I've worked remotely for five years before the lockdown started. That was mostly fine and I personally do feel that I was/am more productive working from home t

I've worked remotely for five years before the lockdown started. That was mostly fine and I personally do feel that I was/am more productive working from home than I had been working in an office, but the lockdown has made things more difficult in a few ways. First, I used to travel quite a bit. Conferences, visiting friends in different countries, etc. Since I can mostly work from wherever I am, it was always easy to do five or six trips a year. That obviously hasn't been happening since lockdown started. I live in kind of a grungy, uninteresting neighborhood in South London. I don't particularly like it (we're here out of convenience for my partner's job) but frequent travel really helped me be OK with it. Now, I haven't been more than two miles from my flat in the last year (we don't have a car and going any further would require getting on a train or bus or plane and I don't consider that to be a reasonable thing to do if it's not for an "essential" purpose; the only times I've gone anywhere further than walking distance have been for legally required immigration appointments). I used to occasionally even go and work in a cafe or pub for a few hours, or just hang out for a change of scenery and of course I can't do that either. So I'm really unhappy with my location now and really tired of seeing the same thing every day. Second, my partner is a university lecturer. Normally, I'd work from home and she'd go to her office on campus. When they moved her classes online and she started working from home, we were in each others' way all the time. She had to pretty much turn our living room and kitchen area into a TV studio with lights, multiple cameras and a green screen setup. If she's having a class, I have to avoid passing through that space, making any noise, or using too much internet bandwidth (no pushing big docker images...) Meanwhile, I'm used to having quiet space to myself to code and that's hard to do when someone is giving a loud lecture right to you. Plus, since it's a lot more work and stress for her and no additional pay, she's been unhappy and when she's not happy, neither am I. To make things worse, the UK has also been dealing with Brexit and over the last year a significant number of our friends, who happened to be European, left the country. So we were already feeling more isolated and down than usual before lockdown even started since most of our social network disappeared on us. Still, I try to focus on how good we have it. Both of us are still employed, both in jobs that we can do from home. Our neighborhood is crappy, but our flat is pretty nice even if it's not huge. We live on a loud, busy, polluted street, but we do have a small deck so we could at least sit outside sometimes when the weather was nice (this is the UK though, so that's like three days a year). I remember living in apartments in NYC that were basically big enough for a twin size bed and a desk and nothing else. I know that there are still a lot of people living in places like that with no outside place to go during lockdown. I had one friend and former coworker who died, but otherwise neither of us have lost any family members or very close friends. So all in all, we could be doing much worse.