Five days. Every week. And I love it.

Work from home is overrated. The office is where it’s at.

I drove to work this morning. The sun was doing that thing it does in the early part of the day where it catches the top of the buildings and turns everything golden for a few minutes before retreating behind the next tower.

A bloke in a Hilux cut me off on the way in. An army of cyclists on Lime bikes attempted to weave between the cars. And by the time I parked and walked the last stretch to the office, a café I’d never noticed was pumping out the kind of espresso smell that makes you briefly reconsider every life choice that doesn’t involve owning a café.

This, apparently, is the thing I’m supposed to want to replace with… my living room.

I don’t buy it. And I know that makes me a heretic in an age where “flexibility” has become the corporate world’s favourite word to deploy when it doesn’t want to commit to anything.

But here’s the thing: I genuinely, deeply, enthusiastically love being in the office five days a week. Not because I’m a masochist, not because I don’t understand the appeal of working in tracksuit pants, and certainly not because I haven’t tried it. I tried it. We all tried it. The pandemic made us try it. And sure, it was fine. It was functional. It kept the lights on.

But fine isn’t good. And functional is a pretty low bar for a life.

Your living room is not a vibe.

I don’t care what anyone says. Your house, however lovely it may be, however ergonomic your chair, however perfectly curated your Spotify playlist for “deep focus” … it doesn’t compare to the city. It just doesn’t.

The energy of a place where thousands of people, workers, tourists, are doing thousands of different things, all moving in and around and through each other, generates something that a home office fundamentally cannot replicate. It’s not even close.

Working from home is climate-controlled a slow entropy punctuated by the occasional knock of a delivery driver or the neighbour’s dog losing its mind at a possum. Working in the city is chaos with a pulse. And that pulse matters. Ideas don’t just appear out of thin air while you’re sitting at your kitchen bench staring at a Zoom grid of twelve tiny faces, half of whom are clearly reading something else.

Ideas come from friction. From overhearing something. From bumping into someone in the street who mentions a thing that connects to another thing you were thinking about three days ago. You can’t engineer serendipity from your spare bedroom. You just can’t.

And it’s not just inside the office. Last week I ran into a former client grabbing lunch on the same street. A five-minute conversation standing on a footpath led to an introduction I’d been looking to make for months. The week before that, I bumped into an old colleague at the coffee shop downstairs and walked away with an entirely different perspective on a problem I’d been overthinking. This stuff doesn’t happen on Teams. It doesn’t happen in your DMs. It happens when you’re physically present in a city full of other people who are also physically present, moving through the same spaces, open to the same unplanned collisions.

The city is a network you don’t have to log into. You just have to show up.

Your brain needs a commute.

Here’s where the research actually backs me up, and it’s not often I lead with that (make of that what you will).

Psychologist Sabine Sonnentag and her colleague Charlotte Fritz developed what they called the “Recovery Experience” framework, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology in 2007.

Their work found that psychological detachment from work during non-work time is one of the most critical factors in reducing emotional exhaustion, burnout, and depressive symptoms. Not just “taking a break.”

Actual mental separation. The ability to switch off.

Now, here’s the part that the work-from-home evangelists tend to gloss over. When your office is also your home, that boundary doesn’t just blur. It evaporates. Christena Nippert-Eng’s foundational study Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries in Everyday Life found that people who work from home have a significantly harder time maintaining the mental boundaries needed for genuine recovery.

The physical act of leaving a place of work, travelling through a different environment, and arriving at a place that is definitively not work, creates what Eviatar Zerubavel rather beautifully described as “mental fences.”

Your commute, annoying as it might be, is doing more for your mental health than you think. It’s a transition ritual. A decompression chamber between your working self and your actual self. When you work from home, you don’t get that. You just … close the laptop and you’re already there. Except you’re not really there, are you? Part of your brain is still sitting in that last email, that unfinished deck, that Slack message you probably should’ve replied to.

The research on work-family conflict is pretty unambiguous here. Greater boundary permeability between work and home leads to greater psychological strain. That’s not my opinion. That’s decades of organisational psychology saying the same thing in increasingly polite academic language.

Don’t blame the office.
Blame the office you built.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “But, the office is awful.” And to that I say: yes. Probably. Because most offices are awful. And that’s not the office’s fault. That’s a leadership failure.

If your staff loathe coming in, take a hard look at what you’ve built for them. Is it a place with personality, warmth, and character? Or is it a soulless grid of identical desks under fluorescent lighting with a “collaboration space” that’s really just a couch nobody sits on next to a whiteboard nobody uses?

An office should feel like somewhere you’d actually choose to spend time. It should have good coffee. Natural light. Spaces that are genuinely different from each other, not just the same beige repeated in slightly varied configurations. It should reflect the people who work there, not the property manager’s idea of “contemporary professional.”

If you spent half the energy you’ve spent writing return-to-office mandates on actually making the office a place worth returning to, you wouldn’t need the mandate. People come back to places that make them feel something. They avoid places that make them feel like a number in a headcount.

The obvious.

Look, I’m not delusional. I know there are roles and circumstances where working from home makes perfect sense.

I know there are people with commutes that would make a reasonable person weep. I know there are parents juggling logistics that would humble a military strategist.

But the wholesale cultural shift towards treating the office as some kind of relic, as though physical presence is inherently regressive and anyone who prefers it is simply not enlightened enough to have discovered the joy of doing a Zoom call in their underpants … that, I think, is wrong.

The city gives you energy. The separation gives you sanity. And a great office gives you a reason to show up.

Five days a week. Every week. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.