TL;DR (by GPT-4 🤖):
- The author reminisces about life before the ubiquity of cellphones and the internet, particularly focusing on the after-work hours.
- The concept of being unreachable after work hours is alien to younger generations who are constantly connected and expected to be available at all times.
- The author and his peers recall the days when work emails didn’t exist, and work communication was restricted to work hours only.
- The article highlights how the growth of remote work and the pandemic have blurred the boundaries between work and personal time, with a survey suggesting that U.S. workers were logged into their employers’ networks 11 hours a day in 2021, up from 8 hours pre-pandemic.
- The author interviews people of his age group about their experiences around 2002, when they were about 27 years old. They recall waking up just in time for work, commuting with newspapers or books, and using work phones for personal calls.
- After work, they would engage in activities like swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone or via work email, and people were less likely to flake as there was no option to send a last-minute text.
- They recall the days of watching whatever was on TV, renting movies from Blockbuster, and playing games on their desktop computers.
- The article concludes with a reflection on how different life was before the internet and cellphones became a constant presence in our lives.
The people who are working 11 hours either don’t know how to turn off or would be taking their work home anyway. How common this free labor is depends on the company/industry. People do have to learn how to setup a good balance or they will likely burn out.
I don’t think the issue is new. Certainly not limited to younger people nor only a thing because of work from home became more common. And then you have shit like “grind culture”, no it isn’t as fun as it might sound. The whole workaholic thing has been around for a long time. People use to refer to stuff like this as the “rat race”.
Pro tip: If you’re just a regular office worker and your employer messages you or sends you an email after work hours just don’t respond to it until you’re back at work. If your boss gives you shit about it that’s the best-case scenario! Why? Because then you can demand that they document in writing that they expect you to work when you’re not at work and you can send that shit right to HR (who’s job is to protect the company from idiots like your boss). It could be a promotion opportunity to fill the void left by your fired boss 😁.
Always demand everything in writing. An email or instant message is fine! Bosses know that making (young) people work after hours is sketchy AF and will suddenly decide that it’s way too risky to abuse you anymore. This isn’t the type of thing that’ll hurt your career! If it were that’s not the type of place you want to be working at anyway.
Remember folks: The most sure-fire way to make more money and get a promotion is to go work somewhere else. “Rising up the ranks” just doesn’t happen anymore and raises will never be as much as you’d get going to work somewhere else.
Big companies really don’t like managers pushing people around, making them do more work than they’re paid for. Not only is it a potential very expensive lawsuit (and really bad PR) it’s also an indicator that they’ve got an employee (your boss/manager) that likes to bend the rules and potentially do illegal shit. If they start digging around they often find the very same people who abuse their employees are the ones that embezzle money, make false expense claims, form secret partnerships with their friends outside of work (i.e. corrupt vendor selection), etc.
Small companies are a different story and medium-sized companies often just haven’t learned such lessons yet or are just such terrible employers that they just expect extremely high turnover (and take advantage of it by abusing people for as long as they can).