WHITE MONDAY

What Hybrid Work Reveals About Trust, Freedom and the Future of Work

From Homo economicus to Homo spiritus — a reflection on work, freedom, trust, intimacy and transformation.

It is Monday, and autumn is becoming darker. The mornings arrive later, the evenings close earlier, and across the city office windows shine white against the growing darkness. There was a time when Monday morning meant that those illuminated windows would gradually fill with people. Desks would become occupied, coffee machines would begin working, lifts would carry people from one floor to another, and the familiar rhythm of professional life would start again. Today, some of those windows remain strangely empty. The light is on, the desks are still there, the chairs are waiting, and the building seems to remember what Monday once meant. Yet the rhythm of the human being has changed. When I look at those white windows against the autumn darkness, I do not see only absence. I see white space: a space in which something else can be imagined. This is what I call my White Monday. Not white because everything is perfect, and not because what happened over the past years should be romanticised, but because a blank page is white. Light becomes particularly visible when the season grows dark, and after disruption there sometimes comes a rare moment when we can decide what we want to draw next.

Monday has traditionally carried a simple instruction: go back. Back to work, back to routine, back to the office, back to responsibility, back to what we knew before. But perhaps the more interesting question is why Monday must always mean going back. Why can it not also mean moving forward? The future of work is often discussed as a practical problem of office occupancy, remote-working policies, productivity, employee retention and management. These questions matter, but they are not the deepest questions. Beneath them lies something larger. When a structure that once organised millions of lives is interrupted, what happens to the human being who lived inside that structure? When freedom arrives faster than our ability to use it, what replaces the rhythm that disappeared? And when organisations can no longer rely on physical presence as evidence of contribution, what kind of relationship between the individual and the institution becomes possible?

I was born in Lithuania and lived through a profoundly different historical transition: Lithuania’s restoration of independence after the Soviet period. I do not compare that experience with COVID; their historical, political and moral meanings are fundamentally different. Yet that transition taught me something about human beings that I have never forgotten: systems can change much faster than people do. Political structures can disappear, laws can change, borders can open and possibilities can multiply almost overnight, while habits, fears, dependencies, expectations and inherited ways of thinking remain inside us for years. Wanting freedom and knowing how to live freely are not the same thing. Freedom can arrive before preparation. When an external structure disappears, we are forced to ask what will replace it. Freedom is not simply the absence of the previous system. It is also the capacity to build a new relationship with responsibility, choice, uncertainty and oneself.

The pandemic interrupted another kind of structure. It was not the collapse of a political regime, but the sudden interruption of ordinary life. Millions of people were told to stay home, and in the process we discovered that the office had quietly been doing far more than providing a desk. It told us when to wake up, when to wash and dress, when to leave home, when to travel, when to enter another environment and when to return. It made us move. It created encounters. It divided home from work and weekday from weekend. A coffee machine created informal contact. A corridor conversation sometimes communicated something that never appeared in an official meeting. There was a time to arrive and a time to leave, a place for professional identity and another place for private life. Monday and Sunday felt different because the architecture of life made them different.

Then those boundaries dissolved. We learned Zoom, Teams, remote access and digital collaboration with remarkable speed, but we were far less prepared for the human consequences of that freedom. Who taught us solitude? Who taught us how to create structure when nobody was physically waiting for us? Who taught us how to stop working when work had permanently entered the home? Who taught us to use leisure rather than merely consume distraction? Who taught us how to remain connected without an institution manufacturing contact around us? And perhaps most importantly for leadership, who taught organisations how to trust people they could no longer physically see? The emergency eventually ended, but the transformation did not. Hybrid work did not disappear. The office did not simply return to what it had been, because millions of people had already discovered that professional life could be organised differently. The question therefore cannot remain endlessly centred on whether people should return. Return to what, exactly? The more interesting question is where we go next.

What disappeared was not only the commute. We disrupted rhythm, and rhythm matters. Human beings benefit from some degree of predictability, structure and knowledge of what comes next. When external routine disappears, we need to develop something more difficult and potentially more mature: an internal rhythm. I do not mean another productivity system or another attempt to optimise every minute of the day. I mean the capacity to say: now I work, now I eat, now I walk, now I rest, now I create, now I love, now I am alone, now I am with another person, and for these ten minutes I am fully here. Monday does not have to represent suffering and Friday liberation. Sunday does not have to carry the entire burden of living. We do not need to abolish structure. We need to learn how to carry structure inside ourselves.

Freedom therefore requires skills. I need to know how to begin when nobody tells me to begin. I need to know when to stop. I need to distinguish rest from avoidance and solitude from isolation. I need to create contact rather than waiting for an office, school, church, club or other institution to create it for me. I need to be capable of being alone without disappearing from the world, and I need to know how to be together without surrendering myself entirely to another person. This is one of the deeper lessons of hybrid work. It has not simply given people geographical flexibility; it has exposed the psychological demands of freedom.

The same transformation challenges leadership. There is something reassuring about seeing somebody sitting at a desk. Visibility gives the impression of certainty: I see you, therefore you are working. Yet even before remote work became normal, we knew that physical presence was not the same as contribution. People could spend entire days in offices, attend unnecessary meetings, walk between desks, stare intensely at screens, reply to emails and perform large quantities of visible employment without necessarily producing meaningful work. Presence is easy to measure because the body is there. Contribution is more difficult because it requires judgement. This is where organisations must distinguish between control and structure. Structure can support a human being; control can gradually replace a human being’s ability to choose. Trust operates differently. Trust does not mean that responsibilities disappear or that everybody may simply do whatever they want. Trust means that I do not need to control your every movement because you understand what you are responsible for, and because the organisation is capable of evaluating the quality of your contribution rather than the visibility of your obedience. Responsibility does not destroy freedom. Responsibility is what makes freedom sustainable.

The office also performed another function that was rarely discussed: it created a stage. We left our private world, dressed for our professional role, travelled into another environment and became the version of ourselves that our work required. We selected our language, controlled our expression, demonstrated availability and presented an identity that could be recognised by colleagues, managers and clients. Then, in theory, we returned home to our “real life.” Yet if human beings spend such a large proportion of their waking existence working, it is worth asking which life is considered real. The pandemic created cracks in that performance. A child appeared behind somebody during a video call. A dog barked. A partner walked through the kitchen. We saw bookshelves, bedrooms, washing, kitchens and ordinary domestic disorder. Someone was wearing a formal shirt and slippers. Professional identity and ordinary life collided. Work had not simply moved home; the wall between two versions of the human being had become thinner.

That collision exposed something important. Ordinary life does not always perform particularly well. It is not consistently efficient, elegant, polished or measurable. It contains tiredness, tenderness, irritation, laughter, desire, repetition, care, boredom and interruption. Yet precisely because it is imperfect, it also contains truth. Perhaps the next evolution of work does not depend only on making the professional self more efficient. Perhaps it depends on becoming less afraid of the whole human being.

Much of modern economic and organisational life has been built around an abstraction: Homo economicus, the economic human. Rational, productive, measurable, employable and motivated by incentives. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at developing this version of the person. We have targets, bonuses, performance reviews, career ladders, mission statements, leadership systems, brand guidelines, motivational strategies, culture programmes and increasingly refined technologies for measuring output. Organisations brand buildings, websites, notebooks, coffee cups, pencils and clothing. Yet the person holding the pencil has always been more interesting than the pencil.

Beside Homo economicus, I want to place another possibility: Homo spiritus. Not as a replacement for the economic human, because we still need to work, earn, produce, exchange, build and create, but as a reminder that the human being cannot be reduced to economic function. Homo spiritus works and earns but also loves, touches, rests, imagines, desires, creates, feels, moves and gives. This human needs silence as well as stimulation, solitude as well as relationship, responsibility as well as freedom. This human has a body, an imagination, intuition, sexuality, creativity, vulnerability and, in my understanding, soul. The next evolution of work does not necessarily have to be about making Homo economicus even more efficient. It could also be about allowing the whole human being back into life.

We sometimes speak about workers as though they were abstract minds operating laptops. We are not. We are bodies, and our ability to think, focus, create and relate is inseparable from sleep, movement, stress, touch, environment, health and emotion. We experience exhaustion and vitality, attention and distraction, connection and isolation, excitement and calm. We carry both structure and flow, direction and receptivity, grounding and imagination. Human development does not require manufacturing a new type of person. It may begin simply by becoming more attentive to the human being who is already here: body, mind, emotion, relationship, creativity, meaning, responsibility and spirit.

That leads to a question almost completely absent from conventional conversations about productivity: where is love? We speak about collaboration, engagement, mental health, wellbeing, retention, burnout and organisational culture, but we rarely ask what happens to a human being’s work when that person feels loved. Imagine two people who love one another. One is working. The other is working, reading, painting, studying, cooking or simply existing nearby. They do not need to entertain each other constantly. Someone makes coffee. A hand touches a shoulder. Someone looks up and smiles. They walk outside for twenty minutes. They speak, kiss or sit quietly beside one another. There may be erotic intimacy, or there may simply be companionship and presence. Then they return to whatever they were doing.

A conventional productivity model might classify many of these moments as interruptions. I find the opposite question more interesting: what happens to concentration, creativity, loneliness, aggression and burnout when the human being does not experience intimacy as something squeezed into the exhausted remainder of the day? This is not a prescription for couples, heterosexual relationships or any particular family form. People live alone, with friends, partners, children, extended families or changing combinations of all of these. Relationships begin and end. Families evolve. Some people need more solitude than others. The deeper question is not about prescribing a lifestyle. It is about asking why modern productive life was so often designed as though love, intimacy, friendship, care and relationship belonged somewhere outside the serious business of living.

Work should fit inside human life rather than human life being permanently rearranged around work. This does not mean abandoning responsibility. It means reconsidering what responsibility is for. If the purpose of work is ultimately to support life, then perhaps the design of work should begin with a more complete understanding of the human being it is asking to contribute.

Through my art I have been developing an image that I call the Coffee Capsule. Coffee is almost an excuse. I imagine a small, conscious space inside ordinary life: two chairs, coffee, art, silence, conversation, meditation, touch, intimacy, laughter or perhaps absolutely nothing beyond sitting. A place where somebody momentarily stops being an employee, manager, performer, consumer or economic unit and remembers something more basic: I am human. The Coffee Capsule can begin as an artwork, an installation, a metaphor and a question. One day it might become an actual physical room. Its purpose would not be to tell people what to think or feel, but to protect a space in which not everything must immediately become productive.

Art has an important role here because art does not merely decorate society after the important questions have already been answered. Art is one of the languages through which human beings recognise possibilities before those possibilities have been formalised. Before an idea becomes a policy, an organisation, a building or a social structure, somebody first has to imagine it. Art gives that imagination form.

This is where White Monday becomes more than a reflection and begins to resemble an experiment. Not an ideology, not a government programme and certainly not a proposal to redesign an entire city. One building would be enough. One organisation. One leader genuinely curious about leadership and genuinely interested in the human being behind the worker. Take a suitable office building whose previous function has changed and create proper live-work places for participating employees. They would still have real jobs, salaries, deadlines, responsibilities and professional standards, but the environment would begin with a different assumption: develop the human alongside the worker.

Such an environment might make counselling available without making it compulsory. It could create opportunities for reflection, meditation, art, movement, nature, communication, silence, conflict resolution, creativity, attention and body awareness. It could support people in learning how to be alone without becoming isolated, how to live with others without controlling them, how to use freedom, how to concentrate without supervision and how to discover themselves without constantly performing themselves. The Coffee Capsule might exist inside each living space, not to prescribe what happens there but precisely to protect a little room where nothing has to happen.

For this kind of experiment to remain human, however, boundaries would matter enormously. There could be no compulsory spirituality, no employer defining what somebody’s soul means, no compulsory meditation, no compulsory counselling, no compulsory intimacy and no surveillance of private life. Personal reflection could never become another performance metric. Participation in human-development programmes could not determine promotion, salary or professional evaluation. The private home would have to remain genuinely private. The moment spiritual or emotional development becomes compulsory, Homo spiritus has simply acquired another uniform.

That is why trust is central. The door can be opened, practices can be made available, environments can be designed intelligently, but the human being must remain free to choose. Life would continue in all its ordinary complexity. Deadlines would still exist. Money would still exist. Children might arrive. Relationships would begin and end. Laundry would accumulate. Arguments would happen. People would wake up in bad moods. Some mornings would be beautiful and some would not. This would not be a retreat from reality. Reality itself would be the experiment.

My first instinct when imagining such a model was to measure it. Measure productivity, retention, absence, creativity and burnout. Compare groups. Calculate differences. Produce data. Then I noticed the irony. Homo economicus was returning through the back door. Of course, any serious social experiment involving real people would require ethical evaluation, safeguards and honest learning. Claims should be tested. People should be protected. But the purpose does not have to become proving that a happier person produces eleven per cent more work. Some dimensions of human life deserve to exist without being justified by quarterly output.

Let people live. Let them work. Let them love. Let them create. Let them make mistakes. Let relationships begin and end. Let children arrive if life brings children. Let people discover what they believe. Let them contribute because they choose to contribute. Observe carefully without turning every breath into data. Give the experiment enough time for novelty to disappear and ordinary life to begin. Not a weekend wellness retreat, not six motivational Tuesdays, not three months followed by a glossy corporate report, but years. Perhaps after five years we would learn something worth knowing. Perhaps the most important outcome would still resist an Excel cell. Happiness does not have to become another KPI.

The physical opportunity already exists because the geography of work has changed. Central London alone had around 20 million square feet of available office space in August 2026, with a vacancy rate of 6.7 per cent. That does not mean twenty million square feet of abandoned buildings, and it certainly does not mean that traditional offices have stopped being valuable. High-quality office space continues to attract significant demand. The statistic interests me for another reason: it reveals scale. Millions of square feet of walls, glass, capital, architecture and possibility now exist inside a changing relationship between people and work. London is only one example.

I am not saying that every office should be converted into housing or that the city of the future should abolish conventional workplaces. If an office works, if people value it and if human beings flourish there, let it live. White Monday is not an argument against offices. It is an argument against treating an old form as sacred simply because it is familiar. When a building no longer performs its original purpose as well as it once did, perhaps the first question should not always be how to force the old purpose back inside it. Perhaps somebody should look through the window and ask what else could happen there.

That is the difference between reform and transformation. Reform works with form. We can reform working hours, hybrid policies, management styles, offices and organisational practices. We can re-form an existing structure and give it another shape. Often that is exactly what is needed. Transformation asks something deeper: does this form still serve the human being we are becoming? Reform asks how an existing system can function better. Transformation asks whether the assumptions beneath that system still deserve to survive.

The same question applies to leadership. Organisations understand identity extremely well. They brand buildings, cars, websites, clothing, notebooks, pencils and coffee cups. They tell us, “This is who we are.” Yet the strongest expression of an organisation’s identity cannot be printed. It walks, breathes and chooses. A company’s real brand is expressed in the human beings who emerge from it: how they treat one another, whether they can take responsibility without constant control, whether they can remain independent without becoming disconnected, whether they can concentrate, stop, create, compete, give and care.

This is where I think differently about the phrase “I am brand.” I do not mean that a human being should become a walking advertisement for an organisation. I mean almost the opposite. What I repeatedly choose, create, give and embody leaves an imprint. My responsibility is part of my brand. My integrity is part of my brand. My creativity, generosity and treatment of another human being are part of my brand. A pencil can carry a logo, but a human being carries spirit. Homo economicus asks what I produce, earn and exchange. Homo spiritus asks what spirit I bring into what I produce, earn and exchange.

No leader can command another person to become Homo spiritus. Spirit cannot be imposed. It must be discovered and chosen. This is where any vision of human-centred work has to protect itself against becoming another form of social engineering. Human history contains more than enough examples of institutions deciding what the “better human” should look like. I have no interest in replacing the old corporate uniform with a spiritual one.

Yet we should also recognise that environments already shape human beings. Architecture influences us. Advertising influences us. Algorithms influence us. Work schedules, targets, brands, technology and office design influence us. The question therefore is not whether environments shape human behaviour; they already do. The question is toward what. Do not prescribe love; create enough time and dignity for love to exist. Do not prescribe spirituality; create silence in which somebody may encounter their own understanding of it. Do not prescribe creativity; put art nearby and allow curiosity to breathe. Do not prescribe generosity; give without ownership and observe whether giving travels forward. Do not manufacture Homo spiritus. Make room for Homo spiritus to appear.

This is also why I am cautious whenever we call the existing arrangement “normal.” Normality is simply what has become familiar; it is not automatically proof that something is healthy, humane or optimal. England continues to report high levels of obesity, anxiety, depression and long-term sickness among working-age adults. Those statistics do not prove that the office caused ill health, just as remote work does not automatically cure it. Human wellbeing is far more complicated than that. Loneliness, chronic illness, sexuality, family structure, economic insecurity, diet, mental health and social connection cannot be reduced to one architectural or organisational cause. Yet the existence of widespread difficulty should at least give us permission to remain curious. If so many human beings are struggling, why should we assume that the architecture of ordinary life has already been perfected?

Autumn itself gives me an image for this question. Outside, the days become darker, and against that darkness office windows appear whiter. COVID contained its own darkness: illness, death, fear, uncertainty, isolation and control. I have no desire to romanticise any of it. Nor do I want to remain permanently trapped in arguments about who intended what, who frightened whom or what hidden purpose somebody may or may not have had. We are here now. The more useful question is what we can create from what happened.

Darkness is one of the conditions in which light becomes visible, but darkness does not decide our direction. We do. We lost the office as an unquestioned structure, so now we can reconsider what work is for. We disrupted routine, so now we understand more clearly why rhythm matters. Isolation exposed our need for relationship. Work entering our homes exposed the artificial wall between the professional human and the living human. A world extraordinarily skilled at developing Homo economicus has unexpectedly created an opportunity to recognise Homo spiritus.

This is why I cannot separate the vision from art. I am an artist, and I do not see art merely as something to hang on the wall once the building has been completed and the serious decisions have already been made. Art can become part of the experiment itself. The Coffee Capsule can exist as an installation within lived reality. It does not need to explain what somebody must think. It can simply ask: What do you notice? What do you feel? Who are you here? What do you choose? A pencil line is simple. A word is simple. A cup of coffee is simple. Two chairs are simple. Yet meaning does not need to be complicated in order to be deep. Art gives imagination form, and transformation begins in imagination before it becomes visible in the world.

There is an old story attributed to Alexander the Great. As he approached death, he supposedly wanted his empty hands displayed so that people could see that even a man who had conquered an enormous part of the known world would leave it holding nothing. The historical authenticity of the story is uncertain, but I have always liked the image: open hands, nothing taken. After the buildings, titles, profits, acquisitions, logos and possessions, a leader eventually faces a different question: what did my presence give to another human being? Perhaps the highest expression of leadership is not permanent ownership but knowing when to open the hand.

That idea takes me back again to Lithuania. Freedom did not finish when the external system disappeared. In many ways, that was when the difficult work of freedom began. The same human principle now appears on an entirely different scale. Remote and hybrid work gave millions of people a form of spatial freedom before we had fully learned how to use it. That is not a failure. It is simply where we are. We can learn how to concentrate without constant supervision, how to rest without guilt, how to create rhythm without commands, how to use leisure, how to love, how to be alone without becoming isolated, how to live beside another human being without controlling them, how to belong without surrendering independence and how to work without becoming only work.

Transformation can begin with simple actions: stop, notice, observe, feel, understand, choose, transform, integrate. None of these require another ideology. They require attention.

And so I return to Monday. Outside, autumn is darkening. Some office windows will fill with people today and some will remain empty. I no longer want to see those illuminated empty windows only as evidence of something lost. They can also become white space: a place for an idea that does not exist yet. White because a blank page is white. White because light becomes visible against darkness. White because transformation needs somewhere to begin.

Monday does not have to mean going back. Monday can mean beginning. Reform where reform is enough. Re-form what can take another shape. Transform where the old form no longer serves. Let Homo economicus continue to work, earn, build, produce and create. But make room for Homo spiritus to live.

Let people live. Let them work. Let them love. Let them create. Let them choose.

Perhaps the movement begins like this:

Control → Trust → Responsibility → Freedom → Intimacy → Communion → Creation.

One leader may one day look through one of those white windows and say: let us try. Not because we already know the answer, but because we are finally interested enough in the human being to ask the question.

For generations, leadership has asked:

How can the human work better?

On this White Monday, I want to ask something else:

How can the human live fully?

We do not have to measure every breath in order to justify the question. A pencil can carry a logo. I carry spirit. I am not merely part of a brand. I am brand. I am not only Homo economicus. I am Homo spiritus. Nobody can choose this identity for me.

I choose myself.

And sometimes, against the autumn darkness, transformation can begin with something very small:

one white window with the light still on.

White Monday.

Lina Sima