> Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
> so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet.
I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated.
I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
It'll be interesting to see if SpaceX's Starlink LEO internet service will spur remote workers to spread out even further into places like Montana. We've already had to deal with some remote workers relocating to developing countries and in one case, even an active warzone, without telling the company first.
Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
The space issue is fundamental: there just aren't that much space around cities as they stand today. The only pragmatic solutions are:
1) Build up. Everyone wants to live in these areas, so build as tall of buildings as possible and just spread out upwards. Doesn't solve the personal office problem though since Tokyo is super dense but I don't think anybody has a private office?
2) Build new cities. America is big, and there is still plenty of space left to build. But it looks to me like a combination of power-law economics, plus locale desirability, and political willingness to invest into infrastructure is pushing most ordinary people right back into the clutches of 1).
> Remote work is still challenging though. The nature of not being able to get person-to-person time (regardless of how good video calls get) will always remain a challenge in its own right.
Even as a remote worker, I used to think this was true.
I no longer believe this is the case.
In remote video calls each human is like an augmented cyborg integrated with their computer and the internet.
The nature of IRL meetings tend to disrupt the augmentation aspect. Above a certain number of people perhaps augmentation becomes more obstacle then advantage though.
The above is anecdotal and your experience may differ.
Work life in Japanese cities is difficult to compare with it in the United States because Japanese culture is so much different. Diversity is not prized, conformity and harmony are. A large open space with 300 workers in Japan operates very differently than an open space with 300 workers in an American city.
Build new cities, you're on the right track though I doubt it will happen from scratch like in China. Rather mid-tier cities such as Huntsville and Boise will grow into larger cities.
Remote work has its up and down sides. I've been doing it for two years. Most of the time it is better but there are occasions when collaborating on some idea or document would work better in person at a whiteboard. But those get fewer all the time and the remote collaboration tools get better over time. I'd love for all of us to have Surface Hub whiteboards but they're still too expensive to have a reasonable ROI. Over time though, the price will go down, as will that of other high fidelity collaboration tools.
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.