This is a big part of why white collar jobs are miserable. We have the technology to allow many office workers to get everything done in about 2 hours a day. But because we haven’t moved past the puritanical idea that we must work 8 hours a day to be able to survive, most people are spending 6 hours every day slowly watching their life pass by while pretending to look busy. Salaried workers are often treated as if they were hourly and on the clock, with supervisors chewing them out for “time theft” the second they try to do something productive with their time, like read a book or learning to code.

Remote work shattered this illusion on a massive scale. Now we’re seeing companies that would rather hemorrhage profits and productivity for the sake of just having people back in offices, when they were working better remotely. They are that desperate to control people’s lives and free time.