There’s a window behind the desk that still opens. Probably.
To find out, you’d have to move the monitor, lift the blind, and reach over the lamp. Nothing’s wrong with the window. It’s just inconvenient now, and nobody’s been particularly motivated to do anything about it.
Around three in the afternoon, the room starts feeling stuffy. So you turn down the thermostat.
Now it’s a colder stuffy room.
We’ve gotten very good at controlling the temperature inside our homes. We can tell the thermostat exactly how warm we want the house when we wake up, when we’re working, and when we go to bed. Some thermostats even know when we’re home.
But there’s a difference between keeping a room comfortable and keeping its air fresh.
When someone’s home all day, the house takes in a lot more than it used to.
Ventilation takes care of some of that. But a thermostat changes how warm the air is. It doesn’t change which air it is.
What’s funny is how closely we follow the weather while avoiding any actual contact with it. We know when the rain will start, how windy it is, and whether the temperature has dropped two degrees. We can get all that information without ever opening a door.
For some people working from home, the front door might only open when a package arrives.
I wonder when we started thinking of a comfortable house as one where the outside world stays completely outside.
We’ve spent a lot of money putting windows in our homes.
It seems a shame to use them only to look through.
