The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we spend time. We traveled less. We saw our kids a lot. We cooked more and spent less money. We found new ways to check in with each other. We came up with new hobbies and skills.
To be clear, we did these things because we had to. We also fantasized about happily leaving this new reality behind—when we could finally skip taking masks with us, leave our sourdough starters behind and buy sliced bread, get on a train and go to work normally.
As of this February, offices are back to over 50% capacity for the first time since the pandemic. Schools are open, extracurriculars have resumed in full force, more meetings are off Zoom, people are traveling and commuting again. Ostensibly, this would be a relief for working parents desperate for alone time and kid-free space after the pandemic forced kitchen tables to become school houses, and parents, trained in other fields, had to pivot quickly to early-education and round-the-clock childcare.
Instead, the return to “normal” for many people feels like a demonstration of all the problems with work-life balance that were present before COVID-19, but in even greater relief. Kids overbooked, parents struggling to support their schools, less time for self-care and passion projects, more schedules and meetings and driving around than passion projects and true fun.
Why doesn’t “normal” feel as good as we thought it would? Maybe the previous working world doesn’t align with how COVID-19 changed the way we spent time. For many, pivoting away from the pandemic’s schedule has been a rough transition. What is the point of having gained new perspectives on time well spent, if we can’t actually put any of them into practice?
A window to volunteerism opens and closes
Parental obligations and volunteering are one area where the return to the status quo has been bumpy.
Claire Lovell, vice president of product at the proptech firm Lev in New York, is a mother of two who kept volunteer roles she picked up during COVID-19. She describes herself as “the lobster in the pot” in her virtual alumni board role, as her former high school eventually added in-person meetings and she’s been asked to take on additional responsibilities as secretary. She also serves as the treasurer for her children’s preschool association. And she volunteers with a local tech task force, the meetings of which have become more frequent and have extended beyond their original end date.
This whiplash from “too many hours in a day” (pandemic) to “not enough hours in a day” (now) is hard on everyone who works, but uniquely so for working parents with kid-related schedules to incorporate. “My family is like, ‘You’re grumpy: why don’t you take time to exercise? Don’t do all those other things,’” Lovell says. “But me doing these [other] things provides us with connections we all value a lot. The community I’m part of is permanent for me. I’m planning to be here for 20 or more years.” For now, she squeezes in these extra obligations while she commutes from the suburbs into the city or during “stolen time: weekends, or when I’m watching TV.” She and her wife, a professor, joke that there is no time for laundry as long as they both have jobs.
“I have a lot going on,” she says, but she knows that when it comes to her overload, “it’s completely what I signed up for.”
Remote opportunities become more remote
Stirling McLaughlin, a Chicago-based creative director and art director, is the father of two children with disabilities, one of whom is medically fragile. The world paradoxically became more available to them during the pandemic. “For families like mine, the idea that the world was opening up during lockdown was pretty remarkable. We could do all these things fully remotely that you never would have dreamed of before.”
As a screenwriter and director, McLaughlin and his creative partner found new virtual opportunities as well. “We were able to get access to and participate in festivals that previously we might not have ever had any business being a part of, at least in person,” he says. “It felt like we could be or do anything because we didn’t have to be anywhere.” Their screenplay, Too Many Wades, was a finalist at the preeminent, horror Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus, Ohio, and they took part in some well-organized virtual festival events, meeting other filmmakers and fans from around the world. He remembers thinking, “We could be festival circuit guys.”
Then, McLaughlin says, “When things started to open back up again, all of a sudden, I was getting accepted to these festivals. Because I’m doing 24-hour care for a medically fragile child, the ability to participate really plummeted.” He was crestfallen to have to turn down a trip to Alaska when the screenplay won second place in Anchorage’s 2022 film festival. “I was kind of embarrassed. I got nominated, and there’s no way I’m going.”
A return to imbalanced parenting
For some working parents, returning to more traditional office arrangements meant an unwelcome shake-up to the family workload. L’Oreal Thompson Payton, a Chicago-based reporter, works from home. She and her husband had their first child in 2021. Before her husband returned to his Chicago office three days a week, the pair could divide childcare and home tasks more easily.
Now that he’s going downtown, she says, “That’s three times a week I’m doing pickup and drop-off and getting dinner started. Because I’m the one at home, of course, the daycare calls me first. I’m the one with the more flexible schedule. The unpaid emotional labor.” The resentment, in turn, makes her feel guilty, she says.
This is an emotion Lovell is familiar with. “Robin is left with the crumbs,” Lovell says of her wife, a professor, who hopes in vain that Lovell will drop some obligations. “She is definitely like, ‘Can you please get rid of stuff?’” Ironically, Lovell’s investment in her community also means less time with her family. “’You never play with me,’ [her daughter says.] She doesn’t understand that it’s for her, that it’s still work. Of course, I feel extremely guilty.”
What does meaningful work mean after the pandemic?
Before the pandemic, some workplaces began trying to entice employees with the promise that they saw them as whole people, offering extra flextime for personal pursuits, mental health, or volunteerism. Still, work programs only sometimes result in additional work-life satisfaction. A working father I know at a tech company gets monthly mental health days, but he told me that he often spent those days catching up on his family’s laundry and cleaning rather than zooming around on his Onewheel e-skateboard or playing guitar, as he might otherwise.
In other cases, companies promise volunteer time and opportunities, but either the opportunities feel like assignments or the work culture or red tape makes them nearly impossible. Bridget Reed Morawski, an environmental writer in Washington, D.C., specifically joined a major finance company because they offered the carrot of volunteer time, only to find that at the individual level, it was logistically difficult to log the days she wanted to take off to participate in river cleanups. “My editor was supportive, but she was inept tech- and HR-wise. When you’re in one of those massive companies, there are three different people to email. They were like ‘Just take the day off.’ But there’s nothing for me in the system to click.”
“The act of volunteering is effective, but the programs themselves are not very effective,” says Jessica Rodell, professor of management at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. She researches the topic of meaningful work and has written about pitfalls companies can fall into with internal volunteer programs. She agrees that since the pandemic, more people have realized that there are certain types of meaning and connection that don’t line up with old work schedules and values.
“I think, for a while before the pandemic, we pushed everyone to find meaningful work and connect yourself to your work: ‘Your work is a calling.’ It was such a big part of the way we do our jobs.” After the pandemic, she says, more employees have realized, “‘Wait, my job might just be a job. I get meaning in life in these other ways.’ People are grappling with how to balance that now that they’ve had that realization.”
She says that one of her PhD students is researching whether the notion of quiet quitting is simply rebalancing employee boundaries. “Maybe it’s the idea that there’s more in their lives than work; and they’re trying to create healthier boundaries, that they do other things that matter to them. It’s not just, ‘Hey, I’m at home so my boss isn’t looking at me.’”
Can this post-pandemic sense of overwhelmingness, restlessness, and loss be addressed in any particular way on the individual or societal level? Many of us, for now, just grit our teeth and hope the transition will lead to a more balanced future. Lovell tries to remind herself, “This is a window in time, and there will be more time back for myself.” Payton buys time back for herself: “I hire a babysitter. It’s about outsourcing and not being afraid to ask for help.”
But there are also rumblings that this sense of disgruntlement may be a bellwether of work-life changing to fit us instead of vice versa. Amazon employees are fighting a mandate to return to offices at least three days a week. Anna North at Vox says perhaps the four-day workweek is in the future. Maybe after the pandemic, people are thinking less about meaningful work and more about meaningful life.
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