On the morning of the Retired 2020 Not My Problem Anymore Retirement shirt. ceremony, guests met at the home of Machliye’s family, though she was actually at the beauty salon. While she was gone, the guests ate a traditional meal of morning plov, a national Uzbek dish of rice and meat. As the day progressed, men and women ate separately, which is a tradition. A local religious leader also came by and blessed the couple. Machliye, who had her head covered in a white veil, bowed before her parents and family before departing to live in her new husband’s home.

She couldn’t have anticipated the pandemic, but she did anticipate that we’d be spending more time at home. “My theory has always been that the world is moving into more comfortable clothes,” she says. “I think if you look at what technology does on a macro scale, it enables much more efficiency Retired 2020 Not My Problem Anymore Retirement shirt. It enables you to watch the best TV at home, to have food from your favorite restaurant delivered to your door, and now that we’ve gotten over a lot of communication hurdles, we’re very comfortable having our conversations over Google Hangouts or Zoom. We’ve been forced to learn new competencies that we won’t soon forget, and what that does is [eliminate] the need to physically show up somewhere,” she continues. “I think working from home is going to become so much more common, and just accelerated the inevitable. People may not completely move away from cities, but we’ll be able to move further from them. If we’re working remotely and don’t have a daily commute, or we just go to the office less frequently, suddenly it opens up that house that’s two hours away. Even in terms of finding talent [or applying for jobs], it’s really hard when you’re limited to a geographic area. Once you remove those boundaries, it becomes better for everyone. Over the long term, our home will become much more the center of our world, because we have all of these new options opened up for us.