Some workers still prefer to commute to the office in San Francisco, even if they aren’t required to show up regularly.
As many Bay Area residents head for the Sacramento region in search of more plentiful and affordable housing and to take advantage of remote-work policies, I’m going in the opposite direction: Next month, I’ll be moving from Sacramento to San Francisco — primarily to be closer to my job.
In some ways, this decision feels almost quaint. More than one-fifth of Californians continue to work from home at least part of the week, and nationally, many workers prioritize flexibility and the ability to work remotely when evaluating employment options.
Yet I actually crave less flexibility — enough to literally pay for it by moving to a smaller apartment in a more expensive region.
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This may sound masochistic, but what I’m actually after is something warm and fuzzy: human connection.
Put another way: After more than four years of working from home, I’ve had enough.
Perhaps the acuity of my longing for working with other people — a feeling particularly pronounced among millennial and Gen Z workers, according to a recent international survey — can be explained by the fact that I haven’t done much of it.
When I moved to Sacramento in March 2020 for my first full-time journalism job at the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters, I had heady visions of myself waking up each morning and getting ready for work, putting together a sharp outfit and carrying my coffee cup and lunch box into the office, stopping by my coworkers’ desks to chat, exploring the honeycombed hallways of the Capitol.
I’d spent the previous nine months working remotely as a part-time copy editor and trying to break out of the relentless cycle of short-term underpaid journalism internships, so working 9-5 in an office seemed like a dream.
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Alas, that dream turned out to be incredibly short-lived. Less than three weeks after I started my new job, the state shut down due to COVID.
Once more, I returned to working from home. Once more, my world shrank to the size of my computer screen. And once more, the majority of my human interactions were mediated through technology.
In hindsight, it’s fascinating — and a little disturbing — to realize how quickly the anomalous rhythms ushered in by COVID became my norm. Working from home, I initially tried to maintain some of the habits associated with going into the office, including wearing a decent outfit or at least a pair of jeans — for which I was trolled in the Wall Street Journal after tweeting about it. Why wear jeans when you could wear comfy pants? Before long, I came to accept this logic as infallible.
That line of reasoning persisted even after the world began to reopen. Yes, I could attend a legislative hearing in-person at the Capitol. Or I could watch it on a livestream while simultaneously answering emails, working on drafts and crossing other items off my to-do list — and wearing comfy pants.
And so, even as I applauded myself for being more efficient, I resented myself for taking the path of least resistance.
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I don’t want to take the path of least resistance anymore. I could conceivably work from home for the foreseeable future, but I don’t see myself getting anything out of it. I don’t see myself growing.
I need something to propel me out of my a-little-too-comfortable routine and back out into the world — and I think moving to San Francisco, where I’ll be enmeshed in a bustling, busy, brand-new environment and required to go into the office, will provide the requisite shock to the system.
In other words: It’s time to get rid of the comfy pants and put on the jeans.
This doesn’t mean eschewing balance. The Chronicle requires employees living in San Francisco and surrounding counties to come into the office three days a week, but we still have the flexibility to work remotely the other two days, reducing time spent commuting and getting ready and giving us more time with our families and for ourselves.
But, perhaps selfishly, as a single person early on in my career, I’m grateful for the in-office requirement. I want to spend time with my coworkers. I want to learn from talented journalists who have spent decades in the field. I want to discover all the great lunch spots around the Chronicle office and try as many coffee shops as humanly possible. I want to make new friends and meet new people and explore new places.
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And I want to feel connected to the city I’m living in.
That’s what makes leaving Sacramento so bittersweet. I’ve lived here for four years, and yet in some ways I feel like I haven’t lived here at all. I moved here with no built-in community, expecting my job to anchor me. But without the stability of going into the office, I felt unmoored, like there was no real reason for me to be where I was.
That’s the challenge facing many American cities, including San Francisco, post-pandemic: When many people can work anywhere, what reason do they have for living in one place in particular?
I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to live in the city where I work. Even if I don’t have to go into the office, I want to. I need to.
Now it’s time to see whether San Francisco lives up to the idea of it that I have in my head.
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Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
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