I have a fully remote job. Its great. I work from home sometimes in my pajamas and zoom into meetings. I respect and have the respect of my colleagues, and I think the work I’m involved in is very important. Or at least adjacently important. But I can’t help but feel like somethings missing. Today is an example, I slept pretty marginally, and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, say. But I never fully recovered. So, would I ever go back to the office? Absolutely not.
The allure of remote work
A good remote work essay wouldn’t be complete without painting the picture of where I was when the Covid pandemic hit. And I was the perfect beneficiary of the disaster. I had autumn before I had finished up ‘all but the writing’ as they say of my PhD. My oral qualification exams were complete, my lab work was finished, and ‘all’ I had to get done was writing the dang dissertation. This would be about a two year ordeal, but I certainly didn’t have any need to do work from any specific space. and home was as good as any. Also (un)relatedly, I was at the beginning of a divorce. So there was that.
I and the people in academia I worked with, took to remote work fairly easily. Zoom meetings became a thing we got used to, and as people began being allowed back in person at the University, many people chose to stay home a lot more. “working from home” had been a thing that academics had done, with tepid apprehension and guilt if you weren’t tenured, for a while. So it was a natural fit for me and my office.
After my defense a couple of years later, I took up a bit of a nomadic lifestyle. My new partner and I started buying real estate that needed some work to be habitable and flipping the houses. Well, he started that, and I was following, but the freedom to choose where we bought our next deal while unemployed was a game changer financially. Also, and not the least of things - we got to live wherever we wanted.
Eventually, I felt drawn to do something with my PhD, and let K keep building. Cash flow was a bit tight at the beginning of the projects so any work I could bring in could help finance the investments. I applied to a few positions, did some remote contracting work, and eventually landed two similar paying roles. One was in person, and one was not. The decision was of course a bit more nuanced than that, but the remote portion was the deciding factor. After experience the extreme freedom of a nomadic lifestyle for over a year, I could not tie my soul down to a 9 to 5 office job that required a monthly payment to be stuck in one place.
The humanist remote worker
Not including my remote work during the pandemic, I’ve been at a remote job now for almost three years. And I have a disjointed relationship with it. Mostly I love it. I wake up when I want, without having to consider my commute to work. I don’t have the expenses of transportation - gas, parking, and maintenance all come ‘in the package’ of a remote job. My diet is likely better than if I was at an office. There is no prepping lunch, I just cook a hot meal when I’m hungry. I see my partner multiple times a day, and during my hour lunch break which I don’t need for eating, its logistically easy to do something together like run on the beach, or go for a sauna.
I’m able to live more of the life I imagined when I took up nomadic life. I am more free to follow my interests, and cultivate community in a manner of my choosing, in the community that I chose (though I often chose not too - more on that later). I have more time for creativity, in theory, which isn’t time spent preparing the logistics of a workday. And I connect more deeply with my partner, since we largely share the same workspace.
On paper, having a remote job is a cornucopia of all the right things. The remote worker can thrive in their chosed niche, while contributing to a cause they believe in, while still having the flexibility needed to flourish in their own path.
The anti-human remote worker
And you already know what the flip side of this is. Remote work is isolating. While I have a great relationship with my colleagues, I don’t really know them. We get together in person once a year and it always seems like we actually do spend every day together. But I’ve never had anyone over for dinner, and i have a hard time remember their kids and partners names.
At the end of an average workday, my eyes feel like they have a fine sheet of sandpaper on them from all the computer staring I’ve done. I’m convinced this is worse during a remote job because there aren’t any in person inturuptions - a meeting, or a colleague asking if you want to go to lunch. My brain feels fried too. I’m writing this after a particularly difficult remote work day, and its all I can do to get it done. Writing in the evening is not for me, I guess.
While I get connection to a community doing great things with my job, the connection feels a bit empty, a bit of a shell of what a real work community could be. There are probably lots of reasons for this, including the way the organization is actually set up. Some things I could likely change to make them feel better, but other things are less in my control. I suspect all remote work will carry some level of anti-human with it.
After this experience, though, would I choose remote work again? Every time. Would I ever go back to the office? Absolutely not. I can’t, at this point in my life, imagine agreeing to spend a third of my time in a location not of my direct choosing. You make community where you are, you also avoid community where you are. Remote work has taken me by the head, looked me in the eyes, and laid out the pieces of my life that I’m actaully choosing. Its highlighted where I can do better, when in a traditional workplace I’d either be filling those holes up with something mandated, or ignoring the holes for a lack of time. this way, my hobbies and community stare me right in the face, and I have to live up to their expectations.