I recently returned from a 6-week trip to New York. In retrospect, I romanticized the trip as if I would be starring in my own post-divorce Lifetime special. Sublet life! In Brooklyn and the West Village! Museums and cafes and river walks! If I usually travel to NY for one week, by lockdown math, I figured I was due for at least a month and a half.
But what I failed to account for was that I wasn’t the same person as I was prior to the Pandemic. Far from it. In fact, the life I’ve built in my new home in Napa is so energetically different from New York that it doesn’t even adhere to a similar dress code. The contrast was clarifying. And I suspect people are feeling these before/after reverberations in countless ways.
I had lunch in New York with a friend who coaches Fortune 100 CEOs. A client of his had been bemoaning his employees’ lack of willingness to return to the office. “I don’t get it,” he told my friend. “I’m only asking them to come in 3 days a week and they used to come in 5 days a week.”
“No,” my wise friend replied. “They used to come in zero days a week.”
This lockdown, while considered a temporary stop, became a new norm for people. In every way. They grew roots there, developed new routines, and found fresh boundaries with things they would never return to (commutes, Spanx, heels, timesheets, $20 lunch salads encased in plastic).
Even my little summer excursion bears out this finding: I had grown so used to sitting on my sun-dappled porch, cooking from scratch, and sleeping in silence, that New York City (where I was born and raised, I might add) hit like a brick. Oh, and I really, really forgot about the humidity of July.
The highlights of my trip — while glorious as memory snapshots — had an undercurrent of loss. The 3% Advisory Board met and the joy we experienced of finally being together was tinged with the absorption of how much had changed. People moved to remote cities so their kids could be closer to grandparents. Others were trying to lead agencies through remote work while their own footing was shaky. Every last member of the board has had some upheaval in their life. Gathering in person after two years of virtual meetings felt like a home-coming, yet the place we were returning to seems to have no permanent address.
The equation was reversed when meeting Andrea Ogunbadejo, Eleven’s new Head of Production. Andrea and I have built our relationship in the rectangles of Zoom and finally got to have a three-dimensional meeting. As we hugged I joked “did you know I was a shrimp?” This virtual into dimensional realm is likely the new norm for many work colleagues. And for people like Andrea, who left the UK for her new role in New York, she has the added grief of her dearest friends and family now being demoted to Zoom squares. And not on her native time zone any longer.
Even on the personal front, I felt the push/pull of togetherness. My older son is living in Brooklyn, making a go of it in the art world. Many of his high school friends are also living in New York, far from their California roots. So I proposed a rooftop dinner at my Brooklyn sublet and cooked for them. How amazing to see kids I knew as true kids now doing grown-up things: selling commercial real estate, managing social media campaigns, hell, paying the rent on time.
The amount of gratitude they expressed for dinner struck me. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a home cooked meal!” It wasn’t just the food, it was the intimate setting and likely my maternal presence. We all seem to be starving for something that reminds us of home. And of ourselves.
No one is “officesick.” We’re homesick. For versions of ourselves that don’t exist anymore. While new versions are being born.
Of course I bring everything back to creativity. Creating is an act of vulnerability. It is in our most unguarded states that we find flow. In some ways these upsets to our routines can be good for creativity. Disrupting your own process can yield new fruits from the unfamiliar. Yet creative routines run deep and once we find the where/what/who that works for us, we want to stick to it.
So the challenge on the table, as I see it, is to both mourn the loss that comes from all change (even wanted change), while experimenting greatly with the new. If you’re leading creative teams, you can honor this by speaking it aloud. Encourage your people to recap their own week each Friday and score it on how much it lit them up. They will draw their own conclusions about what was present, or wasn’t, that made the difference.
Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.
This is so true - “We’re homesick. For versions of ourselves that don’t exist anymore. While new versions are being born.” It’s about people being open to frequent personal change and greater uncertainty - and the creativity that can be experienced during that process (which is not all bad) - Not just companies or industries experiencing ‘disruption’ anymore. I prefer this opportunity for redefinition and evaluation of what’s important vs just repeating entrenched behavior patterns in life. Thanks for sharing your perspective.