In late March, I canvassed managers of multinationals about how they were tackling the growing coronavirus crisis. Drawing on the experience of their staff in China, they observed that adrenalin had energised locked-down employees at first. Only at the five-week mark did enforced remote working start to breed anxiety.
Most companies have long since passed that milestone. Ten weeks after I started working from home I took a week off. It was relaxing, but I emerged to contemplate the endless flatness ahead. Lockdown may be lifting, but a return to regular office life is way off. I have just taken delivery of stationery that will last me at least another year. The prospect of measuring out my life in A6 notebooks, on a bland diet of videocalls and virtual encounters is draining.
One colleague calls this “the blancmange era”. Many would willingly exchange their gristly daily stress for such blandness. The toll extracted by financial and job insecurity, or by high-pressure work on the front line of this pandemic, is vast. But workers there talk about the immediate future in similar terms. “Our lives are lived in a loop of hospital and home, with none of the teaching, meetings or networking we usually do, and I just do not think many doctors have the energy for this to go on,” one doctor told the Financial Times.