| I'm with you, that is how I feel. I have been working full-time remote since ... well, for most of my career. My wife and I decided to be in a major metropolitan area because of our kids and schools... but back before, we were living in more rural, mountain areas with a lot of access to outdoors. At some point, we're going to get a small trailer for my use as an office, or an office trailer. It's something I would want anyways. I think one good compromise with this is having a remote-first company pay for either a home office, or the membership fees for a coworking space. Some people really enjoy the interpersonal interaction. Me? I get enough of it via Slack and Zoom, and the occasional in-person conferences and on-sites. One of the positives I can see us moving towards is greater interpersonal interaction with the local neighbors, and greater mixed-use spaces like it used to be. You work from home some of the days, and then walk down the street for the coffee and bagals. You talk with the neighborhood grocers. You can hang out at the community gardens. You make your living with things that could be done remote, but there is a much better sense of community where you live. When you spend money, it would be within the local community, so it helps distribute the wealth to people who you live side by side. And ok, maybe if you don't like to cook, instead of using one of those apps to get some food from across town, you support your neighbors who love to cook. In other words, instead of bonding primarily with the people you work with, your main community is the one you live in. I think that's generally a good thing. There's a project called the Urban Farming Guys. They do a lot of hard work for developing food resilency, and transformed one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City into something that is great. Imagine living there, because you cared about the work they did. You work the remote job by day, and then walk over to their makerspace to teach the neighborhood kids about coding. When they ask for donations, you could spread some of the wealth from working with a remote tech job. You would have a choice to live with the people who share the same values that you do. Here's the thing. I think a lot of people feel that they will be disconnected from people if they work remote. But I think if they were able to choose where they live, they might find that they are even _more_ connected with the people they live with, in the neighborhood they live with. I think there is a modern malaise of disconnection and brokenness, and that won't really be solved without reconnecting to your local community. The interpersonal camaderie at work is an imperfect substitute for what I think most people crave without realizing they crave it. |
The schools are the main thing preventing us from moving to a small town in nature. Most of them have really bad schools. If they don't it's because they're a rich-people enclave and housing's very expensive.