I forced myself to RTO and I'm exhausted
Aside from a brief period in 2021 where I was forced to RTO by my then-employer, Riot Games, and a period in 2023 where I worked from Heart Machine three days a week, I've worked mostly from home for the last five and a half years since COVID kicked off.
I also worked primarily from home in 2015, when I first moved to Los Angeles while working for Tencent - there was no Tencent desk space available for me in the city, so I just worked from my bedroom for the better part of a year. I'm very comfortable and productive working that way! We shipped all six of the Forge games at Riot with me working primarily from home. It was easier for me to do massive rewrite and editorial passes on some of those games while in the privacy of my home.
For a new professional collaboration, however, we're currently forcing ourselves to work from an office three days a week. Then on a fourth day, we go work with a friend of mine who is at home on maternity leave and feeling lonely. At the end of a whole week of that, I'm fucking exhausted!!
I've completely lost my stamina for commuting and leaving the house. I found working from coffee shops earlier this year pretty tiring... I'm now finding that working from an office for a much longer, complete workday, after a longer commute, is even harder for me. I come home completely beat every single day, and fell asleep by 8 PM once this week - which is insane for me, since I'm usually up much later than that.
I assume I will build stamina for this after some time! I mean... I gotta!
Since it's self-inflicted, I'm at least not experiencing the rage I'd probably experience if an employer was forcing me to do this. I've found that the fact I no longer have a boss is reducing my resentment for many things. I used to stay up much later on a regular basis - I definitely experienced that "revenge bedtime" phenomenon. When Riot forced me back to the office, I had to lure myself into a state of peace with it by getting very into cycling my commute.
I spent the first fifteen years of my career working primarily for megacorps... and stealing back my sense of self-worth by making games for smaller teams on nights and weekends. Having no "side gig" is completely new to me. The big impact it's having right now is that when I come home from my terrible self-inflicted commute, I don't have more job to do at home. That's pretty nice. It's very new-feeling to me, however, and it's making me feel uniquely unproductive (which I intellectually understand to be a wrong/fake thought).
Anyway... very odd to be doing this! I genuinely never expected to be the one to RTO myself!