Whilst I almost certainly work in a different industry to that of most of HN readers, I can tell you that it's having a massive effect. Our freelance pool has

Whilst I almost certainly work in a different industry to that of most of HN readers, I can tell you that it's having a massive effect. Our freelance pool has massively reduced in size - mostly through people moving on to find full-time work in completely different industries. In our case (events + conferences) - I'm finding it quite hard to comprehend, as we were one of the only companies still paying our freelancers during COVID as we believed it was the right thing to do, so that we would still have freelance staff who we could rely on post-pandemic. We were paying them on a completely no strings attached basis too - there was no expectation that they would have to pay it back or work for us in future. Our rates are well above average too - which makes the issue even more hard to understand. I suspect that in quite a few cases - people have gotten used to spending more time at home and with loved ones and have decided that they enjoy it more than travelling on a fairly regular basis.