Between trying to juggle it all, not only feel like I’m letting down my work, but my kids as well. They don’t understand why I can’t spend as much time with them while I’m working, nor is it their fault that I’m so much more tired during the times when I would have spent time with them previously.
You aren’t alone man and we’re all doing the best we can with a really tough situation. Try to be as kind to yourself as possible during all this and don’t be afraid to ask find solutions that ease some of the burden.
Migraines for them have improved greatly since they are away from harsh lighting.
Know your pain. Hang in there. You're doing good work.
Chronic conditions ebb and flow, sometimes I’m a great employee and sometimes I’m horrible. Hell sometimes I can’t even see the computer.
Turns out people/companies get tired of it after awhile. So limiting meetings and working solo when I can on large tricky projects is how I’m rolling.
I can solve stuff most can’t. I just need a lot of time to do it.
So glad I never moved to the West coast when I had the chance. Instead I get to live in a nice spacious house with a half-acre lot, a fenced in yard to enjoy with my kids and dog, and work at a great small-business/startup in ML with great colleagues, excellent work-life balance, and the main company motto being - Don't hire assholes, and don't work for assholes. It's been working fantastic for several years now!
I am a recent empty nester. I don't like it much.
If you want other people to subsidize your productivity and/or income so you can live beyond your means in an area where you can't afford to raise a family, then that's a big ask.
It's better for the planet and better for people to live in urban areas, and the only reason that rural areas are cheaper is that they don't have to deal with the shortage of housing caused by urban zoning restrictions.
We all suffer from long time urban homeowners who won't allow increased density so that they can leach off everyone else's economic productivity. It's time for permissive nationwide by-right zoning standards.
COVID is an exceptional and temporary situation.
Everyone has highs and lows (great successes, terrible personal problems/tragedies/etc...) throughout their careers. The only difference between this circumstance and any other is that it's impacting many people at once.
If, for example, you got COVID and were put on a ventilator for a month, how would you react to finding out that you had lost your job? Would you want to take it on the chin and down-size, or would you be upset that your employer didn't show the basic decency to (at a bare minimum) re-hire you once you were recovered?
Times like this I'm glad I didn't pick the US as a place to live.
You are thinking about this from a single perspective, but it is a massively complicated & interconnected issue.
For one other perspective, consider what would happen is companies didn't do what you call "subsidizing". Effected employees can't then keep their job, they have to take leave or find another job all together. That's bad for the company which loses experienced employees and must now pay to identify, recruit, and train a new person, who doesn't know as much about how things run in that business. That person is going to be much less efficient for 6-months to 1-year before they are completely comfortable. You are then subsidizing them instead.
Or consider a broader economic perspective: Let's imagine companies say they won't subsidize like this and impacted people have to take a 10% pay cut. Over 60% of the workforce in the US is white collar, jobs more likely to be WFH possible. That works out to about 79,000,000 workers. Average salary for White Collar jobs is $60,000. Let's say 1/3 need to work from home for family reasons, and they all take a 10% pay cut. That means the economy loses $158 Billion dollars. That is nearly 1% of our GDP, just in that one move, and it doesn't end there: Those people cut back spending. Areas heavy with such workers, like major cities, SV, etc., suddenly have a huge % of their customer base that has to cut back spending. Businesses like restaurants etc., already hurting, take another hit because 1/3 of 60% of all workers (works out to about 18% of the total workforce) now has to cut back discretionary spending. Even if that accounts for only half their 10% pay cut, that's equivalent to almost a 10% reduction in customer base.
Or consider it from a healthcare standpoint: Putting additional stress on this portion of the workforce will have significantly higher stress if "unsubsidized". That translates to more mental health problems, and expensive health care. Some of these workers may lose their insurance if they drop to part-time work, putting an even high burden on the the healthcare system.
Small things can have massive ripple effects. Saying "It's not fair!" is mostly not a helpful guide to resolving complex issues. Right now solutions are needed to keep society running while we get out of this crisis. Approaching it from a narrow sense of fairness is short sited. It won't be fair to the local shops that lose another chunk of their business. It won't be fair to other workers who have to pickup the slack left by a lost employees. If you're going to bring "fair" into things, you can't cherry pick only the one thing. That is one-dimensional thinking. You need to think multi dimensional. You need to consider second and third order effects.
Then afternoon interruptions because they are bored. Lots of crappy reasons, but also because they want me to spend time with them.
Also dealing with my own chronic illness. I was managing to cope/hide before Covid.
Between it all is a sense of guilt of not getting enough done for work and not supporting kids enough.
Other day I got a note under the door asking if I would draw a cat. Man talk about breaking heart.