Isolation, anxiety, and depression in the remote workplace

One thing I noticed about travellers was they can be put into two buckets:

#1. The lost. Running away from problems at home (or travelling for vague reasons).

#2. The motivated. Going to a country with purpose to do stuff.

It sounds to me like you did #1, and if you do it again perhaps you need to find a drive for #2.

Man, so much of what you write resonates with me, and quite much matches some of my current questions or ponderings.

I would love to be able to meet a few people in similar situations around a bonfire, and chat like friends. Perhaps we'd come away with some insights; otherwise, we'd have at least enjoyed the company of a few new friends and some warm fire light.

This becomes a bigger topic but if those people never had worked together they probably wouldn't have met and more over is that a initiated out of convenience or pressure of having to date or hang out with a co-corker because they are always around and you have to see them frequently or daily?

What happened to meeting people naturally outside of a forced setting?

Excellent points, corresponding strongly with my experience.

When I've shifted to night schedules, it's almost always been because daylight hours impose too many interruptions. Even very slight distractions can be hugely distruptive, particularly over time. These range from ringing phones to various street and environment noise (traffic, voices, landscaping equipment, construction), conversations or activities elsewhere in the household or building. Conversations by those you know are exceptionally distracting, far beyond all apparent proportion. The low chatter of a cafe can be tolerable, but a significant other, manager, or co-worker having a quiet converstation nearby will grab your attention, because it could be consequential.

If you don't have full control of your workspace, you've got the added issues of insufficient working room, things not remaining where you put them, and disagreements over organisation and environment (hot/cold, light/dark, windows open/closed, music/none, metal or classical, etc., etc.). Dominion matters tremendously.

The long-term vs. speculative projects issue is one that seems to hinge on trust and communications channel quality. In-person, in-office work benefits by butts-on-seats and the fact that your manager can personally and directly verify you're working on what you said you would be. Creative and speculative work is tremendously uncertain and hard to express / quantify, both as to possible value and any potential progress being made. This is one of a number of problems under the domain of what I call "manifestation", effectively, how directly manifest, tangible, or perceptible a thing is. While direct physical labour is immediately tangible (holes enlarge, wood sawed, big rocks become little oens), intellectual challenges don't lend themselves to ready visualisation or perception. A huge amount of workplace fads over the past half century (and before) have sought to address this. Most poorly.

Finding a manager (or client) who has a good grasp of this might help. I'm really not one to claim solutions, though I think I've a handle on the problem.

And writ large, this is the problem with remote work: it's not manifest.

If available, I strongly urge you to find a local coworking center that focuses on community (ie. not WeWork or a similar executive office relabeled as coworking). Try poking around on https://coworking.org/visa or https://wiki.coworking.org/w/page/29303049/Directory.

I've been full-time remote for my entire software development career and have happily taken advantage of it for occasional travels and such, but for the most part live in one place and love the community that I've plugged into. Finding a place where I'm surrounded every workday by people that I get along with rather than sitting at home with my dog and my computer has been totally integral to that.