The Home Is the Future of Travel
Work and life are undergoing a “Great Convergence.” The once-solid boundaries between our jobs and our leisure are getting leakier.
Knowledge industries—including media, marketing, and law—have for decades collapsed the distinction between work skills and social skills. The same schmoozy behavior that can win friends and influence people can also win business and influence promotions. Computers, where Excel documents intermingle with shopping tabs, blend work tools and personal tools. And remote work—the ability to do a job not only from home but from anywhere—mashes up our work time and leisure time, erasing the spatial differences between many of our weekdays and weekends.
You can see this convergence most clearly in our houses. As recently as the 1800s, the home was everything—where Americans worked, and slept, and cooked, and ate, and raised children, and worshipped. For most people, there was no commute; there was no office, or factory. And the agrarian economy ruled out vacations for most families. Then, in the past 150 years, the industrialized world drew sharp, , and meant three different places.
