For many more millions of essential workers, there was never a choice but to keep showing up at stores, on deliveries and in factories, often at great risk to themselves, with food and agricultural workers facing a higher chance of death on the job. During the first stressful months of quarantine, job turnover plunged people were just hoping to hang on to what they had, even if they hated their jobs. More fundamentally, the pandemic has masked a deep unhappiness that a startling number of Americans have with the -workplace. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live if they can work remotely? Do they want to switch careers? For many, this has become a moment to literally redefine what is work. Millions of people have spent the past year re-evaluating their priorities. But after years of gradual change in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken. The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model-strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption that there is a wife to handle duties at home. We’re supposed to work to live.”Īs the postpandemic great reopening unfolds, millions of others are also reassessing their relationship to their jobs. I’m closer to my goal of: I get to go to work, I don’t have to go to work,” Kari says. Now they have control over their schedules, and her mom has moved nearby to care for their son. “We are taking a leap of faith,” Kari says, after realizing the prepandemic way of working simply doesn’t make sense anymore. Today, both have quit their old jobs and made a sharp pivot: they opened a landscaping business together. “I realized working outdoors was something I had to get back to doing.” During the time I was home, I was gardening and really loving life,” says Britt, who grew up on a farm and studied environmental science in college. Meanwhile, the furlough prompted her husband, 30, to reassess his own career. But as the baby grew into a toddler, that wasn’t feasible either. When that didn’t pan out, she took a part-time sales job with a cleaning service that allowed her to take her son to the office. ![]() A native of Peru, she hoped to find remote work as a Spanish translator. ![]() Kari, 31, had to quit to care for their infant son. Then the pandemic shutdown hit, and they, like millions of others, found their world upended. Their lives were frenetic, their schedules controlled by their jobs. Until March 2020, Kari and Britt Altizer of Richmond, Va., put in long hours at work, she in life-insurance sales and he as a restaurant manager, to support their young family.
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