Worker Blames 'Lazy' Influencers For Ruining Remote Work — 'I'll Never Forgive Them'
The influencers likely haven't helped, but that's not what's behind the return to office mandates.
GaudiLab | Shutterstock Boy, we really had it good there for a while, didn't we? Every job was a work-from-home job, and suddenly life started to seem a lot more manageable… maybe even fulfilling?
Naturally, our hypercapitalist, increasingly oligarchical work culture wasn't going to let that slide for too long, and now everywhere you look, people are being dragged back to the office, often for no identifiable reason besides "because I said so." What's behind this trend, exactly? One Redditor placed the blame on internet culture, but the real answer is much less complicated.
A worker blamed 'lazy' influencers for ruining remote work.
The worker has since deleted their Reddit post, but it delved into a familiar bugaboo of our modern times: Influencers turning absolutely everything into a monetizable piece of content, and often ruining it in the process.
It's happened to tourist attractions all over the world that are now basically unenjoyable unless you're there to film a TikTok. Tried walking down a large city street anytime recently? Prepare to dodge influencers filming "aesthetic" outfit-of-the-day posts against the urban backdrop. ("Aesthetic" is a noun, by the way, not an adjective. Please stop using it as one.)
"Influencers have ruined everything" has become a familiar refrain online, and for this worker on Reddit, it extends to working from home. The theory goes that all those videos we saw the past couple years of people, who always seem to work in marketing, doing their jobs from beaches in Bali or a mountaintop in Switzerland, gave employers the wrong impression: one of laziness.
The Redditor theorized that employers saw all this and acted accordingly. "Influencers killed remote work and I hope they rot for it," they wrote. "I'll never forgive them." There's just one problem: It's not true. Or, at least, not as true as the other reasons.
The end of remote work mostly comes down to the commercial real estate market.
"I hate influencers as much as anyone who has ever tried to walk on a pretty street," one Redditor responded. "But WFH is being eliminated due to real estate, not those goofballs. Can’t have perfectly good buildings sitting empty."
In 2024, Resume.org conducted a survey of 900 business leaders to ask them what was behind their recent implementation of a return-to-office mandate. One in three cited their active commercial office leases as the reason.
This is surely why we have seen so many companies and business leaders citing reasons for RTOs, like better collaboration and productivity, that fly directly in the face of basically all the research on working from home from before the pandemic. In some cases, some of the "groundbreaking" newer studies that refute that old data were performed by entities with direct ties to the commercial real estate industry.
And aside from companies paying for leases they were no longer using, there's the issue of investments. Whether it's the company itself, its parent company, or the actual human beings running them, all these entities are invested in the commercial real estate industry. It behooves them not to let it collapse. So, back to your cubicle you go, widget-maker!
Experts say many return-to-office mandates will likely be canceled starting in 2028.
There is some good news here, for workers anyway. This whole scheme is likely to go kaput in a few years, because a staggering number of commercial real estate leases are set to expire by 2028 in cities across the country.
Leases on some 217 million square feet of office space are set to expire by the end of this year, and more than 200 million more in 2026 and 2027. From 2028 on? More than 400 million square feet of office space will hit the market.
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That's potentially bad economic news (and a bloodbath for investors). But as Amina Moreau, CEO of coworking company Radious, put it to Forbes, “As soon as these lease commitments are at their end, CFOs will start looking at the numbers. Who’s going to pay for seven days at $80+ per square foot when they’re used for a day here or there at best?” Not any CFO who hopes to keep their job, that's for sure.
So, if we hang in there, we just might see a return to some modicum of freedom in our working lives by 2028, regardless of what the influencers are doing in their "get ready with me to do my email job in Bora Bora" videos by then. Thank goodness.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
