I have hated offices from the moment I stepped into one in what feels like a lifetime ago. I am pretty sure I’m not the only one to feel this way. This isn’t a comment about the people I worked with, of course, because they were often lovely and genuinely great to be around. It’s about the spaces themselves: those cheerless corridors, uninviting pantries, one-size-fits-all boardrooms, and soul-sucking cubicles that so many of us spend more than half our lives in. I like to think that the one bright spot in our post-pandemic world came from the collective recognition of how little our professional lives mean in the larger scheme of things. It was an ‘aha moment’ that was a long time coming.

Most of us still don’t have the luxury of working from home, not because we can’t do the job well, or possibly better, but because of how ingrained this ridiculous notion of an office really is. We are raised to believe that human beings must commute for hours and spend ten hours in a building to justify being paid a certain amount of money. It’s why I wasn’t surprised when some so-called titan of industry—the kind we glorify in the press simply because they happen to run a large company or two—recently came up with the ridiculous suggestion that young people should put in more hours at the office. It is the kind of advice our grandparents have foisted on us for years: work harder, as if trying to get by in most Indian cities isn’t hard enough.