Oh wearisome condition of humanity, 3

Born under one law to another bound,

Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

Is it the mark or majesty of power

To make offences that it may forgive?

Nature herself doth her own self deflower

To hate those errors she herself doth give


 . . If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

Derived from the Latin punctus contra punctum, “point counter point” signifies “note against note,” which may be depicted by a vertical line and dots representing a chord, the basis of harmony (Erickson 3; Huxley, Letters 296 n272). The phrase clearly implies a musical motif, but its ultimately becoming the title of Huxley’s new work was the decision of his American publisher, Doubleday Doran and Company, and not his own, a fact that reinforces the idea that music was not part of the author’s original conception behind the novel. In fact, Point Counter Point replaced the title that Huxley himself had expected to use, “Diverse Laws,” a phrase he extracted from a stanza near the end of Mustapha (1609), a closet-drama by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, based on atrocities in sixteenth-century Turkey.

This is bracing stuff. Yet it is rather unsatisfactory in explaining the recent upsurge in authoritarian and populist movements. Intellectuals have always been vain and attracted to silly ideas that may line their pockets or boost their standing. More interesting is why the populist Right – Trump, Orban, Law and Justice, the Leave Campaign – have generated such large followings. It is here that Applebaum’s arguments begin to fall short.

Beware the unholy alliance that wants to make working from home the norm

Many in their twenties and thirties feel cut off from colleagues and the wider corporate context of work during lockdown

Since lockdown began, it has sometimes felt as if every columnist and politician, every corporate strategist and trendy academic has propounded a single, apparently unchallengeable truth: that working from home is unquestionably better.

The internet has destroyed the logic of the office. All those years people spent trudging into work were a ridiculous imposition that not only left employees less productive, but required companies to maintain costly and unnecessary premises. All we hear about is the better work-life balance enjoyed by (often) upper-middle class professionals during lockdown, the money saved on commuting, the time freed up from the endless rotation of pointless meetings.

I have heard a very different view from friends in their twenties and thirties. Many of them feel cut off from colleagues, performing work with no real idea of the wider corporate context, and none of the informal feedback that is so useful for progression at that age. Technology has kept things ticking over, but there are fewer opportunities to take initiative or impress senior staff.


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The loss of a physical separation between work and home is keenly felt, as is any culture of collaboration or innovation beyond what is permitted by pre-arranged Zoom calls. Working from home is less appealing if you face a choice between doing so in your dingy flatshare or moving back in with your parents, perhaps for many months. Clearly we aren’t returning to normal any time soon; few businesses will use the responsibility the Prime Minister has now conferred on them to bring their staff back to the office in full.

Even if they were inclined to do so, there are immense practical problems if they want to be “Covid secure”. But nor should we swallow the sometimes thoughtless narrative of the home-working lobby. They seem determined to turn what was once a privilege into an entitlement. There have even been suggestions that the Government should enshrine a “right” to home working into law.



But what of the “right” (if we must talk in those terms) to office working? What of those companies that reject the fashionable mantra that home working is better, and instead think it “breeds silo thinking and tribalism”, as the entrepreneur Luke Johnson put it the other day? What if they ask their staff to come back, and the staff refuse? Will the authorities stand by them?

Or will the need to “consult” with employees the Government is insisting on mean firms will be trapped with a system they know is suboptimal?

I am not denying that some people may perform better at home, or that some companies may be right to dispense with expensive fripperies such as canteens or “thinking pods”.

The retreat from the office may even have the benefit of disempowering increasingly imperial, and increasingly woke, HR departments.

But there is a danger here: that an alliance of corporate interests and established professionals will, under the cover of increasing employees’ choice to work as they please, destroy the ability to meaningfully choose. And much else besides.

Now she is on home soil, hasn’t that changed? Rather than deferring to him during public appearances, she seems not only to script the words her husband says but she finishes his sentences when she thinks he is rambling.

Haven't got the spend

Leave as is

Drill down

Ye by Burna Boy

Wookie - scrappy

hardy caprio rapper

Memories by Kamikaze

Seek to reach out for some sort of radical solution on the basis of which the real problem is obscured.

"You’re not easy-going, but you’re passionate, and that’s good. And when you get upset about the little things, I think that I’m pretty good about making you feel better about that. And that’s good too. So, they can say that you’re high maintenance, but it’s okay, because I like…maintaining you."

WFH may be comfortable for fifty-somethings who know their work like the back of their hands - but they learnt their trade somewhere. That somewhere was probably an office, watching the generation above, emulating the best bits. Due to the marvels of broadband, we have young adult children working on video calls all over our locked-down house, but the drawbacks are clear. There is no one from whom to learn the basics, or to answer the simple questions that too unimportant to commit to an e-mail, but which are a vital part of learning the ropes. This lack of face-to-face contact turns the learning curve into a steep uphill slope.

Here is something that I think is becoming more and more true the longer I spend working.


There is ”work” and there is your “career”. The latter is probably more important than the former.


Your career comprises things like the technical skills you need to build up to have longevity in this sector, soft skills you will need to build to move up the ladder and so on. Things that have value to you regardless of who is paying your pay check.


Then there is “work”, which is the things your employer is paying you to do. Maybe they want you to type “int vlan” a hundred times a day, or do things sub optimally, maybe they want you to make their stack optimal.


When there is little overlap between work and your career, then work becomes a burden. Then you have people complaining about a lack of work/life balance. If there’s good intersection between the two, then people tend to be happier.


There are also boundaries you need to set with your employer. It is true that one person not being able to set boundaries, or that one person who answers their phone all the time because they have nothing better to do, can wind up causing an expectation that all others in the team need to do the same. A reasonable employer will understand that not all people are the same. The 20 something with no family has different demands on their time vs the 30 something with a partner and young kids. The 50 something with grown up kids may look at work differently to the previous two examples. I enjoy my work, but I set firm boundaries with my employer.


There will never be enough time, but if you wind up doing things of no value for your career in the time you have, then that is on you.

Feilding those requests the moment

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