by Sunday brought a new assignment that’s both hilarious and depressing: documenting how remote work has destroyed what little remained of professional standards. My first piece: remote workers who never wear pants. And I mean NEVER. Business casual on top, full chaos below the camera line.
I interviewed a software engineer who admitted he hasn’t worn pants to a meeting in eighteen months. “Why would I?” he asked, genuinely confused by my question. I explained that pants are generally considered part of being clothed. He responded, “That’s very binary thinking.” I’m not sure what pants have to do with binary thinking, but I’m too tired to ask.
The phenomenon extends beyond simple pantlessness. There’s remote workers using green screen beach views to pretend they’re calling from tropical paradises while actually sitting in their basements in Cleveland. One accountant in Ohio has been “working from Bali” for six months. His company has no idea he’s never left his mother’s house. It’s fraud, but make it digital nomad aesthetic.
Then there’s the entire subculture of Zoom backgrounds that people use to construct fictional lives. I found someone whose background is the Oval Office. He works in data entry for a dental supply company. When I asked why, he said, “aspirational branding.” I asked what he’s aspiring to. He said, “relevance.” I felt that in my soul.
My research led me down a rabbit hole to the pandemic’s weirdest legacy, which isn’t just remote workit’s that we’ve collectively forgotten how to be humans in public. People who haven’t worn real pants in years. Professionals who conduct meetings from closets because their studio apartments have no doors. The complete dissolution of work-life boundaries until there’s just one long, pantless existence punctuated by Zoom calls.
I also discovered people who name their Roombas after Shakespeare characters. One woman has a fleet of robotic vacuums named Hamlet, Ophelia, and Macbeth. “They each have distinct personalities,” she insisted. They’re robots. They bump into furniture on a predetermined pattern. But sure, Hamlet is definitely contemplating existence while sucking up dust bunnies.
The connection to my people treating pets like therapists piece is obvious: Americans are so starved for connection that they’re forming emotional bonds with anything that appears to respond to them. Plants, pets, and now cleaning robots. Next week someone will probably tell me their air fryer understands them.
Between articles, I checked the comments on my empath piece from yesterday. Half the responses are from angry empaths who say I “wounded them energetically” with my words. The other half are from people thanking me for saying what they’ve been thinking. The duality of man, or in this case, the duality of internet discourse.
Tonight I’m reflecting on how I immigrated to America for opportunity and ended up documenting a society that has formed parasocial relationships with household appliances. My mother would be so proud. Or confused. Probably both.
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