employees. Maybe I have an idealistic view of the average monk but I’d be quite sad to learn that the pettiness that pervades many corporations is much the same. A great many people work simply to survive: I’m not sure the same is true of monks.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
baud147258 5y ago
> Monks live at work, eat at work, sleep at work, wash at work, weekend at work and holiday at work good thing for the monks that the average monastery is bigger than the average US downtown flat
MichalSternik 5y ago
https://archive.is/Z9e5R https://archive.is/Z9e5R
tmnstr85 5y ago
I struggle with isolation at work. It really escalated during the pandemic. I run a small team and we're often isolated from everyone else, except the client in front of us at any moment in time. Most the work is indirect. Coming back into the office, its a struggle to integrate back into a culture that, for me, appears to no longer exists. I'm trying to reconcile if this is my own doing, or if something else has changed. I look around and many of the faces in the back office are new. There's no love coming from the middle or front office or top brass. To me, at this point in my life, I don't want to be monk. I want to feel like I belong, I want to feel like a valued member of a community. I've worked in financial technology and back office operations most of my career. I doubt I will find any of that in any back office these days.
- basisword 5y ago
  This makes me curious. With the flexi-work world we now live, in are the people who want to work in office just fighting an inevitable full remote future? It sounds from your post like in-office isn’t what it was before. How long until the people hoping it returns to what it was give up and search for alternatives? I wonder if the kids of the near future pick a job, get a budget for a co-working space, and then work alongside their actual friends, all doing different jobs. We might find ourselves for a while in that middle ground that doesn’t work great for anybody until the next generation comes along and completely embraces the future.
black_13 5y ago
Compared to life before this paradise. I dread going back.
znpy 5y ago
This really sounds like low-key return-to-office propaganda. > Over the past year many of us have sat at home, confined to the same four walls for much of the day, contemplating the same view, munching the same lunch and wearing the same clothes (at least below waist level). That really wasn't my experience at all. My city is well interspersed with gardens, parks and trees in general and since the lockdown was lifted I was able to explore the parks near my house by taking walks during lunch break or by going out for lunch with my SO from time to time. My coworkers and me still meet from time to time, when we all decide to do a gathering in the office. So yeah, that's low quality bait. If my experience sounds extta-terrestrial to you the good news is that you can achieve something similar or even better while working remotely (since you're not tied to a certain place, city or area in the same city).
- Amasuriel 5y ago
  I agree with this, my schedule was always more the same working from an office than at home: 1) same 5 restaurants to reasonably eat at, or packed lunch options that reheat well 2) same work location 3) same limited number of places to take outdoor breaks (assuming there was any at all). I find my working hours infinitely more varied from home
rootusrootus 5y ago
I went to the office yesterday. It felt ... nostalgic? Everything is exactly as we left it in March 2020, except for the sign-in system that checks symptoms, the social distancing signs in the lobby, inside the office itself it's like we just left yesterday. Someone is keeping the place clean, for sure, not a bit of dust or anything to indicate how long we've been working remotely. I almost want to go back. At least occasionally. There are people just outside of my team but in the same department that I may never see again, and they were nice people. I'll admit we had a good work environment and no toxic people, and clearly not everyone is so lucky. But it occurs to me that if I leave the company soon (and I am planning to), there's a bunch of folks I'll probably never see again, without ever having had the opportunity to wish them farewell. At least face-to-face :). Maybe I'm just a softie. Many people seem to have much colder relationships with their coworkers.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  I think there are a LOT of people, including me, who feel the same way. My team was reorg'd last summer, and a number of people from my team were reassigned, including my manager; now a bunch of them have left the company and moved cross-country, and I never got a chance to say goodbye to them in person. It's been a hard time.
tibbar 5y ago
And the devil is in the details of how you isolate. Seeing someone once a day for an hour is profoundly different from seeing someone once a week, or (again) from seeing no one for several weeks. Isolating with other people is not like isolating by yourself. One way you may find refreshing; one way may drive you mad. It’s a terrible experiment we’re performing on ourselves.
thedigitalone 5y ago
Cache without paywall https://archive.is/Z9e5R https://archive.is/Z9e5R
gwenbell 5y ago
Read it. Commented on my own site, here: http://gwenbell.com/#Cl1yKR9Kh0hI0za8VLmSZZaDY6qtObOJhBgg10Xx5Xw= http://gwenbell.com/#Cl1yKR9Kh0hI0za8VLmSZZaDY6qtObOJhBgg10X... Thanks for reading and commenting, if you wish.
xyzelement 5y ago
> Hell is other people Slide side-track but the older I get the more I realize that (at least for me) having to deal with other people is a path to "salvation", not "hell." When I was younger, I found certain types of people and interactions difficult and painful. I was very quick to judge people who caused me this "pain" as bad people, and so I always interpreted the quote that "hell is other people" as a reference to that. But lately I've come to realize that these negative reactions have much more to do with me than with the people. I react(ed) strongly to certain people and things because of my own emotional baggage, etc. and I've come to value these interactions as pointers to where I need to work on myself. So I find that having to deal with people actually forces you (or at least, forces me) to confront your own issues, it's a form of therapy although obviously painful in the moment. The alternative is to avoid all these triggers. For example, someone in my family chose to spend much more time with plants than with people in order to avoid all these painful triggers, but as a consequence I see her "spiraling" more and more into her own emotional dark places rather than being forced to stay above water by social interactions - by being forced to confront and work through the issues. Maybe this is not universal, maybe it only applies to me, but I see that the more work I do on myself, the less I agree with "hell is other people" - which means there was never really a big problem with them, only with me.
- bopbeepboop 5y ago
  I have much the same experience as you, but two points: 1. Those pointers to your issues are only helpful because you have the resources to work on them — dredging up issues when you lack those resources often breaks people. Being “forced to confront” when you’re at risk of being overwhelmed is a genuine threat you’re pretty cavalier in dismissing. Can that lead to negative cycles? Of course — but most mental illnesses are a reasonable defense or reaction applied unreasonably. Unwinding that requires understanding the point of the mechanism. 2. I’ve found that while this process has made me feel better and address my own baggage, I still just don’t enjoy most people — and find the whole ritual of dense living exhausting. I think you may be conflating unblocking your emotions with the outcome of your personality, once unburdened. You felt that way, but other people will feel differently. To me, hell is the constant barrage of other people trying to assert themselves in and control my life, when I’m forced to be around them — often, using me as a springboard for their own emotional journeys. I don’t mind it as a general principal, but I do mind being coerced to participate when I’m not feeling it.
foxyv 5y ago
I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate spaces where we interact with other people. Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars. I can go a week in my suburban home without ever interacting with anyone. Take away the office and the supermarket and you can go for years without talking to anyone. Then I get on my bike, or walk somewhere and suddenly I meet more people in 30 minutes than I did in 3 months.
- acabal 5y ago
  I completely agree, and I rant about this constantly. But in America at least, cars have infected society to such a degree that for the average person imagining life without them is totally impossible--like asking a fish to imagine life without water. "How would we get groceries?" they ask, and the thought of having a small grocery store within walking distance doesn't even occur to them, because walking is something they haven't done for their entire lives. Building a life of total car dependence in the 1940s-60s is IMHO one of the two great American mistakes of the 20th century, that by destroying local bonds between neighbors and strangers has led to America's current sense of deep, unspecific anxiety and lassitude on a societal level, and on an economic level has set the stage for the destruction of both small town and urban life that we've seen in the past 30 years.
  - asdff 5y ago
    People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights. It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.
gtsnexp 5y ago
It is mysterious how paywalled articles find their way to a highlighted position on HN.
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
Economist being paid to astroturf on behalf of corporate control freaks and their urban real estate buddies

177 points by elorant 5y ago

zwirbl 5y ago

https://archive.is/u8CkK https://archive.is/u8CkK

Trex_Egg 5y ago
Thank you
qx80 5y ago
Thank you, I hate compensating content creators for their work

anthropodie 5y ago

> We might think we invented WFH, but for the first monks remote working was standard. After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. Yet the Benedictine guide makes clear that this privileged existence is often a struggle. Some early monks wept, constantly. Many said it was a sign of their faith – but, having experienced several lockdowns, some of us might be more tempted to diagnose the depression of enforced isolation and flat days on repeat, time without end. It seems the author does not know anything about monks, people, WFH and whole lot of other things. The title is Hell is other people and yet in article it is said that it's better to go to office because experiencing hell through other people is better than personal hell. WFH is not like being a monk for God's sake. In fact, you can have very active social life and you get to choose people who you spend time with. Unlike in office where you are forced to get along with people you know nothing about.

jdavis703 5y ago
Can you though? For most of mass, forced WFH experiment social activities were literally forbidden by law. To venture out the house after 8pm meant risking arrest or tear gassing by the government. In America.
- roflc0ptic 5y ago
  Examples of people being tear gassed for being out past curfew?
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    Mostly people peaceably assembling to protest police violence. Sometimes they were just having a vigil, not even protesting. This was big news all through 2020, so the poster probably reasonably assumed it didn't need citation. Example: that time Capitol police tear gassed protestors so Trump could go have a photo op with a bible at a church. They weren't even out past curfew, but that was the way the police justified it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._John%27s_Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J... Even people who usually defend the police were taken aback by the relatively tame response by the same police to pro-Trump protestors later on before the January 6th coup attempt.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dorkwood 5y ago
  In California there were lots of people walking around outside after curfew. And you were always allowed to leave your home at any time to exercise. There was often a police presence down at the beach, but they didn't enforce anything. Not even fines.
  - vibrato2 5y ago
    There’s a lot of video evidence to the contrary on your beach claim. Personally I was nearly run over by a police suv and tackled off my skateboard at noon by an officer in a major American city for violating park closure.
    - asdff 5y ago
      It depends on the city. In LA people still played pickup basketball and soccer despite whatever the mayor was saying and the police only got serious about the beaches a few times. Surfers never stopped going out naturally.
the-dude 5y ago
It seems to me you are taking the piece a bit too literal.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  > After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. That was funny and I'm pretty sure 100% tongue in cheek.
- high_5 5y ago
  I for one, can't really make anything out of this article. Is it a joke or just a poor attempt at comparing monasticism with corporate life? Or is it both?
  - dustintrex 5y ago
    It's both! This is the style of all the pieces in Economist's year-end 1843 magazine: thought-provoking, but entertaining and not meant to taken terribly seriously.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    It's not poor. It seems a lot of people on HN are dismissing the advice in the story because they have mistaken ideas about what monastic life is like and, for some reason God only knows, conclude that the author doesn't know what she's talking about. As someone who actually lived as a monastic for a time, I can tell you that a. monastic life is not like what HN wags think it is and b. the article is insightful
saalweachter 5y ago
I would also note that, etymology of the term and famous examples notwithstanding, the monastic lifestyle is a fraternal one, such as rarely exists anymore: you are living and working within a community of people doing and living the same way as you. "Brother" is even the common title for a monk. This used to be the most common way to live; a farmer with 10-40 acres finds himself in a community of other farmers, but there aren't many farmers today and industrialization has pushed them far apart. Aside from the military, most of us just have day jobs, and go home to our separate lives at night.
- neaden 5y ago
  Traditional farming in Europe and most of the world wasn't even a farmer having their own plot of land. Most farming was collaborative, fields were held in common and individuals owned certain portions of the fields mixed with others. Much of the work of weeding, plowing, etc had to be done as a community. 10-40 acres is also far more than someone would be capable of farming as an individual household before modern technology.
  - dexwiz 5y ago
    Correct. Most villages had one large field surround a few buildings. The split was split up some standard ways. If the village was on a road, the divisions usually fanned out from the road, making the division map look striped. I’d the village sat on a river, often the divisions would radiate out making the map look like a corner of a pie with many slices.
- watwut 5y ago
  The Christian monastic life is nothing like living in farming community. The monasteries rules every detail of your life. There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything. On the extreme end, you have monks who can see other people for like 1 hour a day or did wow of silence. Oh, and they dont get to pick person they will be with during that 1 hour of socialization. The rest of time is in isolation and activities for every minute are prescribed. And even in more moderate monasteries, you still have whole day prescribed. Who you socialize with is controlled too. You don't get to voice opinion about rules. You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening.
dustintrex 5y ago
As the text you are quoting (!) says, the first monks were solo: stylites on pillars, hermits in caves, etc. Communal monastic living came later, and brought with it the inevitable social tensions you see in any group of people living and working together.
- eigengrau5150 5y ago
  anchorites vs cenobites
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cratermoon 5y ago
It's surprisingly similar. Source: I lived as a Zen Buddhist monk for a time in my life. The article is quite insightful.

episode0x01 5y ago

> Oh, the temptation to swan into the office wearing sweatpants and slippers. Don’t do it! The costumes of the corporate world – the heels, the pressed trousers – may seem antiquated and absurd. They all feel so 2020. But why? The author just mentions that the monk's robes were surely worse. And that might be, but so what?

navbaker 5y ago
From the next two paragraphs: "Despite that, there is a power to performance dressing and no one knows this better than monastic orders. Many monkish rules on dress would not be out of place in a modern company handbook <clip> ... <clip> One of the first things a new monk did on entering the monastery was to step out of their old clothes at the door and into new robes. The two worlds were separate, and dressing accordingly helped keep them that way."
cratermoon 5y ago
Ever watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood? Remember how he'd change his shoes and sweater in the intro and outro? Transitions like that are part of a healthy routine. WFH I've maintained a morning "get dressed for work" and evening "change out of my work clothes" routine, even though I might just wear shorts and a t-shirt for work. The point is to psychologically frame the different aspects of our lives

weatherlight 5y ago

"Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves." ~ Jean-Paul Sartre As you can see, this does not mean other people are the worst and you should hide yourself in a dark, lonely room so that you don't have to put up with them. It's because of how we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us, whether you work from home or not. "By there mere appearance of the Other," says Sartre in Being and Nothingness, "I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other." Side note, the Economist is a rag.

nickthemagicman 5y ago
I mean isn't that kind of the same thing just a little bit more specific? It seems to me that he basically clarifies why other people are hellish. We absorb the critiques and judgements of others into our psyche and use them to forge our own identity. Which by definition is limiting our own self-actualization and freedom and torturous if that person we're influenced by is dysfunctional. Then you start to think of this in a modern mass media world where the scale of influence is global and things get even more insane.
- amouat 5y ago
  So I largely agree, but it's not that "other people are hellish", it's that they are, in fact, hell. Satre is using the word hell to mean "the afterlife" i.e. we live on in other people's minds and opinions whether we like it or not. Also people don't have to be dysfunctional for it to be a form of torture, we are trapped in their minds (gaze?) no matter what.
  - weatherlight 5y ago

stepbeek 5y ago

"The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong." - Marko Corrigan, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs

cratermoon 5y ago
Except that monasticism and monastics still exist today, and they still follow the same Rules that were laid down by the early Church (or other faith) founders. There are still Benedictines, Trappists, Redemptorists, Jesuits, and so forth in Catholicism, as well as extensive communities in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and other faiths. Many of them have adapted quite well to modernity.
- stepbeek 5y ago
  My original comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think the underlying sentiment is a reasonable one. Joining a monastery - from an outsiders view - is fundamentally a pursuit of a higher purpose. Joining a corporation is often anything but. While there will be crossover in human group dynamics, I’m (perhaps naively) viewing corporate life to have a completely incompatible incentive structure coupled with a bent towards generally self-serving employees. Maybe I have an idealistic view of the average monk but I’d be quite sad to learn that the pettiness that pervades many corporations is much the same. A great many people work simply to survive: I’m not sure the same is true of monks.
  - deleted 5y ago
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baud147258 5y ago

> Monks live at work, eat at work, sleep at work, wash at work, weekend at work and holiday at work good thing for the monks that the average monastery is bigger than the average US downtown flat

MichalSternik 5y ago

https://archive.is/Z9e5R https://archive.is/Z9e5R

tmnstr85 5y ago

I struggle with isolation at work. It really escalated during the pandemic. I run a small team and we're often isolated from everyone else, except the client in front of us at any moment in time. Most the work is indirect. Coming back into the office, its a struggle to integrate back into a culture that, for me, appears to no longer exists. I'm trying to reconcile if this is my own doing, or if something else has changed. I look around and many of the faces in the back office are new. There's no love coming from the middle or front office or top brass. To me, at this point in my life, I don't want to be monk. I want to feel like I belong, I want to feel like a valued member of a community. I've worked in financial technology and back office operations most of my career. I doubt I will find any of that in any back office these days.

basisword 5y ago
This makes me curious. With the flexi-work world we now live, in are the people who want to work in office just fighting an inevitable full remote future? It sounds from your post like in-office isn’t what it was before. How long until the people hoping it returns to what it was give up and search for alternatives? I wonder if the kids of the near future pick a job, get a budget for a co-working space, and then work alongside their actual friends, all doing different jobs. We might find ourselves for a while in that middle ground that doesn’t work great for anybody until the next generation comes along and completely embraces the future.

black_13 5y ago

Compared to life before this paradise. I dread going back.

znpy 5y ago

This really sounds like low-key return-to-office propaganda. > Over the past year many of us have sat at home, confined to the same four walls for much of the day, contemplating the same view, munching the same lunch and wearing the same clothes (at least below waist level). That really wasn't my experience at all. My city is well interspersed with gardens, parks and trees in general and since the lockdown was lifted I was able to explore the parks near my house by taking walks during lunch break or by going out for lunch with my SO from time to time. My coworkers and me still meet from time to time, when we all decide to do a gathering in the office. So yeah, that's low quality bait. If my experience sounds extta-terrestrial to you the good news is that you can achieve something similar or even better while working remotely (since you're not tied to a certain place, city or area in the same city).

Amasuriel 5y ago
I agree with this, my schedule was always more the same working from an office than at home: 1) same 5 restaurants to reasonably eat at, or packed lunch options that reheat well 2) same work location 3) same limited number of places to take outdoor breaks (assuming there was any at all). I find my working hours infinitely more varied from home

rootusrootus 5y ago

I went to the office yesterday. It felt ... nostalgic? Everything is exactly as we left it in March 2020, except for the sign-in system that checks symptoms, the social distancing signs in the lobby, inside the office itself it's like we just left yesterday. Someone is keeping the place clean, for sure, not a bit of dust or anything to indicate how long we've been working remotely. I almost want to go back. At least occasionally. There are people just outside of my team but in the same department that I may never see again, and they were nice people. I'll admit we had a good work environment and no toxic people, and clearly not everyone is so lucky. But it occurs to me that if I leave the company soon (and I am planning to), there's a bunch of folks I'll probably never see again, without ever having had the opportunity to wish them farewell. At least face-to-face :). Maybe I'm just a softie. Many people seem to have much colder relationships with their coworkers.

QuercusMax 5y ago
I think there are a LOT of people, including me, who feel the same way. My team was reorg'd last summer, and a number of people from my team were reassigned, including my manager; now a bunch of them have left the company and moved cross-country, and I never got a chance to say goodbye to them in person. It's been a hard time.

tibbar 5y ago

And the devil is in the details of how you isolate. Seeing someone once a day for an hour is profoundly different from seeing someone once a week, or (again) from seeing no one for several weeks. Isolating with other people is not like isolating by yourself. One way you may find refreshing; one way may drive you mad. It’s a terrible experiment we’re performing on ourselves.

thedigitalone 5y ago

Cache without paywall https://archive.is/Z9e5R https://archive.is/Z9e5R

gwenbell 5y ago

Read it. Commented on my own site, here: http://gwenbell.com/#Cl1yKR9Kh0hI0za8VLmSZZaDY6qtObOJhBgg10Xx5Xw= http://gwenbell.com/#Cl1yKR9Kh0hI0za8VLmSZZaDY6qtObOJhBgg10X... Thanks for reading and commenting, if you wish.

xyzelement 5y ago

> Hell is other people Slide side-track but the older I get the more I realize that (at least for me) having to deal with other people is a path to "salvation", not "hell." When I was younger, I found certain types of people and interactions difficult and painful. I was very quick to judge people who caused me this "pain" as bad people, and so I always interpreted the quote that "hell is other people" as a reference to that. But lately I've come to realize that these negative reactions have much more to do with me than with the people. I react(ed) strongly to certain people and things because of my own emotional baggage, etc. and I've come to value these interactions as pointers to where I need to work on myself. So I find that having to deal with people actually forces you (or at least, forces me) to confront your own issues, it's a form of therapy although obviously painful in the moment. The alternative is to avoid all these triggers. For example, someone in my family chose to spend much more time with plants than with people in order to avoid all these painful triggers, but as a consequence I see her "spiraling" more and more into her own emotional dark places rather than being forced to stay above water by social interactions - by being forced to confront and work through the issues. Maybe this is not universal, maybe it only applies to me, but I see that the more work I do on myself, the less I agree with "hell is other people" - which means there was never really a big problem with them, only with me.

bopbeepboop 5y ago
I have much the same experience as you, but two points: 1. Those pointers to your issues are only helpful because you have the resources to work on them — dredging up issues when you lack those resources often breaks people. Being “forced to confront” when you’re at risk of being overwhelmed is a genuine threat you’re pretty cavalier in dismissing. Can that lead to negative cycles? Of course — but most mental illnesses are a reasonable defense or reaction applied unreasonably. Unwinding that requires understanding the point of the mechanism. 2. I’ve found that while this process has made me feel better and address my own baggage, I still just don’t enjoy most people — and find the whole ritual of dense living exhausting. I think you may be conflating unblocking your emotions with the outcome of your personality, once unburdened. You felt that way, but other people will feel differently. To me, hell is the constant barrage of other people trying to assert themselves in and control my life, when I’m forced to be around them — often, using me as a springboard for their own emotional journeys. I don’t mind it as a general principal, but I do mind being coerced to participate when I’m not feeling it.

foxyv 5y ago

I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate spaces where we interact with other people. Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars. I can go a week in my suburban home without ever interacting with anyone. Take away the office and the supermarket and you can go for years without talking to anyone. Then I get on my bike, or walk somewhere and suddenly I meet more people in 30 minutes than I did in 3 months.

acabal 5y ago
I completely agree, and I rant about this constantly. But in America at least, cars have infected society to such a degree that for the average person imagining life without them is totally impossible--like asking a fish to imagine life without water. "How would we get groceries?" they ask, and the thought of having a small grocery store within walking distance doesn't even occur to them, because walking is something they haven't done for their entire lives. Building a life of total car dependence in the 1940s-60s is IMHO one of the two great American mistakes of the 20th century, that by destroying local bonds between neighbors and strangers has led to America's current sense of deep, unspecific anxiety and lassitude on a societal level, and on an economic level has set the stage for the destruction of both small town and urban life that we've seen in the past 30 years.
- asdff 5y ago
  People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights. It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.

gtsnexp 5y ago

It is mysterious how paywalled articles find their way to a highlighted position on HN.

qwertyuiop_ 5y ago

Economist being paid to astroturf on behalf of corporate control freaks and their urban real estate buddies