From WFH to WTF...

I heard a deeply tragic story the other day, from a rather unlikely source: a healthy 25-year-old with a well-paid job, a place to live, and good family and friends.

What could be so tragic about those circumstances, you may well ask: someone with their whole life ahead of them, in good health, with enough money to enjoy life?

Consider the following exchange between the 25-year-old and an older family member (OFM):

OFM: "So what are you doing for work now you've finished studying?"

25 y/o: "Oh, I've been lucky, I've managed to get a really good job in administration for a great company."

OFM: "Sounds interesting, what are the hours?"

25 y/o: "Monday to Friday, 8 to 6."

"8 to 6, that's a long day, you must be tired at the end of it, what with all the travel as well."

"Oh, there's no travel! It's all work from home."

"What, you mean you never go into the office?"

"No, none of the admin or support staff do."

"Have you EVER been into the office?"

"No, the interview was over Zoom."

This may seem an unlikely source of "tragedy", but when I heard this story, I just thought how utterly sad and devastating it was that such a fundamental part of adult life - going out into the world and finding work - has been removed.

"Hang on," you may say. "It hasn't been removed. This person has found work."

Yes - but in terms of character formation and developmental progress, I think the "going out into the world" bit is just as, if not more, important than the "finding work" bit. After all, people have amazing, transformative experiences going out into the world and doing things other than working - travelling, studying, meeting new people - but very few such people have similarly notable experiences sitting alone on their sofa, even if whilst so-sitting they are doing things that generate cash.

It's different when you're older: when you've had many years or decades in the workplace, going WFH can feel like a huge relief, especially if a long commute was also part of your working day.

But when you're young, the opportunity to be in the real world, meeting new people from all walks of life, navigating all the complexities and politics of a working environment, are a key developmental stage which simply cannot be replicated by sitting on the sofa (or, more likely in this age of crowded house-shares, stuck in your bedroom).

I was thinking about this 25-year-old and their working life after reading another assessment of Generation Z (the oldest of whom are currently 27), and how they are increasingly unrecognisable from older generations is several stark ways, which can be roughly encapsulated as: they don't go out.

For people in the 18-27 year old age bracket, "going out" generally means - or used to mean - going to pubs and clubs, drinking, and meeting friends and potential partners.

Yet now, 20-somethings are far less likely to engage in these activities than adults in their 30s and 40s. Nearly 40% of 18-24 year olds do not drink alcohol at all (compared to just 12.5% of the adult population generally), only 25% of them are interested in going to clubs, and fully 75% of them are single - with an increasing number of them identifying as "asexual" (91% of people who identify this way are aged 18-27).

Furthermore, friendships in this age-group are less and less likely to be experienced in parks, cafes, and pubs, and more and more likely to be conducted online - through text messages and face-time (“you don’t need to pay to go clubbing,” said one teenager. “You can sit at home and watch it on your phone.”).

So, if you're not interested in drinking or clubbing; if you're single with no aspirations for a partnership; if your friendships are all online, and finally, if you work from home... what actual reason is there (also factoring in the ever-increasing array of online entertainments and delivery apps) to ever leave the house again?

And that's what it comes down to: Generation Z has been engineered to be the prototype of the "ideal" human of the future. Someone single and teetotal (the establishment wants to eradicate alcohol because it typically provokes too much sociability) who lives life - works, shops, and socialises - entirely online.

We think of this as a hideous dystopian future, but the fact is, it's already become a reality for millions of people, and it's been pushed especially hard on Generation Z to ensure they don't know any different.

If I'd been told when I was 25 I had to give up the buzz of the office, the work friendships, the drama and gossip and Friday night drinks, in exchange for sitting on my own at home, I would have been horrified and devastated.

But today's 25-year-olds are not, because it's all they've ever known.

If I look at my own life, I consider the key developmental period where I definitively concluded adolescence and passed into adulthood to have been ages 23 to 27. I had finished studying, and moved from the slow and steady pace of life in Stoke-on-Trent, to frenetic, full-on London, living in a series of house-shares with an array of pub-story-worthy flatmates ("and then she took the bin into the back garden and set it on fire whilst screaming" - true story).

I did a wide variety of different jobs - none less than 30 minutes travel from my home, and some up to two hours away - and encountered radically different sorts of people. Not only did I befriend those from countries as diverse as Romania, Brazil, and South Africa, but I actually befriended (whisper it) those of a more right-wing persuasion.

Having grown up surrounded by a uniformity of liberal left-wing views (spending half my childhood on a university campus, and the other in Islington-of-the-north, Chorlton), I had never had a right-wing friend.

(Though I had suspected, shamefully, I might be leaning more in that direction myself, when I started buying The Sunday Times at the weekend, instead of The Observer.)

I was astonished to hear people I liked unapologetically espouse the kind of views I'd previously thought only beholden by "the evil", and - although I would neither define myself as "left" nor "right" now - encountering a wider array of views during my twenties was key to my eventual evolution into "conspiracism".

And I would never have met these life-changing people online, because - although Facebook and so on were around at the time - algorithms would have kept me in my echo chamber, just as they are designed to do. It had to be in person.

So I can certainly see why the psychopathic controllers who rule the world want to so viciously excise this stage from people's lives - it's too likely to turn them from the formulaic repeaters school aims to mould them into, into open-minded free-thinkers who ask questions and change their minds. My entire world view altered radically between the ages of 20 and 30 - and that is not because of anything I read or watched (useful as such resources can most certainly be): it was because I went outside and lived in the world.

Also, on a physical level, when I lived and worked in London, I would easily walk around 12,000 steps a day without trying - walking to the tube, walking around the office and up and down stairs, popping out to get coffee and lunch, meeting friends after work. I never did any formal exercise, but was incredibly fit from all the walking - as well as getting plenty of sun in the summer months.

How many steps a day does the average WFH employee manage? According to a report in Forbes, the average remote worker walks just 16 steps from their bed to their workstation.

Whilst the very diligent and disciplined may commit to spending their lunch hour briskly walking around the block, realistically, most people - and more as time goes on - are going to stay in the house all day, breaking only for food, before spending the evening online or in front of a box set (after all, going out is so expensive now).

The more they get used to it - including and especially if it's all they've ever known - the easier it will be.

All this, of course, is entirely by design, and was accelerated and normalised by "the pandemic".

Without the pretend plague, there is no way society as a whole would have accepted the mass exodus from the workplace into working remotely. The idea of "working from home" was, until 2020, widely seen as something of a euphemism for "got a hangover" or for otherwise shirking off. Employers nearly uniformly rejected it, because of the negative impact they believed it had on workers' productivity and team cohesion.

So - even though internet capabilities were more than good enough to enable many workplaces to make the change to work from home prior to 2020 - it would never have happened without a crisis.

That was a key, if not THE key, reason for "Covid" - to radically restructure society. To make never leaving the house appear a safe, convenient, and inexpensive alternative to going outside.

The lockdowns and business closures had the joint effect of normalising the idea of staying in all day, every day, whilst the economic effects meant that - by the time the UK did unlock - not only had many leisure and hospitality venues gone out of business, but soaring costs meant fewer people than ever could afford to regularly go out in the ways they could pre-2020.

And going out is as habitual as anything else: once you're out of the habit, it is increasingly difficult to get back into it.

I don't think it incidental, either, that the resistance to the Covid tyranny was overwhelmingly comprised of people aged over 35, and there were very few in the 18-30 bracket. This does not seem intuitive, when historically, that age-group has been the most beloved of going out - pubs, clubs, travelling, and going to college and university.

You'd therefore think that age-group would have been far more outraged and up in arms about having all their opportunities taken away, than adults in their 40s, 50s, and older, who typically have a rather more sedate pace of life than a 21-year-old.

Yet a shockingly large number of those in their teens and twenties stated they found lockdown a relief.

The statistics quoted at the beginning of the article - showing Generation Z eschewing drinking, clubbing, and dating - speaks of a generation far more introverted that its predecessors, and as we all know, members of this generation are far more likely to be on the autistic spectrum, and to suffer with social anxiety and panic attacks, than older people.

Indeed, mental health conditions have exploded in the young in recent years, whilst remaining relatively low amongst older adults.

Generation Z has been brought up in a perfect, toxic storm of endless chronic poisoning - the gargantuan "routine childhood immunisation schedule", which has been vastly extended past anything their parents ever had; endless rounds of health-decimating antibiotics to deal with aforementioned poisoning; foods coated in gut-dysregulating pesticides; water full of neurotoxins, and the list goes on.

This, coupled with the stresses of constant social media immersion and an ever-more toxic and discordant school culture, has produced a generation in meltdown who are therefore - understandably - far more amenable to a life lived entirely alone indoors, than older generations would have been.

The social anxiety and panic many of Generation Z feel at the prospect of leaving the house and interacting with others primarily stems from a damaged gut and consequent nutritional deficiencies, caused by their lifetime regimen of poison (mental health conditions have long since been known to have their root in the gut). It could all be reversed with the right diet, detoxes, and supplements.

But instead, the system sticks a label on them (depressed, ADHD, autistic - nearly every under-30 seems to have at least one such label now) and prescribes more poison, because a damaged, fearful person who gains relief from staying inside alone, is exactly what the system wants.

It profoundly alarms me just how easily this radical and enormous transition has taken place: that young adulthood no longer means, "going out and finding your way in the world", but rather, being at home online - and we've slapped a veneer of respectability over it because "at least they've got a job and are earning money".

But that's not enough and we all know it. When we picture the stereotypically exasperated parent of an unemployed young adult, a youth who's lounging around the house all day playing video games, the typical line of the parent is, "sitting around the house all day's no good for you! You need to be out in the world around other people!".

It's not just about the pay packet. If you said to that parent: "okay. He can get paid for being online all day. Are you relieved now?", most parents would say, "no, because that isn't a proper adult life. He needs to get out there and experience the real world!".

Yet for an ever-increasing number of young adults, they can't.

The potential implications of this on a mass-scale and what it will do to human development in every regard appear to have been barely considered (of course, the overlords have considered them very well: that's why they've engineered this situation into existence). We've been sold on it because it's "safer", "cheaper", "more convenient", overlooking the cataclysmic losses and what they might mean in the long term.

Even more ominous is that the idea that being at home all day, every day is acceptable because "you're getting paid so there's no problem" throws the door wide open for UBI.

The job market is contracting as AI gallops ahead, and we're very close to a situation where the number of people who want to work, outstrips the number of jobs available.

In the past, a key argument against UBI was that sitting around the house all day isn't good for people: that the idea they will use their UBI to enrich their lives and cultivate meaningful hobbies is fanciful, most will just use it to sit at home scrolling the internet, drinking, and watching TV.

Well, now that so many people's lives are much closer to that, even if they're officially employed, makes the case to resist UBI much weaker. So many people are already leading a "UBI-like" lifestyle.

How many regular drinkers, once their employment became work from home, have crossed over into outright alcoholism, because working from home facilitates it? It's pretty difficult to get away with being drunk in an office (indeed, I remember an old colleague of mine who was and got fired), but if you're just on the computer alone all day, who's to know?

How many people are now spending Friday nights at home watching Netflix, rather than enjoying vital, life-lengthening sociability, having end-of-the-week drinks with colleagues in the pub?

How many people are now using Zoom, rather than attending work meetings in person?

Now we've already got people used to an at-home, screen-based life, changing the income stream that facilitates it from "salary" to "UBI" is far less of a leap than it was.

What the social engineers have very diligently been doing in the post-war years - a strategy enormously accelerated in the 2020-present chapter - is making every attempt to drastically shrink our lives: to cut us off from more and more people, pursuits and possibilities until, in the end, it is just us - individual people, alone with our screens - and them, on whom we have become entirely dependent\.

They do this because they are psychopaths and this is exactly what psychopaths do. Isolate people, shrink their lives, and make them wholly dependent.

So, as ever, we must vigorously push back, and make more effort than ever to remain - not "safe" or cocooned in convenience - but human. In times past, one didn't have to make a particularly concerted effort to do that, it was simply a given that if you passed through life's normal milestones - finished school, got a job, acquired friends and a partner - your life would be adequately peopled and active.

Now it is far from it, including and especially for young people who should be at the social peak of their lives.

If I were to give advice to anyone still at school, I would encourage them to seriously consider professions which can never be 100% work from home - construction, plumbing, electrics - and for people already qualified in other fields, to try as hard as possible to find "hybrid" positions, rather than something that is completely work from home.

I would also emphasise the importance of developing hobbies that cannot be done alone inside - sports, drama, being in a band or choir - and that getting out of the house and being around others in a meaningful way is as or more important than making money (and if the prospect of doing those things causes you paralysing anxiety, that very likely stems from a gut condition that is treatable).

I know a lot of people of all ages do already do those things and more and that's great. But the psychopathic social engineers are going to double down in their efforts to make it harder and harder, so we must be ever-more creative in resisting, and in ensuring we are never prepared to prioritise "safety" and "convenience" - both of which a life lived entirely indoors do indeed offer - over (risky and difficult as it certainly is) a real, full, "IRL" human life.

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