Front Porches in Cyberville

In a previous article I chastised those who complain if their careers take a hit after leaving the workforce or insisting on working remotely.?I argued that if someone makes a personal choice to stay at home — working remotely or not working at all — they need to accept the career ramifications of such a decision.

However those ‘stay at home’ ramifications are likely positive in many ways, even if career trajectory may not always be one of them. ?

I applaud those workers who consciously chose to order their personal priorities in a way such that Career isn’t #1.

There are several societal and personal benefits stemming from the Great Resignation, and other good things happen when folks work from home. For example:

• Parents staying home to raise and educate their kids
• More volunteers doing charitable or other good works
• Getting to know your neighbors again
• A re-focus away from consumerism
• Less traffic congestion, smog, gas consumption
• etc

In the interest of fairness and balance, there are some real negative impacts to our society and businesses stemming from the Great Resignation that I’ve already railed-on in a previous article.

A Helluva Lot More With Less

Welcome back to For Mature Audiences Only, a series of articles focused on maximizing your work life and ‘life-life.’?Today’s article focuses especially on getting the most of our personal endeavors.

For the past seven years, my wife and I owned a home in a neighborhood that had first been developed in the 1940’s.?Like many ‘close-in’ neighborhoods, ours was undergoing a transformation with the original homes scraped and then rebuilt with McMansions.

This neighborhood’s original WWII-era ranch-style homes had two or three bedrooms, one bath, and a one-car garage.?By contrast, the newly built homes typically have five bedrooms, four baths, a three car garage and other 'essentials' like a home office, finished basement, media room, etc.

Big House, Little Family

Oddly, this need for larger and larger homes is happening even as the size of the average American family has grown smaller. ?

I grew up in a family of six souls in one of those small ranch-style houses.?All six of us shared one bathroom, and I shared a bedroom with my two brothers (of course my sister was the fav, so she got her own room).?Our single-car garage worked just fine because our only car was a beat-up old Studebaker that didn’t want for a garage anyway.?I recall that all the toys my brothers and I owned could be stored in one small wooden trunk that sat at the end of my older brother’s bed.?

At that time my family and I thought we were rich, and indeed we were.?

One thing we did have in abundance was great neighbors with whom we interacted every day be it on a front porch, riding bikes in the streets or dinners at each others’ (small) homes.?We knew our neighbors and they knew us, and that made for a safer, kinder and sometimes spicier life!

The point is simply this:?In Western countries, many of us are working to acquire more bedrooms, cars, watches, clothes and other things we don’t really need.?Our stuff controls us, and we stumble-around searching for an ersatz cyber-community.?

In pursuit of all this stuff our personal lives suffer. If our children go lacking for parental time and if our souls are left wanting for peace, then I say, bring on more resignations.?I love the idea of more people at home in their own neighborhoods for more days of the week. ?

Who knows, this all might lead to something rather odd and rare…maybe we’ll actually get to know our neighbors. ?