We gave our houses another full-time job.
At one end of the dining table, a laptop charger runs down a table leg. There’s a sweater hanging over the back of the chair. At breakfast, the room feels perfectly comfortable. But by two in the afternoon, after sitting in the same spot for hours, it’s cold enough to need another layer. So the sweater stays there, ready for tomorrow.
The house hasn’t changed. What we’re asking of it has.
The table used to be good for meals, homework, and the occasional pile of mail. The chair was bought on the reasonable assumption that dinner would eventually end. Now they’re both expected to put in eight hours a day.
But it’s not just the furniture.
For years, plenty of houses were empty for most of the workday. Everyone left in the morning and came back in the evening. In between, the shower had time to dry, the kitchen stayed pretty much the way you left it, and nobody was making lunch or filling the sink with another coffee mug. The house wasn’t cleaning itself. It just wasn’t getting much dirtier.
Now someone’s home all day. The toilet gets flushed more often. There are lunch dishes, crumbs, more footsteps across the floors, and a trash can that fills up faster. None of this is particularly dramatic. It’s just what happens when people are home. We didn’t just give the house another job. We took away its time off.
At an office, you don’t usually look up from your computer and think about whether you should clean the bathroom. When you work from home, you might. The bathroom’s right there, and you’re the person who’s eventually going to have to deal with it.
Commuting had plenty wrong with it, but it did make you leave. You got out of the house, went somewhere else, and came back at the end of the day. For several hours, your house had nobody asking anything of it.
Now you close the laptop and move it out of the way so you can eat dinner.
The charger is still wrapped around the table leg. The sweater is still on the chair. And you’re still sitting in the room where you spent the workday.
