Work From Home
“If You Can Work From Home, Your Job Is Meaningless”
A popular saying, especially since covid, but an inaccurate one.
While I agree with the underlying sentiment of attempting to find meaning from physical work, this position is mostly just a cope from failing to deal with the technological age.
Technology is here. It isn’t going away. Technology allows similar work to be performed in different locations. While this destroys community and human connection—It is what it is. We can’t change it.
A man can put bricks down in an assembly line. Or, the same man can supervise thirty robots that put down the same bricks in the same assembly line, all from home. Either way, the bricks will be put down. A man can balance the accounting books in his office or from his home. Either way, the books will be reconciled. A 911 dispatcher can accept your call from some centralized location (which, as history has shown, is also a single point of failure) or from their own home office. Either way, your call gets answered.
Most jobs are similar, aside from certain production personnel and apparently “meaningful” jobs like drug dealers and gas station attendants.
We need people that work in public, but that does not guarantee meaningfulness to the employment. A person who works from home 50% of the time is not meaningless 50% of the time. The whole anti- “work from home” mantra is a somewhat silly statement, but as we’ll get into, I feel it is a telling of our degenerative age.
There is also the case that the most important—and most meaningful—job of all is at home. A stay at home mother, who doesn’t need to go anywhere.
Which is really the crux of this issue and why I am even bringing it up. I think this saying has become a mantra in recent years as a further assault on stay-at-home mothers (SAHMs). It is literally even in the name “work from home” versus “stay at home”. The feminists have used some variation of stay-at-home as an insult for many decades at this point, and it’s sad to see a lot of normal people fall into this anti “work from home” trap, further disparaging SAHMs even without consciously realizing it.
The saying (and idea behind the saying) further dissuades more people (especially impressionable youth) from focusing on things that actually matter, like family and child rearing. Which occur—surprise—at home.
There is likely also the libertarian element at play here, because the mantra focuses so much on economics and materialism, so it only takes into consideration consumption and goods produced or services rendered. We must “go into” work to produce some GDP benefactor, and therefore that is all that has meaning to the holy grail of libertarianism/materialism. You must produce or make something tangible to the materialist, or your work is completely worthless in their eyes. No amount of any metaphysical growth will change them. They are devoid of any type of soul. It is a vain materialistic (merchantist, in John Glubb terms) outlook on life, where production and economics are the most important things, above that of higher principles, forms, and understanding such as culture or biology.
Instead of these healthy focuses, the saying implants into people that “meaning” can only be derived from going into a place to work your life away as a corporate drone, or by beating your body through the trades. I’ve done both in my years, and both were incredibly meaningless.
But I have found a ton of meaning in detaching from that materialistic worldview and instead focusing on myself and my family. I do the minimum traditional “work” that I have too, whereas I maximize the work toward my loved ones and my understanding of the world. This pays dividends far exceeding any perceived “meaningful” work I did in construction or at my former corporate office.
The things I built during my time in construction will degrade and melt away with time (likely already have). The tasks I checkboxed off in the corporate office will be long forgotten and made worthless in the coming financial collapse. But the connection I’ve made with God through seeking truth (at home, nonetheless), the covenant I’ve strengthened with my wife, the life I have created and am nurturing, the community connections I have fostered, the people I have helped, and the things I have learned will continue to pay dividends far into what will become of my afterlife. Most of those have happened right here at home; Just like my writings on this website, which have hundreds of thousands of views.
All of that is real meaning. Not something that can be destroyed by rust and moth, or forgotten in a filing drawer somewhere. And this saying seeks to pervert that.
Like everything in the modern world, it seeks to make consumption, production, and materialism the highest virtue one can aspire toward.
But not here. We won’t fall for it.
The people (men and women) that focus on their family, their kids, their own mental health, and furthering their own knowledge are the ones that will find true meaning. And each one of those can be, and often must be, completed solely from home.
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