Forcing a return to the office won’t work

The Romans never invented the stirrup. What we call a “chest of drawers” was unknown before the late seventeenth century — before which time you had to store your valued possessions in a deep coffer or chest. The doorknob did not exist until 1878. The tea bag was invented by accident in the early twentieth century when a New York tea merchant sent out samples of tea in small silk bags.

Traveling into an office to spend a day performing work which could easily be done at home suddenly seems as absurd as buying a CD

The evolutionary process by which new ideas are conceived and adopted seems linear and inevitable when viewed in retrospect. Delve into history, however, and you will find it is insanely uneven and haphazard. Consider what might be the best idea anyone has ever had — Jenner’s discovery of smallpox vaccination. I always assumed Jenner was immediately fêted for his discovery and the practice was widely adopted within a decade or so; in fact it faced hostility and skepticism for around fifty years. Persuading people to electrify their homes similarly took decades. In Ireland recently I met someone whose grandfather had worked for the Electricity Supply Board, the Irish body charged with encouraging people to electrify their houses. He had resorted to what would now be called a social media influencer campaign: he bought the local priest a bottle of whiskey every month on condition that his sermons regularly referenced how much he liked having electricity at home.

The idea of having to persuade people to install electric lighting seems mad in hindsight. Until you realize that most people, most of the time, have two behavioral defaults: habit and social copying. It is consequently very difficult to persuade people to do anything which requires them to change a habit, or to adopt a behavior which marks them out as unusual. People are also heavily inclined to construct elaborate post-rationalizations for their past behavior, or in defense of the status quo. I am old enough to remember people dismissing cellphones with the phrase: “Why would I ever want to make a phone call on the street?”

Looked at like this, it’s amazing we have any progress at all. Yet certain technologies have a trick up their sleeve: once you have experienced them, the prior alternative seems ridiculous. Once you have used a chest of drawers/doorknob/teabag/electric light/cellphones, the previous technology seems slightly tragic by comparison. I have one of those magical Quooker taps which produces boiling water on demand: extravagant, I know, but once you have experienced it, waiting for a kettle to boil seems faintly medieval. Hence much technology gets adopted the way old people install stairlifts — a long process of reluctant heel-dragging eventually followed by a “I wish I had done this years ago.”

We never minded buying physical CDs when that was the only way you could buy music. Eventually, however, we learned we could download individual tracks instantaneously, only to be told by the music industry that we still had to buy CDs containing twelve unwanted tracks for twenty bucks or else Madonna couldn’t afford to buy a seventh house. Suddenly, faced with an alternative, buying CDs seemed ridiculous, a monstrous imposition. Eventually the music industry buckled.

Something similar has happened with commuting. We never minded it when it was seen as an inevitable part of getting any work done. There was a grudging acceptance because we had never experienced anything else. Now traveling into an office to spend a day performing work which could easily be done at home suddenly seems as absurd as buying a CD. The prior behavior, once normal and universal, seems painful. I am far from being one of those people who supports wholly remote work, but the idea of forcing a complete return to the office simply won’t work.