I’m One of Those Weirdos Who Actually Wants to Go Back to My Office

But not five days a week, and definitely not for “in-person collaboration”.

This mess is a desk. And I miss it. • Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

My first remote job was a little more than three years ago, and it almost killed me.

I was coming off five years at an agency where I’d only been promoted once (with no pay raise) and had been doing the work of at least two people for actual years, so a new in-house copywriter role for a tech company requiring four remote and one co-working day a week sounded like an absolute dream. I got a new desk at home with a second monitor, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse — the works. Six months later, it took all my mental, emotional, and physical effort just to get out of bed for conference calls at noon or later, let alone do any actual work. Some days I would dial into the calls from my bed, contribute a two-minute status update, and then go back to staring at the wall motionless for hours, hating myself and questioning the need for my own existence.

Part of it was the work itself: writing and rewriting the same ten redundant articles for an AI customer service chatbot company with the same five SEO keywords got old quickly. More intense & insidious was the isolation — this was before video calls really took off during the pandemic as an absolute necessity for…