Working From Home Gave Me Freedom and Took Something I Did Not Know I Needed
The commute I had resented turned out to have been doing something important. The colleagues I saw daily turned out to have been holding something I did not notice until it was gone.
Story
What actually happened
I had been working in a project management role at a software company in Miami and when the company moved to fully remote working I was, in the initial weeks, genuinely pleased. The commute was gone. The flexibility was real.
The ability to structure my day around my own rhythm rather than the office's was something I had wanted and now had. For about four months I experienced this as unambiguously positive. By month five something had shifted in a way I could not initially locate.
I was less motivated in the mornings in a way that the flexibility was supposed to have addressed. I was finishing the working day without the natural boundary that leaving a building had provided and finding myself working in the evenings not because of particular urgency but because the border between work and not-work had become porous in a way I could not seem to fix.
I was lonelier than I had expected - not loneliness in the dramatic sense but in the specific ambient way of someone who had been receiving small doses of human connection throughout the working day without registering them as significant until they were absent.
I missed, genuinely missed, things I had complained about regularly: the brief conversations in corridors, the overheard discussions that gave me a peripheral sense of the organisation's texture, the specific social experience of being in a room with people I was working with.
The absence of those things produced a flattening of my working experience that I had not anticipated. I started putting structures in place that I had never needed in an office: scheduled calls with colleagues that had no agenda except maintaining contact, a morning routine that created an artificial commute transition, a physical space in my flat that was categorically work rather than home.
These helped without fully solving the problem. At 30, working in a hybrid arrangement, I understand that the office had been providing things I had not valued until they were gone - the informal social infrastructure, the physical transition between states, the ambient sense of collective purpose.
These things are not romantic arguments for the office. They are real functions that remote work requires you to consciously replace.
The lesson
Actionable takeaway