Where would your VPN be? What makes you think the government doesn't monitor traffic flows there? They don't even need to monitor traffic flows at your home's I

Where would your VPN be? What makes you think the government doesn't monitor traffic flows there? They don't even need to monitor traffic flows at your home's ISP, since they can see both legs of the connection just by watching the network your VPN server is on. If you're in a FVEY country, you can't count on any real network metadata privacy protection (against your own country's government) for near-realtime communication. Multiple hops (e.g. tor) makes it more difficult for them, but also makes your internet connection slow and unreliable, and your traffic becomes even higher priority for them to investigate; if they happen to have flow data on each of the nodes you use, you're probably unmasked.