Working From Home is Good, Actually

It's not just disability experts agreeing -- it's everyone else

There’s no shortage of takes from the mainstream media talking about how remote work is bad and it’s going to take its physical and emotional toll on the workforce. Everyone from Malcolm Gladwell to the New York Times has an article out about how the remote workforce is essentially a mental health trainwreck that’s already reaping what they sowed. As a remote worker, I can safely say no one gives a shit — and I’m exonerated by the facts. According to Inc., 77 percent of workers say they want to work from home. That’s not a small number, and it’s not about to change drastically any time soon. People know what their jobs are, and they know how to do them — so why not let them accomplish the same feats of technological ingenuity that they would accomplish in the office from the comfort of their own bedrooms?

Just take a look at some of the arguments these articles are making and you’ll see plain as day that they really don’t have a leg to stand on — that their entire premise is based on making it easier for office landlords to continue charging for a service nobody needs — and that it’s really about controlling every aspect of worker’s lives. What they want is a workforce that doesn’t talk back, that does what they’re told, and that shows up to work on time. Remote work is making all of that a little harder to accomplish.

The article in Fortune specifically takes note of meetings and how nonverbal cues play into understanding situations, but at no point does it ask whether or not the meetings were necessary. Do you have any idea how many meetings I’ve had that could have been emails? How many annoyed middle managers I’ve heard saying “at least I’m not one of those people who thinks meetings should be emails”? Their entire job is justified through how many meetings they schedule in a day, so of course they’re concerned about nonverbal cues. At one point in the article, they even mention mirror neurons and play time as a structured activity that allows for better problem solving and smarter ideas, but who the fuck is trying to turn the office into a playground? Not the bosses, that’s for sure. The office culture that I’ve been a part of is incredibly structured down to the minute and forced down the throats of every worker at their desk, cubicle or no cubicle. Everything from meetings to pizza is a required activity that no one has the option to skip out on or reschedule, because what else could they possibly be busy with? Work is work, not structured play time or problem solving central. Outsourcing the issue by pretending that all forms of problem solving are actually a team activity is exactly what middle managers want — to pretend that things can’t be solved without meetings — when the majority of the workload is handled by overworked employees who deal with the majority of the backend.

The article in Forbes takes a different approach, saying that workers are more stressed and have a harder time sleeping before taking a darker turn, insisting that higher rates of domestic abuse mean that the office is no longer the escape many women needed it to be from abusive partners. Since when exactly is the workplace, where many women face abuse from bosses and shitty coworkers, an escape from any serious kind of domestic abuse? Since when has the office been a safe haven for women in any capacity? This is plainly an example of blaming remote work for anything; suddenly things that were never true of the office have to be true because the data suggest that domestic abuse rates were higher during the pandemic when people were on lockdown. Remote work’s purpose isn’t to lessen domestic abuse, and likely has no actual effect on how often spouses are hitting or verbally abusing their significant others. It’s to make it so the average worker doesn’t have to spend two hours commuting or socializing when they could be working. And with the extra two hours under their belt, remote workers would have time to take themselves to couples’ therapy.

The article in the Guardian uses more weak data to argue the point that mental health disorders are more severe in people who work remotely. There’s some truth to the argument that rates of depression and anxiety increase based on the amount of social isolation people experience, but should the workplace become an obligatory social endeavor? Does it really make sense to allow one of the main avenues for a person’s social life and emotional livelihood to be directly tied to their employment? In a world where layoffs are common, and the average desk job is as transient as fast food employment, isn’t combining social elements with the workplace a terrible idea? A therapist of mine recommended a book entirely about avoiding emotional pitfalls in the workplace and dealing with abusive bosses. Remote work doesn’t entirely eliminate the avenue of abuse — I know that from firsthand experience — but it makes it a lot harder for people to scream and rave and rant when they’re sitting behind a computer screen instead of in a live office setting. And most people would think the opposite, but you can’t physically abuse someone from across the internet.

The BBC article strikes a similar chord, arguing that mental health outcomes are worse and social cues and interactions are healthy for individuals. What’s most important here is that like with the other articles, the people clamoring for a return to the office are only asking for a few days a week where they can head back in, and likely want a hybrid of work from home and work from office days. Hybrid roles are becoming very common, but are still missing the point of remote work — the idea of working from home is supposed to exist for people who don’t fit into traditional office spaces and whose jobs can entirely be done with access to a computer. People want to be able to see their children at a school play or pick up their kids from school — people want to be able to schedule downtime in the middle of their week instead of being forced into a traditional one size fits all model — it’s part of the reason people in my generation are asking for a four day work week. With how much time gets wasted not working, it’s almost an inevitability at this point, especially as Scandinavian countries, which have a lot of remote working opportunities, embrace the four day model. Less work ends up being more work in the long run.

I say this as a person who’s never fit into the traditional mold of a nine to five office job: I can’t commute to work. It’s physically and emotionally tasking. I get severe headaches from having to keep my spine and my neck aligned in a specific fashion. I get incredibly anxious having to deal with coworkers for any period of time, regardless of whether or not it’s behind a computer screen. I lose my ability to focus the second there’s any amount of noise, making it impossible for me to get my work done. I work terribly in office settings, I work terribly in physical locations that aren’t my own personal office space, and I’m exactly who remote work is supposed to be for. I have all the mental health conditions that make remote working a necessity, and at the end of the day, I’m competing with people whose entire livelihoods aren’t dependent on being able to work out of the home on a personal computer. Hell, even writing one of these articles can be done entirely from the comfort of my bed, not just my bedroom. It’s where I write the fastest. It’s where I can look up information I need. It’s away from loud noises and distractions. Maybe it’s overworking my brain, but I like it better than the idea of being unable to focus, plagued by headaches and constantly worried about whether or not I said something stupid to a coworker.

Remote work has also enabled me to engage in my hobbies, which is something every article mentions but never really follows up on. I wrote the majority of a novel while I was writing for a company entirely from home, and worked on my music as much as I felt inspired even while most of my creativity was being used elsewhere. Having been an exhausted creative for most of my life, I can safely say that if I had to spend those extra hours commuting, there’s no way I would have had time to pursue any of my other livelihoods. And even though they don’t pay me anything, they still give me satisfaction and joy that I wouldn’t know otherwise. It’s something that I can’t get from an office job. It’s something that I could never get from the stolid working conditions of corporate America.

And disability experts agree — the rise in remote work is allowing people with disabilities to look for stable employment — which not only considers them in the job market, but allows them to lead richer, more fulfilling lives by having access to the economy in a way they didn’t before. Not that people with disabilities should have to work at all, but I’m sure the ones that can enjoy having access to more money and insurances that they might not have had before they found remote work.

I think the only real downside to remote work is that it’s much more difficult to unionize people behind a computer screen. A union takes people doing boots on the ground labor and personal outreach to a large number of employees, and that’s not something you can really do effectively from across the internet. And that’s a valid criticism of the system; it’s harder to draw attention to unsafe or unfair working conditions when everyone’s doing a white collar job, and remote work is still office work, so it’s inconsistent and easily taken away when the bosses feel like you’ve done something you shouldn’t.

All in all, remote work is good, actually. Everyone who says it isn’t is trying to sell you something.