100% of the ~20 people I personally know who were happily doing their entire job just fine from home in 2020 and 2021 were in the 40-90 income percentile range. The ones who’ve totally lost that benefit are mostly on the lower end of that.

Perfect, let’s make white collar jobs miserable as well then shall we? Not saying that that’s what you are implying but that sure is the logic among some folks out there: “you have it too good”, “when i was your age i used to walk through 10 meters deep snow”, “i single handedly defeated the vietcong” and therefore so should you.

My office room has double layer soundproofing, a massive oled tv, 5 monitors one oled, a nice laptop arm, a playstation that gathers dust, wallpapers of my favourite childhood movies, and a huge office chair that feels more comfortable than any chair i ever had in any company.

If cows give more milk when happy and listening to music then so can humans gave their brains milked better when happy.

"Oh but why can't we think of the rich?" is what your response sounds like. The point of my comment is that whenever a topic like this comes up, the response here on hacker news is always WFH even though it only addresses a small fraction of the people affected. Responses like that reek of privilege. (To say nothing about the fact that the WFH crowd is even over represented here among the white collar jobs).

WFH will not solve this crises and it distracts from the point. Ultimately, people are stressed because of wealth inequality. A lack of wealth makes people hopeless and small things like WFH are bandaids when you are faced with never being able to have financial security in your life.

I know 4 people working in a call center (for professional companies: two synchronization and deployment plateform, and a customer platform for gold/black card owners, so it isn't really something you can easily move to another cheaper country), they had to come back onsite in the spring, one burned out and left in september, and an other took two month off (it's kinda nice because she's my dungeon master, so we play a lot more now).

And from what i've heard, the reason she had to take a break was because too many senior people walked away recently and she took too much responsability, too fast, and couldn't bear working after working hours for almost the minimum, not from the site.

So definitely not 10% income earner. I think my brother made more when he was a sound technician.