Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

In terms of work, however, I think it depends on the organization and people's stage of life. If you already have a family, then WFH is much better to me and worth the tradeoff. Imagine being able to spend 2-3 hours with your young kid everyday at the cost of less face time with your coworkers.

As a downside to distances being generally shorter, we also don't have the same vast impressive swathes of nature that the US and Canada do, plus historically we cut down most of our forests to maintain an impressive navy. However we do have some forests left and plenty of coastline, no part of the country is more than 50km from the coast, there is still plentiful natural beauty to admire.

So it is possible to live closer to nature here, while still being not too far away from the city. In the long run, I may also want to get out of IT and do something less stressful and more "real", but that's something I'm still weighing the pros and cons of. There is also the consideration that by living in the city, I have very easy access to events and dining experiences, which is something I do still value, even if the pandemic has made all of that seem like the distant past.

One thing I do know is that I'm not interested in suburbia. It's either apartment living or close to nature, I'm not interested in the small identical plots of land, cookie cutter communities, HOAs, any of that stuff. I want my neighbors either on the other side of a wall or more than a stone's throw away :-)

If everyone is remote, then a person in India is the same as a person in US/UK/EU and the two differentiating factors are 1.Cost 2.Talent

This puts a very big burden on employees in the US/UK/EU in that they have to increase their talent to match their offshore counterparts while at the same time fighting to make sure their salaries don’t go down

Sure, but the key is like-minded individuals, and it's fun (at least for many people) to be thrown together with hundreds or thousands of other people who are at the same life stage as you.

Sports clubs, and many similar clubs and societies, amongst university students only really work when those students are substantially located in roughly the same geographical location.

You're conflating being in a lecture hall with attending university. Being in lectures is a small part of the whole experience. Much of the rest of that experience relies heavily on being mostly colocated for the academic year.

A really small example: Cambridge University will not be able to continue fielding a top quality rowing squad unless the squad members are all able to train together as a team. It will not be able to recruit new members to its rowing teams to build that top quality squad unless it can bring all those people together.

On the teaching front it's pretty difficult to do a substantial proportion of, e.g., practical physics, chemistry, and biology labs from home or your hall of residence. It's also going to be impossible to meaningfully participate in practical engineering labs, or many of the activities that medical students need to do in order to qualify as doctors.

Even the more practical aspects of the arts and music present serious challenges, and nobody can make me believe that a remote experience in these disciplines will be anything more than second rate.

For some people I'm sure it's fine (Open University and its associated remote learning have after all been available in the UK for decades) but for most people remote university is going to be an extremely impoverished experience. If I were university age now I'd seriously consider deferring until the pandemic is in the past.