Started thinking about this when my friend’s son took a semester off from university to come home and work, one of the jobs he picked up is in landscaping. I felt a twinge of jealousy – working outside every day, helping to make things grow, work that is active and physical. What an excellent way to spend your day, especially as compared to being stuck inside all day. For him, in classrooms, for many of us, in front of computer screens and in meetings (or zoom calls). Tying this back to the cliché that is the title of today’s post, my friend’s son is literally working in greenery – much greener grass than most of us. And I am green with envy, pun intended.

Some of my happiest moments are when spending time outdoors in nature. So how did I put myself on a path where that can only happen in my time outside of work? My cousin’s son (which makes him my cousin – don’t know why I’m not calling him that?) is getting his PhD in microbiology in Australia after studying, living and working on coral reefs in Guam. What an excellent path he’s on! Really excited for him! Why did something like that never occur to me? Doesn’t that sound like a better career than what I’ve chosen? I love scuba diving on coral reefs, and go to a lot of trouble to be able to do that on vacation. Wouldn’t it be great to get paid to do it rather than pay (a lot) to do it?

Half of my career has been in finance, half has been in overseas development/humanitarian assistance, and lately I’ve been working in the sweet spot of those, impact investing in Least Developed Countries (LDC). It’s a pretty cool gig! Exactly what I aspired to in my idealistic youth. But is it just me or does the road not taken have a sneaky way of making us second-guess ourselves and our choices?

There are some obvious fallacies involved in this line of inquiry. Traditionally, and still for most people in my circle, we do full-time work that has a ton of rigidity and inflexibility built into the regime. And I would posit that anytime we introduce a sense of obligation to do them at least 40 hours a week, even the best things no longer spark joy. Need to check with cousin Colin if all his time at work on the reefs in the tropic has been following his bliss (Joseph Campbell reference for those paying attention.) Not be too crass, but wouldn’t there be more gigolos and prostitutes if it were really true that doing what you loved meant you’d never work a day in your life?

So when it comes to some of the major pain points of working full-time, including commuting and spending an inordinant amount of time in the office, that was turned on its head during COVID when so many of us ended up teleworking, and all of a sudden we realized we could still get things done even it we weren’t in the office. For a while the press coverage was good – like everyone was piling on to this epiphany – teleworking isn’t just a euphemism for slacking!

Time Savings When Working from Home “Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866

But lately the press coverage has changed and it seems like we need to get our lemning back on and into the office.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post calling on the federal government to enforce a stricter back-to-office approach.

“The pandemic is over,” he wrote. “Excuses for allowing offices to sit empty should end, too.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/04/white-house-urges-federal-workers-return-office-this-fall/

For what it’s worth, my own point of view is that when we give motivated, responsible employees agency to determine when and where they can be most productive and add the most value, they will do the right thing like prioritize the right in-person meetings and travel and show up, and the organization wins. When we set arbitrary rules about where to clock in, there’s always inefficiencies and it can reduce productivity and be demoralizing and everybody’s a little (or a lot) worse off.

The guys harping on showing up in the office seem like grumpy old men who are woefully out of touch. And are probably so privileged the can’t relate at all to what these decisions mean to the everyman and everywoman who make up the ranks of their organizations.

Granted I know I am the pot calling the kettle black in the sense that I am among the privileged to have a service job that can be done remotely, and that there are a lot of jobs that have to be done in person, and many of those are compensated through hourly wages that are woefully inadequate to provide for commute, childcare, social safety net, etc. costs. But don’t worry unions are making a comeback and those workers’ rights and wages are bound to improve since Americans are always willing to pay true prices that capture external costs that reflect our ethics and values. Right?!?

In any event I was fortunate enough to have another epic vacation this summer that also provided a perspective on where the grass is greener. In fact the places I spend time lately rarely have much green, so my expectations were for not for a hot girl green summer but a hot and dry (old hag LOL) summer, but lo and behold there was more greenery than expected in Spain, which apparently got some decent rains earlier this year. Spain made a better impression on me this time than my previous visits. Seville, Cordoba, Barcelona are imbued with and exude their history and also great tourist havens. Madrid is a lovely, eminently livable European capital with a great standard of living. How lucky Kathrine was to live there for the past few years! And how great it was to see her there and meet Astrid!

Morocco stayed at the same level for me as previous visits except when we went ballooning over Marrakesh and that was literally uplifiting

Wishing you excellent summers and hoping to catch up with you again soon on a green patch of grass somewhere in the world!