The New York subway is a terrible place to be productive. During the morning commute, congestion forces many people to stand, one hand holding onto a pole for balance, so that getting any real work done is often impossible. Drivers can use their phones to check their inbox or write a few emails, but internet access in the city’s tunnels is spotty. When you look around, people are mostly reading books, flipping through their music libraries, playing colorful phone games, or just staring into space, disconnected.
Occasionally, however, someone violates the sanctity of the subway’s morning slog. Earlier this week, a woman managed to find a seat next to me on the train, pulled out her laptop and started plugging into a spreadsheet. The sight filled me with dread, as it does every time I see a fellow passenger writing code or tweaking a PowerPoint presentation while I listen to podcasts. I suddenly became much more aware of the hard, thin edge of my own work computer, digging into my thigh through the bag.
It is a common existential crisis among American office workers that virtually nowhere is safe from the pressures of their jobs. This inevitability is usually attributed to the proliferation of smartphones, with their push notifications that signal the arrival of email and other messages in the workplace. The first iPhone, released in 2007, helped make social media ubiquitous and paved the way for hyper-connected professional lives. Now, on-call retail clerks and law firm partners often feel like they’re never really working.
But that blame is often attributed to just the wrong piece of take-home technology. If staying home with a cold still requires a full day of work or you can’t find a seat at the local coffee shop on Tuesday afternoons, the iPhone isn’t responsible for ruining your life. The novelty and early popularity of smartphones seems to have distracted America from how quickly its laptops were also removing most of the boundaries between work and home.
You could be forgiven for not noticing all the important things that happened in America in 2008. The economy and housing market cratered that year, 2.6 million jobs disappeared and more than 3 million homes went into bankruptcy. Barack Obama was elected as the country’s first black president, after a particularly heated race. Millions of people were super-in the Twilight a series of vampire romance novels for young adults. All sorts of things happened.
But 2008 was also a pivotal period in the construction of the technologically crowded world in which Americans now live. The first iPhones were sold in 10 million units. Google launched its first Android phone, setting up a key rivalry that still animates the US smartphone market more than a decade later. While these world-changing devices found their way into the hands of millions of curious people, another mobile gadget quietly rose to the top of its market. There is some disagreement about whether 2007 or 2008 was the first year in which laptops outsold desktops in the general market, but 2008 was the first year in which US employers bought more laptops than desktops.
Amid the economic upheaval, there was optimism about how laptops could improve things. They were cheaper, lighter and more powerful than ever, which meant they could be used by more types of office workers. The rapid availability of wireless internet meant that more people could break free from their rigid office life and daily commute. “Laptops and the American consumer are in the honeymoon phase,” he says Los Angeles Times explained then. “Users can connect their laptops to external monitors, keyboards and mice while sitting at their desks, then kick them out and work from the coffee shop, library, airplane or living room.”
At work, getting a laptop has become a status symbol. It showed that you were a person worth investing in in an ordinary company or that you found your way into the growing, then mysterious technology industry. When I got my first office job in 2008, only upper management had laptops. Devices separated important people from us who were subject to their decisions.
However, as laptops improved and Wi-Fi increasingly seeped into the cracks of American life, the reality of the potential of laptops no longer looked so rosy. Instead of freeing white-collar workers and “knowledge” workers from the office, laptops have turned their entire lives into an office for many. Smartphones may require you to read e-mail after hours or log into the office communication platform Slack before you leave for work, but laptops give workers 24-hour access to sophisticated, expensive applications—Salesforce CRM, Oracle ERP, Adobe Photoshop— which provided them with a whole range of duties.
According to a recent study, Americans with a college degree or more—those most likely to start a new job and immediately get a laptop—spend 10 percent more time working now than they did in 1980. Those extra hours are deeply felt: “Screen time” has become downright fashionable. specter, and to escape it, people are often advised to avoid carrying their phones at the table, to stop scrolling through social media before bed, and to stay away from their email app before the morning shower.
But those habits won’t fix Americans’ relationship with work when all their work comes home with them every night. More than the smartphone, laptops have ended “working time” as a concept. The office used to be something you went to for a certain number of hours a day; now, work is the whole plan of existence. When people are worried about work interrupting all the hours of their lives, what they’re really worried about isn’t the email letting you know you have to do something, but the expectation that they’ll start a task right away or continue working after traveling home. Things that could have been solved at 9am the next morning suddenly became problems at 9pm.
For young people who have never experienced professional life in any other way, being constantly available and ready to put in another hour or solve another problem is often considered a reputational requirement, which pushes personal interests, hobbies and goals to the periphery of people. life and burns them. This makes it hard for you to focus on cooking dinner or getting a good night’s sleep. People take their laptop on vacation, just in case. In many companies, the laptop culture creates an expectation that true sick leave is only available to the seriously infirm; otherwise, you and your head are better off working from home.
Laptops aren’t all bad, of course. They remove a barrier for those who want to write, create art, create music or develop a new skill. Laptops can be portals to procrastination, leading to hours Battle horseman or YouTube makeup tutorials. Because they’re still pretty clunky, they’re not subject to the same kinds of pointless checks that can make smartphones so stressful. I’ve never seen someone almost get hit by a car because they couldn’t look up from their computer.
Even at work, laptops provide some of the benefits they were marketed for. For people who would rather be a freelancer than go to an employer’s office, they really provide the flexibility that gave people so much optimism over a decade ago. For jobs that have always required long hours, they can mean fewer nights tied to the office desk. You can wait at home for a plumber on Tuesdays without sacrificing a single day of vacation. In a real emergency they can be invaluable.
But laptops’ biggest sin might be giving employers the convenience of treating every little hiccup as an emergency, no matter how trivial. Their employees have little choice but to pull out their computers and get to work.