I think the most alienating thing about a return to the city and to work is the tyranny of the digital age. How good it was not to be at the beck and call of emails, with their ability to find you anytime and the concomitant implication that their speed and ease of flight should be mirrored in your instant reply. It’s the correspondence equivalent of changing the rules of tennis so that you have to volley every service at the net instead of allowing it to bounce towards the baseline.
It strikes me as crazy that the modern equivalent of bread and circuses is a lottery whose lure of untold wealth is predicated on the statistical near-impossibility of matching five or six random numbers. Yet every time I want to do anything involving viewing, buying, communicating, voting, parking or paying tax online I have to remember endless sequences of random numbers and letters of Byzantine complexity. And if I can’t, I have effectively ceased to exist.
