Simply getting in your car and driving to work increases your all-cause mortality significantly. I'd wager more people die in car accidents on their way to work than DUIs. Anecdotally I've been nearly killed several times because someone was late for work and ran a red light, cut me off, etc. Road rage incidents increase because you have to be in the office by X hour.
Reduced health, of course, because of driving. You can also consider most employers aren't going to stock a full kitchen so you're probably eating more fast food and garbage snacks. You're more sedentary because you typically can't walk out of the office for a quick trip to the gym, etc. Oh, also, your sleep is probably worse because you have to be up 2 hours early to get ready for work and drive.
Most people don't realize how dangerous automobiles really are. Accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US until people get to be 45+ and cancer starts overtaking it. Even in 2020-2021 CDC data that probably has less people driving than usual: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home. One thing I liked about living in a city was being able to walk to work. I'm reluctant to work anywhere I have to commute because the last few years have likely significantly reduced my chance of accidental death purely due to remote work.
In some ranges it's the leading cause, although overdose deaths sometimes win out. It's kind of absurd that this isn't brought up in articles about remote work. Newspapers run articles about gun violence every day despite it being wwaaaayyyy less likely than dying in an automobile accident, but the far greater danger of commuting is almost never discussed.
"one"of. "Accidental" death is there leading cause of death. But that doesn't mean "car accidents" it just means accidents. For the 35-44 rage 22k died from poisoning and 6k died from car accidents.
It is still a lot, but not the #1 cause of death. About 42k out of near 3 million deaths are due to car accidents (each year)
You don't have to drive to work, some of us walk and use transit.
If the reason to not go into the office is to not risk some accident out in the world, then you might as well also not go to stores, out to restaurants, or movies or shows. You shouldn't even go to a park, and certainly never travel just for fun. Just stay in your house at all times.
That sounds like a horrible way to live to me. There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
> There are other reasons to prefer WFH, but fear of the world shouldn't be one of them, IMO.
I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it. If they paid me for the transit time in from home to the office and back I'd be worth $50-60k more. It gets worse with pagerduty. You're on-call and can't take an hour to get home lest there be an incident to need to respond to. So now you're stuck at the office until late at night doing unpaid labor. Driving home tired is a lot of fun too, aint it!
The "drive to work" situation is not only dangerous it's outright wage theft. Why should I want to collaborate.
>I'm not afraid of the world. When I am not paid commensurate to the risk I won't take it.
Do you need to be paid to go to the grocery store or is everything Insta carted to you because you care about your health more than finances?
It's just such a werid argument to make. It is more convinent, but let's not act like the act of getting outside (an act our industry is stigmatized against) is endangering our health.
This is truly amazingly poor reasoning rhetoric. Your entire argument is two straw men.
Fallacy 1: I can work from home; I can't see a movie on the big screen or visit a park from home. Your analogy has improper premises.
Fallacy 2: Many offices, work locations, and entire cities are not walkable and have poor transit. This is your first straw man argument.
Fallacy 3: The activities you listed are presumed to be more enjoyable than driving into work, so the cost benefit risk profile for traveling to them is different.
Fallacy 4: Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
Fallacy 5: Work driving will occur much more frequently and over typically much longer periods of time than the events you listed. As your risk of accidents rise proportionally to time on the road, these again are not equally weighted.
In short: nobody with a driving-only commute who does not want to RTO is also saying they don't want to go to parks or restaurants or travel. This is your second straw man.
They aren't trying to disprove your argument, simply stating that "increase health concerns" is a poor argument to begin with. You can agreed with a stance and disagree with the arguments.
>Most driving to work is done simultaneously with others aka in much heavier traffic, significantly increasing the risk of commuting vs other driving.
In most major US cities, there honestly isn't much difference anymore. There's always too much traffic, even at the slowest parts of the day.
Even if you're not driving to get to work, simply going outside and taking any form of transport (even walking) increases your risk.
And for most people, if you can reasonably walk to work, you're probably going to be exposed to all sorts of particulates from the roadway you're likely walking along. Exhaust fumes, rubber particulates..etc, none are exactly health-boosters.
Reduced health, of course, because of driving. You can also consider most employers aren't going to stock a full kitchen so you're probably eating more fast food and garbage snacks. You're more sedentary because you typically can't walk out of the office for a quick trip to the gym, etc. Oh, also, your sleep is probably worse because you have to be up 2 hours early to get ready for work and drive.