The Ironies Of Working From Home

You work from home, but your office is a pillow fort and the internet doesn't reach the rooms of your house. You have tough time leaving the house to do things like run errands or meet up with friends for coffee. And that’s just in terms of getting out physically. Even if you could pry yourself away, you’re still mentally tied to your house. You find yourself constantly checking email or returning calls, even when there is nothing pressing that requires your attention. You can’t help but to continually move back and forth from the couch to the computer. You don’t work from home, you live at work.

I think this can be a real problem for a lot of people. Sitting at a desk chained to your computer can be so addictive that there are some companies who actually pay you for logging into the office every day. They want you to use their computer, even if you spend more time on the internet than actual work. The house functions as your office, and it's just a matter of how much time you're willing to give it.

So if this is what happens in some of the most powerful industries in our society, what happens when we start working from home? What happens when we can't go outside? What happens when we can’t leave at all and essentially work from our own houses?

It turns out that there is something people don't talk about a lot: boredom. 

You might think that being trapped in your house sends you into a permanent state of bliss, but the truth is far from it. You can easily get very bored stuck in a small space. Boredom is one of the biggest issues people have at home. It can lead to feelings of isolation and depression, as well as other physical ailments like anxiety and insomnia.

It’s no surprise that boredom leads to these problems when you consider how our society already looks down upon people who choose to stay indoors and work from home. Hiding in your house doesn't make you some sort of soulless monolith that people fear, it makes you someone with even more willpower than anyone else on Earth .

People are constantly teased about how boring and isolated they must be, which is incredibly unfair. It’s like judging someone for having a job that pays them a lot of money. You could make the same money doing something that provides you with more meaning in your life, but people would just laugh at you for it.

I don’t claim to have the answer to this problem, but it seems like people could benefit from some sort of in-home social or physical activity . The only thing that matters is that you get out once every day to do something fun and productive. You can even find ways to entertain yourself at home if you really put your mind to it.

Conclusion

I'm not a capitalist, I'm an anarchist. Capitalism is only one manifestation of the state and, like other states, it presumes some people are entitled to power over others. However, there are other ways that don't presume this. Is  this  one of them? I'm not sure. The thing I find most interesting about how technology is changing the relationship between work and home is the concept of 'digital nomads'  - people who use technology to work remotely so they can travel around the world while still making money. One day working from home will be commonplace, but now we're at least moving in the right direction toward more freedom.