I work with six or seven people. I like most of them. In a normal month I might speak to two of them, once, for about twenty minutes, because something broke or something needed a decision. There is no morning standup. There is no evening wrap. We are all sensible adults who agreed, correctly, that recurring meetings with no agenda are a waste of everyone’s life. So we do not have them.
I still think that decision was right. I also think it removed the only structure that reminded me other people existed on a Tuesday.
This is the part of remote work that nobody puts in the pitch. The pitch is freedom, no commute, work from anywhere, keep your own hours. All of that is true and I would not go back. What the pitch leaves out is that a job is not only a job. For most people in history it was also the place where they were seen by other humans on a regular schedule without having to arrange it. You did not plan those interactions. They happened to you. Someone complained about traffic, someone brought food, someone noticed you looked tired. None of it was meaningful. All of it added up.
Take that away and still, you do not immediately feel lonely. You feel efficient. The loneliness shows up later and it does not announce itself. It shows up as a slow flattening, where the days stop having edges and you cannot remember whether a thing happened last week or last month.
Proximity is not the fix
There is a detail in all of this that confused me for a long time. I do not live alone. My family is downstairs. Six people, a full house, noise, doors, someone always cooking something.
I am maybe twenty steps away from all of it and it does not fix the thing.
That was the first honest realization I had about this. If loneliness were simply an absence of people nearby, my situation would not qualify at all. There are people nearby. The problem is that they do not share my context. They do not know what I did today, they do not know what any of it means, and explaining it takes more energy than the comfort it would return. So I say it was fine, and they say good, and both of us are telling the truth.
Loneliness for a remote knowledge worker in a small city is not a shortage of humans. It is a shortage of people who are in the same situation as you at the same time. In a big city you would find them by accident. A coworking desk, a friend from a previous office, someone at the gym who also stares at spreadsheets for a living. Where I am, those people exist in a group chat at best, and a group chat in my context has always been work.
The solutions people give
The standard advice arrives quickly, and everyone offering it means well.
Get married. This is the one I hear most, and I have thought about it more than I would admit out loud. My honest position is that I am not in a financial place where I could make another person comfortable in the way I would want to, and choosing otherwise for the sake of company seems like a bad trade for both people. So it stays on the shelf.
Move to a bigger city. Fair, and probably eventually true, but it is a large solution to apply to a Tuesday afternoon.
Get hobbies. I have hobbies. That is exactly the problem, and it took me a while to see why.
I read novels. I read history. I watch long videos about ships and wars and whatever else the algorithm hands me at othree in the morning. I open Blender and start something new and interesting and I do not finish it. I have started more projects in the last two years than I have finished in my whole life. Each one is genuinely enjoyable while I am inside it.
For a long time I read that as a discipline problem. I now think it is something else.
The revelation (Ba Dum Tsss!)
Every project I have finished in my life, I finished because a specific person was waiting for it.
Work deliverables get finished. Always. Not because they are more interesting, they are usually less interesting, but because a real human being will open a message and ask about them. Things I built for someone in my family got finished. A thing I promised to a friend got finished, late, badly, but finished.
The Blender scenes, the app ideas, the tracker I built for myself, the projects that were purely mine, all sitting at seventy percent. Nobody is waiting for them. So they wait for me instead, and I never come.
That reframes the loneliness a little. I had been thinking of it as a lack of company, something to fill with more input. More books, more videos, more new projects. But the input was never the missing piece. What is missing is being counted on. Not admired, not entertained, not even talked to particularly often. Just having somebody, anybody, with a small legitimate claim on something I said I would do.
This is why the hobbies do not touch it. Consuming things and starting things are both solo acts that require nothing from anyone else. They fill the hours without ever putting me in a position where my absence would be noticed. It is possible to spend an entire year that way and end it with a full brain and no evidence you were here.
Where that leaves me
I can see the shape of what would help. Show an unfinished thing to one person before it is good, so that a witness exists. Say a date out loud to somebody so that missing it becomes slightly embarrassing. Take on some small local thing where a person expects you at a certain time and would notice the empty chair.
I have not done any of it.
I want to be clear about that, because this is the point where an essay like this usually turns and tells you what the writer did next, and I do not have that paragraph. I have a diagnosis and no treatment plan. Understanding the mechanism has not yet made me act on it, which is its own familiar joke, and I am aware of that while writing this down.
So this is not a story about coming out of something. I am in it. The city is the city. The finances are the finances, and they set the calendar for a few of these decisions whether I like it or not. There is no office to walk into on Monday and there will not be one. Those are not problems I am solving this month. They are the weather.
What I can say is that the weather is not the whole of it.
There is a version of this that reads as bleak and I do not think it is honest. An hour ago, I got the light right in a scene in Blender that I have been poking at for weeks, and I sat there looking at it at longer than logic permits, feeling completely fine. I read good books. I learn things nobody asked me to learn. I have a family twenty steps below me who would come up the stairs if I needed them, even if they do not know what I do all day. Quiet is not the same as empty, and being under-witnessed is not the same as being unloved.
The boat is still taking water in a few places and I have not fixed any of them yet. It is also still a boat, still afloat, going roughly the direction I pointed it, in weather that will change eventually because weather does.
I am writing this from the middle. That is the only place I could honestly write it from.