Something has changed.

Whenever I travel I try to stay in remote-friendly co-living spaces. They are the perfect way to make like-minded friends while travelling, without the pains of sharing a bedroom with 6-12 other humans.

I’ve been doing this since 2019. This was the pre-pandemic era, when there were significantly less people able to spend months away from home while working. That led to higher odds that the people you met had struck out to run their own company, and created a company with travel rules that suited them. These people weren’t satisfied with letting others define what they could and couldn’t do with their lives. They were paving their own way forward, and loving it. Inspiring entrepreneur types.

They knew that work didn’t have to become a blocker to exploring the world, if you’re willing to take on a little risk along the way.

Of course like working for any company, work wasn’t always a blast. At least these people knew that they were responsible for their own unhappiness in those times. Responsible for getting themselves out of it too. They had a bias for action, and a tolerance for uncertainty.

I made some of my best friends in those places.

At the time I was working a full time role, and being around these people reminded me how much I missed the challenges of working for myself.

I left that job a few months later.

A month after that…the COVID LOCKDOWN!

Millions of people were banned from entering offices.

Work became work-from-home.

People had a taste of the pleasures of not being tied to a daily commute in a single location. And the pain of social isolation.

Many companies declared themselves remote forever. You could now work from any town in the world with a fast wifi connection. Other companies lay in wait for the day they could drag people back to their cells, sorry, offices. In a lot of cases, people came willingly. Why wouldn’t they? Being locked up at home was awful.

Others discovered that working remotely meant so much more than being at home. It meant being anywhere. People moved to new cities. As the world’s borders opened up, they flew to new countries. To beaches and mountains and lakes. Meeting foreign people. Tasting foreign foods. Speaking foreign languages.

Still, management continued their call to return to the office. The battle between employees and companies raged, and the dreaded hybrid model was born. One foot in and one foot out.

A compromise satisfying neither side.

When you have to be in the office on Tuesday, you can’t be in Hawaii on Monday. And when you’re in the office on Tuesday, but your manager is in the office on Wednesday, you all end up in the same place anyway:

On Zoom.

This had led to a huge problem. Now, in the eyes of many people, a bad job at a remote company is better than a good job at an office-first company.

Now, thousands of miserably-employed people are continuing to explore the world as remote workers.