"He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere."
-Montaigne, On Idling (quoting Martial's Epigrams)
9.5.23
In New York for another day, pondering a calendar punctuating with a couple appointments, and wondering how long I'll be able to keep this up.
Last weekend we took the backroads southwest through Addison and Elkhorn to the trailhead of the Pine Creek Trail, which winds south into the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. The trail was created from the old railroad path along Pine Creek, broad and surrounded on both sides by steep ridgelines and dense woods.
I have to admit that I can't recall hiking through a more beautiful space, flanked by tall pines and flowers the color of pretty much the entire Crayola box. We shared the trail with a couple horseback riders, a few intrepid hikers, and lots of families on bicycles taking advantage of the relatively shallow incline. I watched the parents and swarms of kids ride by, and thought of how very different it would have been to raise boys here, not just for the physical beauty of the place but for the values and the culture. Sort of wishing I hadn't driven east on I-10 from Blythe with every option in the world laid out in front of me, determined to settle in the South to the exclusion of everywhere else.
But that's a done deal. The issue now is how to survive, professionally and otherwise, as a sojourner who periodically drops into Florida when I can't find a way to avoid it. Panama City holds several decades of memories and friends and work contacts I can't really replicate anywhere else. Not that I've given it much of a chance here; it always seems that I'm too busy trying to keep the ship afloat in PC to devote any energy or time to joining the local Kiwanis Club or trying to market that shiny new New York law license. So this place becomes an aesthetic delight, but little else.
My connections to Taylor County don't run as deep as P's, but they're there. I also am able to leverage P's cred down there to some degree, and have instant entre into Perry society, such as it is. Unlike in Panama, I can easily walk into a WalMart or a restaurant there and not know a soul, although that pretty much never happens at the golf course or the Elks Lodge. Absent Wyldswood, I doubt either of us would spend any time in that place; it's just an abiding love for that little patch of land, and all we've experienced there in our short time together, that keeps us coming back.
But I can feel the pressure of the zeitgeist, a gravitational field trying to drag all of us back to the office. The NYT published a whole essay about it, and how different the various responses have been around the globe to the management challenge of remote work and workers.
Nearly sixty years in this space collectively leads me to believe that capital will win in the end--management needs to be able to spy on lazy, shiftless workers, and hasn't quite figured out how to remote into their computers at home to make sure no one is watching porn or playing video games. Office space needs to be rented, restaurants in our urban centers need their lunchtime customers. Almost everyone will get dragged back, eventually.
In my own profession, I'm starting to see in-person hearings and depositions hit the schedule with increasing frequency, making it harder to block off "Florida" and "New York" weeks on my calendar. Will I have to make a choice at some point? If that happens, will basic home economics preordain the outcome? The income stream required to maintain this party has become pretty startling. That may dictate how it all ends, if I'm forced to decide between an office job in Florida and salvaging some sort of remote gig somewhere else.
What a depressing thought.
I'll be here for a little over a day now, flying back to Florida tomorrow afternoon for a combination of paying work and beginning the process of cleaning up Wyldswood after the storm left us with massive clusters of downed trees and branches. I'm already sensing this is going to take far longer, and cost a lot more money, than we initially thought when the good news arrived that the structures had survived. The structures were at least insured; this will come out of our bottom line.
A compelling premise as I get ready for my first conference call.
Remote work isn't going anywhere. Those business real estate empires just also happen to own major news outlets to help them spread fud