Splash No. 210 - Office
Office
A little over a month ago, I started a new job at a startup called Pave. And for the first time in two years, I had to start going into an office for a few days a week. I was horrified. I truly believed myself to be someone well-suited to work from home, with my limited social battery and penchant for working from bed most of the day. Leading up to my first day, I had no idea how I was going to do it, unless the office had some secret bed desks that they hadn’t told me about. But now, about six weeks later, here I am, someone who sometimes misses the office on his work from home days, despite the 30-40 minute commute.
I don’t think I was fully aware of how little human interaction I’ve received over the last few years until I started this job. Working in an office is such a wholly different experience from working remotely, with plenty of residual small talk and conversations happening constantly. Even actual meetings feel different when aren’t constantly presented with the head and shoulders of your coworkers in perpetuity.
After my first few days, I was exhausted — not only from the commute and the many stairs in the office, but from feeling like I had to be “On” all the time, presenting a version of myself that was perceived by others. It turned out that maintaining my winning personality and offering an endless barrage of hilarious quips was no easy task. Each day, I would come home and collapse on the couch, utterly drained.
But this exhaustion wasn’t bad. It didn’t feel like the purposeless tiredness from another day passed without much happening, no, this felt more meaningful, even if I just spent a day throwing acronyms around to think about the future of a piece of software. Working at a small company means that everything anyone does can have an impact and everything feels a little more consequential. To my brain, I’m sure that these days of activity are perfect — joining together with other people on certain goals, just like how our species has done for millennia. Overall, I find myself more satisfied than I have felt for a while.
It’s not a perfect existence — I’m still building up my social battery enough to socialize outside of work, but I think my capacity is slowly rising, more electricity flowing. What’s worse is my creative juices are flowing less than they used to — I spend much less time thinking, which keeps me out of existential crises. Unfortunately, existential crises provide a majority of the basis of my writing, so maybe this is a time for me to diversify or give myself more time to just sit and think. For now, I’m just enjoying the shift, trying to keep up with the pace, and appreciate the newness of it all. (And continuing to search for the secret bed desks.)
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - june 22 - I listened to a lot of music this month!! Lots of intense house music but there's always variety in there.
ARTICLE - "Andrej Stojakovic Is Paving His Own Path to the NBA" by Mirin Fader - I can never resist a lovely little profile of a basketball player
POEM - "Why Are Your Poems so Dark?" by Linda Pastan - "Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time?"
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Industriously,
Nikhil