For most of my working life, I was a journalist. That meant I never really had a typical 9 to 5 job. Most of us schlepped into the office at 10am if we had no assignments in the morning. Those who had jobs don’t appear until afternoon. Those who had assignments throughout the day may not even appear. (PS: If this sounds like heaven to you, let me just say that while we come in at 10am, a lot of us often end work after 9pm, sometimes later.)

So, I didn’t understand what it meant to commute during rush hour. I didn’t understand how it felt like to park my butt in a chair for 8 hours a day. And most of all, I didn’t understand the toll this can take on your mental and physical well-being.

As a journalist, I was always out there, somewhere. The constant movement and variety of places I visited suited my restless, free-spirited soul to a tee. And although I stared at a computer screen like any other knowledge worker on the planet, I didn’t have to do it continuously.

Even after leaving journalism for a spell to pursue a career in healthcare, I didn’t have a typical 9 to 5 routine. As a nursing assistant, I walked 6km a day at work. I chose shifts that suited me. Sometimes I worked 8 hours, sometimes 4. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night. And if I wasn’t at the nursing home, I would be driving, sometimes for 50km plus, around South Australia.Travelling, I was always travelling. For two years I barely stared at a computer screen except to write my novels or email someone. That break was so long that my eyesight actually improved during this period!

What I mean from this long and hopefully slightly entertaining ramble is that for most of my life, I had flexibility and autonomy over how I ordered my days and where I worked.

Enter butt-in-chair work routine

I truly only got to taste the “butt in chair in front of screen for eight hours” routine after I returned to the media as a subeditor.

If you’ve spent most of your working life in active, always-out-and-about jobs, the transition to office working life can be painful. Okay, I was as miserable as a cat trapped in a wet bathtub.

There were so many physical and mental impacts. I didn’t really understand the magnitude until I started writing about them in this post, and it was eye-opening for me. It made me realise why so many people find remote work so appealing and want it so badly.

1. Physical toll

I loved working with my subediting colleagues, but hunching over a desk, squinting at text for six hours a day in subpar lighting* did a number on my health. I had terrible neck and shoulder pain, my weight went up and my eyesight degraded a lot during this period.

(* I have no idea why, but the subediting floor was dimly lit – apparently because the lights were too glaring and causing the subs difficulties. But I couldn’t manage the dim lights – the glare from the monitors would give me migraines. This is something offices really need to consider – good ergonomics extends not only to good chairs and proper table height, but lighting as well.)

Then, I moved to corporate. Boy was I thrust into the rigours of the 9 to 5 with vengeance.

For the first time in my life I had to be a part of the rush hour commute. As a journalist and subeditor, I dealt with traffic jams like any normal urbanite, but it wasn’t a regular, daily thing. As I worked 4pm to midnight as a subeditor, I got to avoid most of the hell.

But as a 9 to 5er, there was no escape.

I mitigated it the best I could. First, by taking the LRT to work as it was just better for my sanity to be stuck in a metal tube full of sweaty office workers than to be stuck in a metal tube surrounded by other metal tubes on endless highways.

But the LRT took a long time to get to the office and I was always a sweat mess when I got there. So, I moved near the office. The commute shortened from 40 minutes to 10 minutes. It just took me RM2,000 a month in rent to achieve that lifestyle. (#sarcasm)

When I shifted to another company, I decided to just stick to commuting due to the high cost of rent in the area. It took me a solid hour to get to and from work because I had to change trains and walk a good 15 minutes to the station to the office.

I would often be so exhausted from all that commuting that I went straight to bed.

The only positive thing from it all was that I had no trouble making my daily 10,000 steps.

2. Mental health impacts

There is an unwritten rule in the “butt in chair for eight hours” routine: Don’t be seen away from your desk for longer than 10 minutes.

I get up often to ensure my back would not stiffen up, often walking to the pantry or just standing up if possible. In one workplace, apparently I got up too often because someone complained about it. When I asked why this was a problem, I was told that it was “distracting” and that “maybe I didn’t have enough work.” When I asked how long I was supposed to sit down so as not to appear distracting or lazy, I was told: “At least 2 hours.” I got up once an hour.

And lordie, open work spaces. The person who invented this needs to be [insert colourful torture procedure]. The “experts” say that open offices are meant to improve collaboration, but let’s face it – open offices are mostly there to save costs.

Actually, the newsrooms I’ve worked at were open offices. The old Star office in Section 13, PJ, was once a big open space – a warehouse converted into an open floor of haphazardly arranged wooden tables and chairs. The entire editorial floor was on one, chaotic floor. No one had a fixed desk. We were hotdesking before it was cool.

The newsroom was rarely quiet – orders were shouted across the room, and if things got heated (and boy were there the occasional loud disagreements) everyone knew about it. There was one editor whose yell was so supersonic that when he shouted a reporter’s name, the entire editorial department knew that that poor soul was in trouble. (Figuring out why said soul was in trouble fuelled our afternoon tea sessions.) Add to that, the rumble of the giant newspaper printers below added to the din.

The only reason why all this insanity worked was because most of us weren’t in the office all the time. (I am not sure how the subeditors coped though!)

But as a subeditor stuck in a desk for hours, I found the din nigh unbearable. By then we had already moved to a tower, but the old habits of shouting orders and having loud disagreements never left the newsroom. The floor space was smaller, so somehow the noise was louder than when we were at the warehouse.

I coped by listening to metal music while working – louder vs loud – until an edict was issued that we were not allowed to listen to music during work hours.

You see where I’m going here. When we’re working in an office, we don’t really have control over where and how we work. Not all companies are draconian, of course, but imagine having no autonomy over how you can work productively, or having to conform to management’s idea of a productive work style.

This impacted my mental health in surprising ways. Having someone lodge a complaint that I was “walking too much” made me feel unwelcomed and hypervigilant. Having to battle endless din and not being able to tune it out or get away ate away at mental reserves and dimmed my focus.

It may seem like such a tiny thing, but having control over where and how you want to work goes a long way to enhancing your mental health.

In the end:

Physical toll + Mental health impacts = A lot of stress

No wonder so many people want to continue working remotely even after the pandemic ends.

The office job isn’t 100% bad though

Although I favour remote working, there are some aspects of the office life that I miss, namely the watercooler gossip.

And the free coffee machine.

Damn I miss that RM50,000 coffee machine that made creamy cappucinos and perfect Americanos.

And IT people I can meet face to face so that I can show them (in pictures and sign language) why my laptop is on the fritz instead of doing it via text over chat, only to have them send code-heavy messages that only the Enigma Machine can decipher.

No, really, the social aspects of office life are really huge. In fact, some pundits are saying that the young generation that enters the workforce during the remote working, COVID-19 era will really miss out on the social-political benefits of the 9 to 5 office life. (And that their career will be forever in the dumpster as a result. Gotta love the media and their catostrophising ways, eh?)

I experienced this social deficit myself when I joined a new company at the height of the lockdowns. I worked mostly remote, met my teammates once or twice. I visited the office only once in my tenure.

I can literally count the number of friends I have on one hand. (When I mean friends, I mean people you’re comfortable enough to discuss the latest episode of WandaVision with. Wait, no, I have zilch office friends I can do that with now. Bummer.)

If I was working in an office, being the ENFP that I am, I would probably already be friends with the janitor, Sally from accounting or the barista at the cafe downstairs where I grab my coffee every morning. I would have had lunch mates from the office or even from other offices.

Because I was new, I couldn’t leverage on the social networks that I may have built if I had joined the company pre-pandemic.

So, I feel disconnected in a weird way. Like I’m a blind creature shoved into a dark corner of a massive building, unaware of what’s going on around me. You know, like a basement-dwelling monster, only less creepier.

It can be very lonely.

If I was still in the Star, I would have 15+ years of social networks to take advantage of. We will probably have built a Discord or Clubhouse channel by now.

However, I believe that the social impacts of starting a new job remotely can be fixed by technology in time or with a hybrid working style where people spend some of their time in the office and other times working from home.

COVID-19 was a shitshow in many ways, but it gave companies and office workers the opportunity to experience the remote working lifestyle and to reevaluate the way we work.

I hope something good comes out of 2020, the year that was so terrible it’s now a meme. And I hope companies will give workers more freedom and flexibility to order their days and how they work.

Because, honestly, how do we go back to the way things were after we’ve tasted the fruits of flexibility and freedom?