Remote but Not Removed

Remote work sounds like peace until you realise how quiet it really is.
The kind of quiet that hums behind your headphones — where even Spotify feels like company.

You start your day greeting people you’ve never met.
You know their typing speed, their timezone, and their cat’s name.
But you’ve never shared a lunch table, or silence, or that awkward 2 p.m. office air.

And somehow, it’s fine.
Until it’s not.

The illusion of connection

Slack makes it feel like we’re together.
We drop memes, emojis, and inside jokes like confetti digital proof that culture exists.
But when you close the laptop, it’s just you again.
No footsteps, no random “how far bro,” no chaos.

The workspace disappears, and suddenly you remember:
you don’t actually belong anywhere.

Remote isn’t loneliness it’s proximity without presence.
You’re surrounded by messages, but no one’s really here.

The blur

At first, working from home feels like freedom.
Then you blink, and your home starts feeling like work.
Your desk becomes your dining table, your rest becomes “context switching,”
and your weekends become “catching up.”

You stop saying “I’m done for the day”
because the day never really ends — it just quiets down.
There’s always one more ticket, one more PR, one more check.
So you keep going — half alive, half online.

The small grief

No one talks about the small grief of distributed teams.
The muted laughs.
The goodbye calls where no one actually leaves the meeting.
The birthdays in calendar invites.
The good mornings you type before coffee,
and the silence that answers back.

Sometimes I miss the chaos of people.
Even the annoying ones.
The bad jokes. The random power cuts.
The shared noise of being human.

Finding stillness

But there’s also beauty in it.
In learning to sit with the silence.
In building something invisible but real.
In knowing that somewhere across timezones someone’s working beside you,
and maybe they feel the same quiet too.

Remote doesn’t have to mean removed.
It just means relearning connection
one message, one call, one sigh at a time.