Return to Work

The holidays are over, which means we're back at our desks.

Last year, the Remap crew helped Patrick work through ideas for a new office, and over Thanksgiving and Christmas, Patrick finally made good them. Doing so, it turned out, proved to be a shockingly emotional experience beyond building desks and buying endless accessories.

Then again, how spaces define us has been a huge part of Remap, and what ultimately lead to the creation of the HOA podcast. We're all older, and while not necessarily wiser, we certainly find ourselves thinking about these topics a lot, and it's got us in our feelings.

Prepare for some Sad Dad thoughts, folks.

Patrick: Back in the fall, inspired by the work Janet had done to make her work space more functional, I decided enough was enough with my own space, as well. I have written in the past about how my life as a reporter—where I’ve often written while huddled around half-broken laptops, cold coffee, and terrible seating—has made me complacent. Hell, one of my “offices” in a tiny San Francisco apartment was literally inside of a closet, because it’s all the space we had. 

Rob, I wrote in a closet for the better part of a year. 

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s part of a larger personality quirk/feature: I can get used to things. Think about all the times we’ve hung out with one another. How often have I expressed all that much interest in where we eat or drink? I pretty much never chime in beyond realizing that people are not picking something that is in a reasonable walking distance, and even then, I once let you guide us through a rain storm towards a place that, to your credit, had some terrific food. 

But…I’m older now. I turn 40, despite what my face might tell you, next month. I find myself in a position where, despite being semi-recently laid off, I am in a good final position! (In no small thanks to the continued stability of my wife’s job while the weirdness of mine worked itself out.)

To that point, last month I asked our financial advisor, aka the guy who scares the shit out of me about how much I need to keep putting aside each month to prevent my daughters from being saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, to drum up a life insurance policy for my wife and I. There is a whole other story to tell about that process about how I was denied good coverage from a bunch of places because I had the good fortune of my dad dying of a heart attack, but we can get into that another day. The point is that I’m now paying for the kind of life insurance coverage that’s supposed to make my life easier, or my wife’s life easier, if great tragedy strikes.

I’m almost 40. My dad died when he was 56 years old—and I was 27. 13 years. In another 13, which feels simultaneously like an eternity and no time at all, I’ll be on the doorstep of that same age. I now forget which birthday it was, but there was one in his early 50s where he said “hey, I made it past the point where my dad passed away.” He didn’t make it much longer, though.

When I was in high school, my dad finally bought what he’d wanted his entire life: a small lake house in southern Wisconsin, where he spent his formative years. What do we spend all this time working and toiling, if not to finally, at some point, try and make ourselves happier? That what we’ve grown complacent with isn’t enough, that it’s okay to have a meaningful treat?

I did not expect the introduction to this back-and-forth to be so somber, but in unpacking and dismantling my old desk, I found the original print out of the eulogy I wrote for my father. In moving on from that desk, it felt like I was moving on from a different era in my life, too. I am not in a position where I expect to move homes anytime soon, so when you reinvent a room, it has many of the same emotional arcs as moving to, say, a new apartment. I wasn’t expecting that.

I’m writing this from my new L-shaped standing desk. Yes, Rob, I bought the biggest one, even though half the desk is empty. This morning, I answered emails and did other busy work while standing. A few hours later, I tapped a button, watched the desk lower, and sat in my new Aeron chair to begin typing this out. In a few hours, I’ll put this computer into sleep mode, walk over to my production suite, and stream with Cado. I’ve only spent 36 hours in this setup, and beyond the newness, it’s making me credibly happy. No, it was not cheap—but man, worth every penny. 

I’m hoping to bring that mentality to other parts of my life, too.

Rob: One of the joys and frustrations as you age is that it’s easier to identify things that are worth prioritizing, and if you’re reasonably lucky you also have more resources to invest in those priorities. It’s joyful because you have all these moments where you realize how much you are being paid-back in experience for the money and time you invested in something for yourself. It’s frustrating because you realize you could have done some of this sooner and made life easier. Maybe not to the exact same degree, I have more money now than I did as a freelancer who had just moved to Boston with his grad student girlfriend. But often it’s the self-knowledge that is the real difference between then and now. There are things I could have benefited from back then, even if I would have had to do them on a shoestring, that I didn’t realize I needed until much later. You rejoice in solving a longstanding problem or removing a recurring irritation, but you also rue the years you spent “putting up” with something that in retrospect you didn’t need to.

MK had a moment like that when she realized we needed a stick vacuum. Simple thing, made a world of difference. We have a very nice stick vacuum and those have gotten better in ten years, but ultimately we would have benefited from one of those far more than the other stuff we’ve used over the years. It just didn’t click for her until this year that what she hated wasn’t vacuuming, it was dragging a vacuum around a house and wrestling with a long power cord. Small thing, no stakes at all really, but an example of what I mean.

When I got my Uplift desk, one of the extras I got with it was an anti-fatigue mat. I didn’t really need it in my office and I kind of forgot about it for a while, but a couple months ago I tossed it in front of my kitchen sink and realized that I was suddenly comfortable standing there doing dishes and chopping vegetables. I’d gotten used to how hard my kitchen floor was, and if you’d asked me I wouldn’t have said working in the kitchen caused me any discomfort much less pain, but really I’d just gotten habituated to enduring and ignoring a constant, mild level of irritation. I’d also, not coincidentally, lost a bit of interest in cooking and baking, subconsciously avoiding working in the kitchen without acknowledging that it had become physically unpleasant.

Again, these are small examples of what I’m talking about. Low-stakes stuff. But I think some of the same dynamics apply to higher-stakes stuff around family, work, and even how we conceive of ourselves and our vision of a good life. A lot of us are taught early that if we can avoid bothering other people with a need or a discomfort by enduring our adjusting our own expectations, then that’s what we should try to do. But if you’re really good at doing that, if you have a lot of resilience, endurance, or both, then you can end up being the proverbial frog being slowly boiled in a pot of water. It becomes habit to ignore a problem instead of checking for straightforward solutions.

A few years ago, my wife and I were on a walk and we spotted a group of turtles sunning themselves on a log in a river. She said she loved seeing turtles in the wild, not because of a particular love for the various species, but because the presence of healthy turtle populations is often a visible indicator of broader ecosystem health. For whatever reason that concept stuck in my head: that if you want to gauge the health of a system, sometimes it’s less about looking for problems than it is about looking for indicators of active well-being. Problems can be sneaky and hard to diagnose, and sometimes it’s easier to find signs that things are in a good place.

Since then, “is this good for turtles?” has become a shorthand in our house for a whole range of subtler questions.