Work, Family, and the New Techno-Agrarianism

family, father, mother, marriage

Like many people I know, my work has shifted, post-COVID, to a hybrid-remote setting. In a tight labor market, my largely brick-and-mortar employer realized that we were losing too much talent to corporate remote options that paid better. Last year, in an attempt to stem the tide, we were offered a three-days-in-office / two-days-remote option. Some of our team were offered a fully-remote option (which all but one accepted).

During the summer, this increased to one-day-in / four-days-remote. It was considered a perk, contingent upon offering our same services and doing our work just as effectively as when we were in the office.

Hybrid Work

It has been working well, it seems. For a largely traditional institution, we pivoted pretty quickly in March 2020 when we were all fully remote (due to COVID) by necessity. Our phone system shifted to our laptops, Virtual Private Networks were added for security, and Zoom meetings became a regular thing.

Though I missed seeing my co-workers from time to time, and occasionally felt isolated and disconnected, I found I was just as productive at home as I was in the office. The hybrid option seemed like the best of both worlds – it got me out of the house occasionally, while reducing my commute and allowing me to do things around the house on my lunch break.

It is not lost on me that this is a privilege of my particular strata in the workforce. Were I a bricklayer, a cashier, or a daycare worker, such options would not be available to me and others who now find ourselves working primarily from the comfort of our home. But since it is my situation, and since workforce culture and employer understanding seems to be shifting, it has allowed me to observe the effect of this shift on family life.

Industrial Changes

I have a friend who thinks and writes about the family unit prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not being a history aficionado, I can only write in general terms, but it seems that prior to the late 18th century, society was largely agrarian, and populations were localized in small towns. When industrialization came about, men would leave their families and villages to seek employment in factories in urban areas.

My friend noted that families prior to this era were together more by nature of the work they did. This seemed to be the case, and I noticed, when viewing the film A Hidden Life with my wife a few years back (the film was set in rural Austria) that there was a rhythm and cohesion to life, more localized economies, and a greater sense of community. When the automobile became more commonplace – my friend lamented – this sense of place was further fractured as people were able to travel farther distances for both work and leisure.

Present Advantages

To my present situation: this is my first time working remotely in a job. But I find it interesting that whereas low-wage agrarians some two hundred years ago had the benefit of family cohesion and togetherness (but minimal opportunities for other work), today it is tech workers. commanding higher salaries, that find themselves, well…at home.

Because we also homeschool, we are also together as a family much more than just a few years ago, when I would leave the house at 7 am and get home around dinner time five days a week. Even when I am working upstairs, or on slower days with no meetings, in the kitchen, the kids are at the dining room table with my wife doing math and language arts.

On my lunch break, we can eat together, or we can go to the adoration chapel together, or I can work in the garden. Because I don’t have to leave or get up as early as in previous years, my wife and I begin our day with prayer and scripture reading at the kitchen table over coffee. When I log off at the end of the day, I’m already home. We could probably even give up one of our cars if we had to, since I tend to bike commute whenever I am able.

Hard Simplicity vs Technology

The days I go to work and it is slower, I find myself literally staring at the wall in my office. I don’t mind, but it just seems so…antiquated. The Corner Office used to be a sign of status and prestige, especially in law-firms and corporate high rises. Now it just seems like an expensive waste of space and not something you would brag about the way a yuppie might in the 1980s.  I literally don’t need anything other than a flat space to put my laptop on to do my work – and I do it more effectively and productively, mind you.

Has technology improved our lives? There’s something to be said about washing dishes by hand for nostalgia’s sake, but I don’t think any housewife is going to be giving up her dishwasher anytime soon. Same for the automobile, or air conditioning, or Wi-Fi. We enjoy doing things old-school – baking bread, tilling a garden, writing a letter with a pen and paper – because we are recipients of the privilege of not having to do so.

If we were forced to thresh wheat by hand for sixteen hours a day, or canning all our produce to get through the winter, it might be a different story. We’re kind of “playing” agrarian, if you will. It’s quaint and pleasant.

But agrarian life was not always quaint and pleasant. It was work, always work, and incessant work. Were one to mimic the sluggard in Proverbs (10:26), he would, well, die. But there was a hard simplicity to life, and I think that was in fact a good that is often neglected. Hard work is good for us, and we were not made for unbridled comfort, leisure, and security.

So it’s an interesting swing of the pendulum – those at the higher socio-economic rungs are enjoying more efficiency, more time, better compensation, and yes, more leisure, in this new post-industrialized technocracy. For many, the laptop is the new scythe.

True Riches

For those working lower-wage jobs that require in-person presence at the worksite, it’s quite the opposite. They are taken away from their families, often scrambling for child-care while just trying to make ends meet and pay their bills. For many of these jobs, absence from the home is necessary. You can’t “virtually” build a skyscraper or empty waste cans remotely.

I often reflect that despite my median income, I am the rich man in the bible, afforded a position not of want or need but of surplus. The bonus, for which I am increasingly grateful, is that I seem to have more time with my family (whom I actually like being around), even when I am working in the next room.

It would be one thing if I wasn’t able to work as well from home as from the office. But this new model has afforded us a curious new paradigm of family life in the midst of a sometimes godless technocratic world order, to make of it what we choose – for good or bad. There is fruit there, and I don’t want to squander it or take it for granted.

This is not to succumb to privilege-guilt but simply to cultivate gratitude as a matter of perspective (hot water! flush toilets!) and to accept the responsibility of multiplying talents for the kingdom and for Christ’s least brethren with what we’ve been given. For those who are given much, much is expected (Luke 12:48).

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