There’s no doubt that the lockdown due to Covid changed things. While much has been written about the so-called New Normal, not much attention has been paid to the fact that while, again, much has been written in the past, the importance of work-life balance and how to achieve it, guess what?

Covid did just that, all by its lonesome. The Virus Sent Droves to a Small Town. Suddenly, It’s Not So Small, The New York Times reported, spotlighting a small Vermont town with a year-round population of 769. The summer influx made the number top its usual 10,000. Summer is over, but people don’t seem to be leaving. In fact, he post office ran out of P.O. boxes in June.

Unhappy With Your Old Life? Pandemic Frees Formerly Office-Bound Workers to Experiment With New Ones, said the Wall Street Journal. Working remotely from Maui? Seasoned nomads advise on testing out dream place; home is ‘where your Wi-Fi connects.’ Untethered to the office, people are on the move. And seemingly, enjoying life. And freedom.

It’s a new experience for many tech workers, who are accustomed to long hours at the office at the expense of their personal lives. Said one former LA based media strategist in the NYT’s piece, “He finds it hard to conceive of returning to his old commuter lifestyle, which allowed him only an hour a day with his 1-year-old daughter.”

“If someone told me I had to go back to do that tomorrow, I don’t know what I would do,” he said. “It’s almost like we were in a trance that everyone went along with. I used to see Millie for an hour a day. This whole crisis has kind of hit the reset button for a lot of people, made them question the things they sacrificed for work.”

Ah, the law of unintended consequences…and freedom is a powerful draw.

Oddly, parents who once spent long hours at the office are now spending more time with their families, not by design, and mandated remote schooling has extended this. We’ve even heard from readers who are first-time parents that they are enjoying the experience of spending time with their newborns. Even more worthy of note is that no one from either group has uttered the word ‘parenting.’ It’s as if, given the shift in lifestyle, the former activity has once again become a noun, and not simply another line item on the to-do list.

After having been pent up in overpriced apartments so small that you had to go into the hallway just to change your mind, what many people have discovered is that it is possible to live in a space with human proportions. Some have bona fide home offices. Some have back yards. Many have gotten pets. As the Wall Street Journal noted, The Forgotten Front Porch Is Making a Comeback A staple of American homes, long out of fashion thanks to cars and air conditioning, is finding a new role in the age of social distancing. And getting to know your neighbors.

People whose idea of planning dinner was once a visit to GrubHub or Seemless are now learning to prepare their own meals and cooking at home. They’re also doing their own laundry and even gardening, which, as it turns out, takes a bit more effort and knowledge than, as Michael Bloomberg said in reference to farming, “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.” Which is tantamount to saying that anyone with more than, say, 500 Facebook friends is a social media expert.

We do wonder what happened to the on-demand economy and if Silicon Valley is still, as Startup L. Jackson once called it, ‘assisted living for the young.’

Will people return to the big cities and to their offices? Zoom has changed the work and team dynamic. Necessity has shown us that working remotely can be effective. The rat race has come to a grinding halt although, as effective as the technology has been, lest we forget, man is a social creature and human contact will be the norm, at some point, once again. However, we do suspect that hubs will grow in areas where the Covid restrictions are not quite so Draconian as they currently are in the urban centers. Time will tell if the leadership of the major urban hubs, most notably NYC and SF, may well have been architects of their own demise. At least for the foreseeable future. Values have shifted. The centers may not hold. People have rediscovered life at a human scale and pace.

Are we closer to achieving that work-life balance, yea, even without the interventions/ dictates of the Silicon Valley masters of the universe? Considering that the consensus seems to be that people love the idea of finally or once again having space, Houston, we may have lift-off.

Onward and forward.