There’s a Zus outlet near my girls’ school in Subang Bestari that I’ve quietly adopted as my unofficial second office. I pull in some mornings when I have to do the drop-off, order an Americano, open my laptop and wait for the traffic outside to clear.
It usually takes about an hour. I don’t mind. On my phone, data tethering is already on. I never use public wifi, partly on principle, partly because I’ve convinced myself that doing so is an open invitation for someone to drop unwanted cookies in my devices. The only cookie that I want is chocolate flavoured and they don’t freely give them out in Zus.
Running your own outfit has its obvious perks. The commute, in my case, is no longer ungodly. And when your daughter messages at 2pm on a Tuesday to inform you that “Father, I doth require you to procure a brown frock for my production co-curricular activity later”, you can just go and do that without filing leave.
(I swear, my daughter does genuinely talk to me like this despite her actively choosing not to take English Literature for her O-levels much to my consternation.)
Sometimes, I wonder if I miss the office. I don’t miss the commute. And definitely not the artificial lighting that made everyone look slightly jaundiced or eerily photoshopped. The other things. The kind you only notice once they’re gone. The lunch group that formed for no good reason and lasted years. The meeting that was a waste of everyone’s time, but in which someone said something funny enough that you were still quoting it months later. The “you look tired, didn’t sleep ah?” said in passing, meaning nothing but also meaning everything.
I’m also not sure how long this version of office life has left in it with the speed of how AI is developing these days. Most people think of AI as a chat interface where you type something and it types back. But companies are increasingly doing something more profound: building agents with specific skills, linking them together to perform jobs and quietly handing them the roles that used to belong to real people.
In March 2026, Oracle laid off 18% of its workforce and the notification arrived via a 6am email from “Oracle Leadership,” unsigned, clinical, simultaneous across time zones. Access to files, email, and voicemail was gone by 6:01am. Klarna replaced 700 customer service agents with AI and celebrated the efficiency gains (though they quietly rehired the similar roles months later after customers noticed the difference). Salesforce cut its support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. The pattern is almost comically diabolical: announce, automate and watch their share prices move up.
What they lost, I suspect, is harder to replace. It’s the colleague who remembered everyone’s birthday every single time. The one who could tell, just from the way you answered “I’m fine,” that you were not fine. The shared irritations, the inside jokes, the low-stakes conversations that had nothing to do with productivity but somehow made the productive hours bearable. Human connectivity at work isn’t inefficiency waiting to be rooted out. It’s the thing the whole machine runs on, quietly, in the background. You don’t notice it until it’s been switched off.
So yes, I do miss the office. Not for the work. The work is fine where I am, arguably better. What I miss is everything I just described. The human texture of work.
My AI agents are good. They handle a lot. But I can’t take them to lunch.