Addicted to Work

In Out of Office, two remote-work evangelists uncover the cause of all your stress: Your job

- BY David Wainer

The journalist couple Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Montana in 2017, thinking they would replace the time saved from their subway commute with hiking, kayaking, and skiing. But work, they soon discovered, simply absorbed the extra time.

Millions of Americans have experienced something similar during our ongoing mass remote-work experiment. Although much of corporate America was no longer stuck in traffic or slogging it out on trains, the fusion of the home and the office actually made it harder to disconnect.

Almost two years into the pandemic, none of this is exactly a revelation. But in Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home ($27; Knopf ), Warzel and Petersen argue that better remote work is possible—but only if we first repair our broken relationship with our jobs. Cutting the cord to the office is a chance to address bigger issues in the U.S. labor force, including child care, inefficient working methods, burnout, “toxic individualism,” and work-life balance.