“Being in the office sucks. Feels like you’re under a microscope. And to be honest, daily physical interaction with colleagues is overrated.”

BE STILL MY HEART!

The Pandemic Has Left Us With A Lingering Trauma About Money: Expanded inequality, an inexplicable stock market, and a whole bunch of weird habits — this is how the pandemic will change our financial lives forever. By Scott Lucas via Buzzfeed.

“2020 caused a new form of trauma,” she said. But people’s experiences were very different, depending on their finances. For some, it has been a terrible hardship. “For those people, the outcome could mean feeling like cash is everything, and not trusting financial institutions or the government to help them. They might become risk averse to the point where it is detrimental,” Anastasio said.

For many office workers, one big impact of the pandemic will be abandoning the office and the cities they lived in.

Max, a financial professional in New York who asked not to use her last name for privacy, told BuzzFeed News that even though she was now working longer days than when she worked in an office, she did not want to return. “Being in the office sucks. Feels like you’re under a microscope. And to be honest, daily physical interaction with colleagues is overrated,” she said.

“I’m planning to buy a trailer and live in that while traveling. I’m a longtime camper/adventurer and prefer the outdoors anyway, so this idea has been percolating a while, regardless of financial pressure,” a woman who works in disaster preparedness and asked to remain anonymous told BuzzFeed News. “At least that way my expenses are lower, and I’ll have enough for a down payment if I want to buy property after living in it a few years.”

But even she is feeling crushed by anxiety.

“I do feel pretty hopeless about being able to afford children,” she said. “As a single woman, I don’t think I can afford to raise a child on my own, especially when I consider the huge unknown of possible medical expenses. I have anxiety about the possibility of medical bankruptcy from myself. I don’t know how anybody in America doesn’t have low-key anxiety about the fact that you can be financially ruined just from sheer bad luck.”

For the last week or so, I’ve been in a back and forth with a kind, lovely recruiter about a possible direct-hire placement. It’s flattering to be found and reached out to by recruiters. However, I want full-time remote work, and this recruiter is telling me remote work is “up in the air” after September. …..yeah, OK - don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I don’t buy a major company saying, “Welp, we’re not sure LOL!” Everyone is sure - no one wants to confirm that it won’t be remote because they don’t want to lose candidates. I have been forthright in my communications b/c I have literally nothing to lose, moreover a recruiter’s commission depends on my being hired, and have said to this kind recruiter [paraphrasing] “we are all adults, and this decision can be made about this position right now. If X job is not or will not be remote full time, I’m not interested, and best for all to remove myself from consideration.”

This article has more to it than remote work or not, but that section I put as this post’s title, above, stood out to me. In-office work is overrated. I’ve been lucky to make some friends out of my work colleagues, but I try to avoid being too friendly at work. It’s burned me in the past and I’m hell bent on doing what it is I want to do in this life.