I’m A Suburban Nomad with a Desk Job
You don’t need to take your laptop to the beach to enjoy the freedom of remote work. That cliche image of someone clacking away at a keyboard from the comfort of a seaside chaise lounge is the epitome of remote work idealism. You wouldn’t be able to see your screen, your laptop would overheat, and you’d get sand in your USB port. In reality, most of us are hunched over our dining room tables or crammed into a tiny home office within earshot of someone else in the house. Not that I want to be away from my partner, but I don’t need to share a bed, a bathroom, and some water-cooler talk about the show we watched together the night before. What I propose is somewhere in between beach-novel-writer and miserable office-dweller. Sounding like something from the J. Peterman catalog, I present The Suburban Nomad. A few skills I’ve picked up from camping for most of my life are pretty handy in the woods and also work well for remote working. Covid forced us to be a bit more flexible with the way we work, and many of us never went back to the office. We decided we like sweatpants but also being outdoors. In a real survival situation like the apocalypse, I would likely whither and die and allow the woods to reclaim me. Despite learning some basic survival skills to backpack some of the Appalachian Trail a few years ago, I still wouldn’t last long if things got really bad. I’m no Grizzly Adams, but I can almost guarantee I’d last longer in the wilderness than Andy in accounting.The ability to work from home is a double-edged sword. It’s great not to have to drive to an office all the time, and it’s great to work in your sweatpants day after day, but the convenience of working from home comes with a price — more than just weight gain. People aren’t made to be together all the time. If you and your partner are working from home together you will find yourself hating them. Rest assured they will hate you, too. Especially if you walk behind them and hack up your sputum during their morning Zoom meeting, or they yell at the…
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