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Coronavirus Is a Preview of Our Self-Isolating Future
How working from home could reshape society
At 8:45 each weekday morning, I drop off my four-year-old at preschool, hug him goodbye, and drive back home. Most days, that is the last time I share a room with another human being until he and my wife return home at 5:15 p.m. Often, it’s the last time I leave the house.
That’s not to say my life is particularly lonely. I have interesting and pleasant interactions with co-workers on Slack, friends and family via text message, and strangers on Twitter. (Okay, not all of them are pleasant.) I conference into meetings using Google Meet and Zoom. And I do it all from a little college town in Delaware, where my wife and I can afford to live in a modest house for less than we used to pay for a one-bedroom apartment in graduate student housing in New York City.
Never going anywhere turns out to be especially convenient in a time of pandemic. While my virtual friends in big cities cower in terror from sneezers on the subway and scrub their hands with the fervor of Macbeth, I roam my house in luxurious freedom, a bottle of hand sanitizer accruing dust in a medicine cabinet. Sometimes I touch my face just for the hell of it.
In the face of a coronavirus outbreak that has so far eluded all attempts at containment…
