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No Feast Without Fasting

Posted on June 15, 2019October 7, 2020 by Tomek Kaczanowski

My laptop broke. Long story short, I had to buy an old Windows machine and worked with it for almost three months. It was very inconvenient comparing to what I had previously.

Then I got a new one. Shiny, fast, light etc. – a dream machine. Even now, few weeks after I got it, I still appreciate its qualities. And I think this is mostly because I had this painful 3-months experience. If I switched from one good laptop to another (slightly better), then I wouldn’t appreciate it so much. I would rather complain that I had to reinstall stuff and that some things work differently than I’m used to.

And this made me think about a different area but similar experience. Human interactions. I realized that since I often work remotely (and so do my colleagues), I’m simply more happy to see them once we meet in the office. There is something fresh, something new every time we meet in person.

I compare it to how I felt when we all worked in the same office 9-5. And I don’t remember having this feeling back then. Meeting with others didn’t seem like anything special – it was so ordinary, that I (we) didn’t find anything exciting about it.

This surprised me. We see each other daily via videochat so why meeting in person is so important? Apparently, there is something valuable and unique about being in the same place at the same time.

It seems to work in every context

I haven’t discovered anything new here. The only thing that caught my attention is that it works for all things we are deprived of for some time. Be it fresh cold water when you are thirsty, a new laptop when you had to use an old one, or meeting with your colleagues whom you haven’t seen face to face for few days.

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