It's no wonder staff fear returning to the office full time

There's a nihilistic little phrase that my friends and I say to each other sometimes. The black humour sounds alarming to those who overhear, but we find it captures the lived reality quite well: “The problem is, you see, that I cannot afford to be alive.” Sometimes it’s softened to more palatable variations, like, “If I could just not leave the house for a few months...” Or, “If I could just go on a very long walk like that couple from The Salt Path maybe did, sleeping only under the night sky, forgoing all food but nature's candy: deadly nightshade berries...” If only the demands of the corporeal form relented, then perhaps we could catch up with the snowballing cost of living.

- Hannah Ewens, The Independent

Maybe you say things like this too. For many living in the UK, everything has become so costly that they can't cover basic expenses. In just the past few days, the news cycle has informed us that one in six can't afford to pay bills and that the number of people who have to work a second job is the highest since records began. It is quite literally expensive to be alive. Don't think about it for too long. Or do, because rumination is a free activity.

In this economy, it tracks that workers now fear being ordered back into the office. In a study of 3,600 UK employers and employees by recruitment company Hays, four in five employees (84 per cent) who work in a hybrid way said it had a positive effect on physical, social and financial wellbeing. The main concern about returning more frequently to the office (cynical employers: read on) had less to do with such frivolous luxuries as watching Netflix on a lunch break, a better work-life balance, and best managing our chronic illnesses, and more about the fact that we can't afford to go to work.