Look: except for a few months in high school, I have never worked for a stereotypical company where I would go into an office and do work with other people; I h

Look: except for a few months in high school, I have never worked for a stereotypical company where I would go into an office and do work with other people; I have always worked by myself or remote. I relish working alone and have never had an issue with it; I've even been quite fanatical about it, trying to make sure everyone knew how great this lifestyle was (one which I learned from my father, who worked for a company half a world away from him, from a home office where he was always accessible to his son: me). But... the pandemic also broke me. Bad. I wasn't at all prepared for life trapped inside where my only interaction with human beings I knew was via video. There were like four months in early 2021 where I only had about four interactions with flesh and blood humans whose name I knew (like, not some entirely random person)... one of them was the guy who lived in a nearby park whom I normally avoid as it is so difficult to end conversations. I gained a ton of weight and at one point--end of 2020--I had given myself some kind of weird anemia (I think from lack of B12 in my stupid closed-in diet). Like: I am someone for whom his entire life normalized remote work and who thrived in such an environment and yet the pandemic was so hard I still haven't really recovered... thinking about it makes me cry. (And like, yes: I could have better managed my lifestyle or better handled the loneliness. Whatever. That is also true for you, and I at least am not judging you for that.) It is one thing to not work in an office--you can work from anywhere! and there are a ton of people who you can get to spend time with--and it is entirely another thing to work explicitly from a small room in your home day in and day out for a year without human contact. I thereby want to posit that maybe--just maybe--the issue isn't working remotely but being forced to stay at home and at times even fear going to the supermarket. There were periods during this thing when people were even afraid to meet up outside, and so human contact for white collar professionals outside of relationships was pretty much just verboten. The world was in a shitty place, and you shouldn't judge working remote based on the experiences you had during a pandemic without even trying to control for the existence of a pandemic as part of your analysis.