Hi all! Joining the chorus I guess and sharing my own experience with return-to-office mandates. This is mostly a vent post, but I’m absolutely open to insights (or insults, whatever, it’s Reddit) from others who might have similar experiences. There’s a TLDR down there somewhere because, yikes, this got lengthy 🙂
Some long-ass background that you're welcome to skip: I’ve always struggled to be happy with work; from the retail jobs I had in high school and my early 20s, to the project/communications management role I worked my way up to in one of my most recent jobs. I don’t dream of labor; work is drudgery. Compounding that, I’m an extremely introverted, socially anxious, private person (like, I spent ten years eating lunch in my car in the parking lot at my former job; I never came out as queer to my teammates; I never once joined a happy hour or made a friend in that space. My coworkers are just that; they are people who happen to sell their bodies to the same corporate entity I do, and I don’t feel compelled to connect with them just because they’re there.)
Through some combination of mental dissociation, alcohol, and a little bit of personal fulfillment derived from leveraging my authority to make work suck a little less for people on my teams, I have by definition been successful and high performer at my jobs. I couldn’t give less of a shit about customers, but I’ve masked that well. My real personal goal as a middle manager was to improve the quality of life for associates and rebuild processes and policies to be more inclusive and accessible.
The catch, however, was that I was working 55+ hour weeks for the better part of fifteen years in an extremely HCOL city. We had an “unlimited PTO” policy, which of course was a bald faced scam; I took 8-10 days off per year on average and still faced pushback. Between the commute and the job, I was out of the house for 12-13 hours a day, and would return home only to desperately seek any source of short term serotonin I could until bedtime. I was miserable and full of anxiety; I was doing my best to save up money for the eventual mental breakdown I saw coming where I would quit my job in a fit of rage. I recognized that the situation was unsustainable, and spent any free moment outside of the above desperately applying to any job I could stretch my resume to fit. My assumption was that a roll of the dice was likely to turn up at least a slightly better work-life balance, but I also thought all of this really was a ME problem; that my attitude about work, however enlightened, was ultimately self-defeating. Work was just a convenient scapegoat for all my misery.
And then something fucking wild happened: COVID. My boss had just about the most ghoulish response you could imagine (he was a senior executive and legitimate covid denier) but we still scored 3 whole weeks of WFH in late March of 2020. I saved hundreds in commuting expenses, consistently ate home cooked meals for the first time in ages — I discovered that when I wasn’t subjected to excruciating small talk in a gross liminal space an hour from home bookended by stressful fights through traffic, I’m actually really happy and high-functioning as a person. By mid April we were back in-office 5 days a week (at a 15% salary reduction department-wide due to “uncertainty about the future”) while every other professional I knew was still living the dream of remote work, making tiktoks about baking bread or whatever.
I devoted myself fully to getting out of that workplace, and after another 16 months of extremely aggressive job hunting throughout covid, landed a fully remote role doing very similar work, with a lesser title, for about $20K less (I didn’t negotiate; I would have taken literally anything they offered.) It also happened to be based an hour from my hometown in a relatively LCOL midwestern city.
And once again, my ability to function and exist and feel fulfilled was unlocked. I was eating healthy, exercising, volunteering, I stopped drinking altogether (a big deal for someone who was effectively an alcoholic for half their adult life), I started therapy, got back into long-dead hobbies and creative endeavors like twitch streaming, writing, gardening… made real friends in my community, spent time with my family, my relationship with my partner improved, I got to spend time with my aging cat, I used the money I had earmarked for a mental breakdown on a down payment on a house back in my hometown instead… I saw myself for the first time ever being able to one day retire by means other than suicide. I was ready to work at this place for the rest of my career—it was the same basic job description but a COMPLETE turnaround for me.
I’d make the journey into my new workplace’s office maybe 2 or 3 times a month, and it was tolerable. Not my favorite thing, but it had a defensible purpose. Interestingly, because of the different context and my improved emotional health, I was willing and able to actually start building relationships with my coworkers. I’m still the same shy weirdo I’ve always been, but I actually found myself enjoying conversations and the occasional work travel with my new team. WFH was 10x better for my ability to build meaningful connections with teammates and produce quality work.
You can imagine where this is going, of course…
One year into my new job, leadership changed, and a series of layoffs wiped out the team. Our division’s CEO (who was the champion of the company’s ongoing blanket remote work policy) and all six people I had interviewed with—every person I had developed a work stream or rapport with—were eliminated. I was spared because I was a high performer AND the lowest paid person in our department (my now-former boss, with whom I’d built a good relationship, informed me that I was lowballed to the tune of about $20K below their budget—and to add to it, I was literally selected as a “fuck you” to a VP she resented who was trying to force in a nepotism hire. In other words, the stars really had to align even for this paltry opportunity to come my way in today’s job market.)
And along with those layoffs, WFH ended with roughly 2 weeks’ notice, supported by all the classic rhetoric: team building! Efficiency! Collaboration! We’re better together!
This has had the exact impact on my mental health that one would imagine. While I was able to make some decent strides in my life that are buoying me from complete emotional collapse, I am beyond miserable and feel completely trapped by this situation. 9 months later, I’m back to spending every free moment drinking, eating junk food and applying for new roles, but now further handicapped by the title of “Specialist” instead of “Manager.”
Little by little I’m slipping into old bad habits and abandoning passions. I quit my volunteer gig, watched my garden dry up, drifted away from the new friend group I'd made in town… and I completely let go of any delusions I might have had about finding another WFH role; I know that era has come to a close for the vast majority of corporate worker bees like me, especially in the midwest. At this point, I’m simply trying to reduce the commute and MAYBE find something with a 3 day in-office requirement—but holy shit is it depressing to have tasted a way of working where I was happy, comfortable, de-stressed and finally feeling something akin to normalcy. To know that it wasn’t just a me problem, but an environment problem, and that the barrier is simply a shitty policy that serves no inherent purpose is just beyond infuriating.
I’ve been writing this post from my little beige cubicle, pausing only to make eye contact with whichever coworker has just stopped by to tell me about the funny thing their dog did over the weekend. Later I have a meeting—it will be on a video call because we have associates based in other offices. I paid $6 for a soggy little Italian sub at lunch, and ate at a wobbly cafeteria table with 3 guys I barely know who spent the entire time talking about reality TV and how to evict “bad tenants” from their investment properties.
So much of my career when I had the power to do so as a middle manager was devoted to inclusivity and accommodation because I knew that working for a living sucked buttered ass. I spent so much time and effort advocating for others, standing up to and dismantling bad processes, doling out what raises I could get approved whenever the chance arose… I looked past peoples’ education, employment gaps, weird scheduling limitations and criminal histories to put them in roles where they could excel… but for me, who really isn’t asking for much, there’s just this bleak blackhole of bullshit stretching on into infinity. (Haha, ok, I’m being dramatic now, but golly I’m pissed off.) I'm good at what I do, and have made some hugely positive impacts on the careers and lives of others that are very rewarding to me, but I'm fucking dying here.
What gets me is that nobody else seems to mind this way of life. I can’t get a read on any of my coworkers’ attitudes toward WFH, but they all seem perfectly chatty and happy—like they sincerely enjoy being here. Like this is it for them. They talk all day about things I could never even begin to fake an interest in. They laugh and smile and take the occasional jab at how quiet I am. That’s their prerogative I suppose, but it just makes me feel even more like an alien.
The quality of my work is measurably poorer than it was in my WFH era. Decisions are made in weird vacuums (hallway conversations, quick check-ins, etc.) so that nobody is ever on the same page anymore. When we were remote, sharing information was always a deliberate and documented act—now it’s a nightmare coordinating anything with anyone. My commute, though inexpensive compared to my old one, is tantamount to a further demotion as my gas and food bills eat away at what little savings I was managing to build up…
Anyway, enough with the self-pity party! Here's my question: Has anyone else experienced this kind of blindsiding with return-to-office mandates? People who were able to completely flip their lives and mental health around during the WFH era? People who made huge changes in their lives based on that new way of working? How do you cope with losing that? Therapy, even has turned into just a sad reminder of how much progress I'd made–it's damage control now at best.
Or am I just totally alone in feeling like my body is on fire every single second that I’m in this place?
What works for others facing this kind of shift?
TL;DR: I left an $85K/yr job that was fully in-office with a horrendous work-life balance, for a $60K/yr job that was fully remote and a great work-life balance. Both jobs way out of my league re: education history. New job abruptly ended WFH and now I’m forced to wrestle with the social anxiety, stress, and self-destructive coping mechanisms that WFH had 100% fixed for me. Have other recluses like me experienced similar whiplash and overcome/coped with it healthily?