When Covid-19 struck, I already had a leg up on remote work.

In late 2018, after a four-month stint in the NICU, my daughter came home from the hospital. My wife and I had been balancing work, life, and an employer-sponsored health insurance plan in a manic blur while our daughter was in the hospital. Now that she was coming home, we wouldn’t have the world’s most expensive babysitters available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And her care would still be complicated: she was coming home on oxygen support, had trouble getting enough calories each day, and would be seeing a dizzying array of specialists and therapists in the critical first few months of her home life.

Thanks to gracious and flexible employers, my wife and I made it work. I remember well the sweet days of bouncing my baby while working at my desk at home. I marked work deadlines and milestones in her little life in an unsorted jumble. I finished a big project; she managed to keep her blood oxygen saturation high enough to nap without a nasal cannula. These were profoundly hard times, but I savor the memory.

At times, my wife and I felt we were on a continuum with our preindustrial forebears, working together in lockstep to care for a household and do our work in a cycle that circumscribed our entire life. At other times, it felt more like leading a double life, with the realities of home and work only distantly related to one other. These lives were co-located, but not co-mingled. In March 2020, only a few months after I returned to the office, the Covid pandemic sent me right back to my home desk and the complexity and contradictions of remote work.

As this new mode of work became my daily life, I began to wonder: Could remote work allow people to return to a time when work and home were inseparable allies rather than antagonists? Could it help families like mine recover the wholeness that was missing in an age when both parents left home each day to work traditional jobs?

Three Acts of Work

Broadly speaking, work has had three different relations to home and the family over history. First, economic life truly was situated around the home. Second, economic life left the hearth and went away: to the smelter, the furnace, the clanging machine, the clattering keyboard. Now, many are returning home with their work. Is the third an authentic return of the first? And if remote work as it stands does not achieve that wholeness, what could bring it closer to its promise?

Granted, specific epochs, countries, economies, and jobs do not all map neatly into these three phases. There are ancient societies where second-phase work was common, and there are societies today where home-based work is the norm. There are entire categories of jobs that cannot be performed out of the home – hazardous waste should be handled in proper facilities, not at your kitchen sink. It is better to think of the three acts of work not as historic periods, but instead as dominant habits, practices, and attitudes toward work.

In the first act, work revolves around the immediate needs of the family. The economic life of the home finds its center at the hearth. The relationship between home and work is not merely, or even necessarily, a geographic one. Instead, it is labor whose product and reward both redound to the benefit of those nearby, in concentric circles: the immediate family, the extended family, the community.

At least this is the standard nostalgic paean to the mythical yeoman farmer or craftsman. There were of course times and places where this description was straightforwardly true. But premodern economies also featured international trade, powerful and monied interests, bureaucratic central management, slavery, serfdom, and devastating waves of famine, disease, and privation.

Most first-act workers were preoccupied with survival. The goal was easy enough to describe, and not that different from our own: “I need to work to provide for my family.” The home was the base of operations for this work, its vessel, its crucible. Home and work and children and land orbited each other with powerful and at times suffocating resonance. In part, this was because devastation and death were so near to the working home as to be palpable. The health of the home and family depended on the fruitfulness of the land and the family’s labor, and the value of work was what it produced and the lives it sustained. The survival drive that inflects all work is eons old, and only recently has our sense of it diminished.

Much more familiar to us is the second act, when work became a thing you went to and left. The genius of this shift was many-faceted. For one, it found ways to convert the concrete and immediate value of work into a liquid form of exchange, abstracting the value of labor away from the product of the work itself and into an endlessly reconfigurable medium: money. Means of exchange had existed previously, but in this era the supply of money increased dramatically, it became much easier to convert labor into money, and the goods and services that could be monetized multiplied.

The second act also found ways to take the immediate concrete needs of individuals and households and efficiently align them to accomplish things. This meant that the daily rhythms of work became more rudimentary even as production processes became more complex and centrally managed. Modern methods of accounting and management proliferated, which allowed corporate organisms comprising the minds and hands of many to conduct group work with machine-like efficiency.

This efficiency required work to become, slowly at first and then rapidly, a separate life and organism into which the worker entered. The nature of this organism, the corporation, was mechanical. With this form of work the human became a replaceable cog in a larger machine. Aspects of this corporate mechanism, combining humans and management processes, found their way from manufacturing to professional services such as medicine, law, and engineering; and even more so to other forms of white-collar work such as clerical and secretarial work, call centers, and medical billing.

Our prevailing attitudes toward work, home, and value changed. The product of this work, the finished goods or final destination, were often completely unknown. Returning home from one of these jobs, a worker would certainly see the value that came from his work, in the things he bought with the money he earned. But he could no longer see the value he had created, except in this abstract form. And his participation in the dizzyingly large corporate organism that compiled that value meant that he shared less or no ownership in the excess value created by his work. Work became less about accreting value to the home and family or keeping a household going, and more about putting in time in exchange for an abstract store of value you could then exchange back into the material goods to feed and house and clothe your family.

I began to wonder: Could remote work allow people to return to a time when work and home were inseparable allies rather than antagonists?

This act of work produced both dignity and desperation, in different measures. It created a profusion of material abundance in the industrializing world that benefited many. At the same time, warning signs proliferated. Even as working conditions and hours improved, anomie and ill health, torpor and burnout, alcoholism and workaholism alerted us that something was not quite right.

And now the third act begins, with workers in many professions taking up “remote work,” which, for their families, is in fact less remote. Like the first act, this one is less a force in the history of economics and more a directional attitude toward work. At a glance, it promises a return to the unified life of the family, a chance for burned-out and overstretched white-collar workers to skip the commute and spend more time with their families.

As a remote worker myself, I’ve been blessed by the arrangement: it has given me much more time with my wife and children than I would have had otherwise. I can participate more actively in the moral formation, instruction, and daily delights and miseries of my young children. I can share three meals a day with them. I can attend in a much more spontaneous way to the miscellaneous household needs that arise. In short, I get tantalizing glimpses of what work must have felt like at times for a first-act worker. To know and participate fully in a household, in all its daily rhythms and seasons, is a special experience, and still regretfully uncommon.

Is Work from Home Poisoned Fruit?

Is remote work the beginning of a shift of the economic life of the family back to the hearth? In part, it may be. But we risk accepting a shadow form of classic home-centered work if we simply take this trend for a return to old ways. If it is, it’s a synthetic one, made up not of whole ingredients but of constituent parts ground into molecules of value and productivity and effort and time, and reconstituted into something maybe more efficient and compact but certainly not whole again. Most remote workers are still “clocking in” and spending the next eight hours as oblivious as they can be to their surroundings. The radical, cubicle-like separation of work and life that developed in the second act is smuggled back home by remote work. The main difference is the commute time.

This synthetic phenomenon crops up in other realms too. In religion, for example, the third act means taking bits and pieces of the spirituality you prefer – some app-guided meditation here, a livestreamed service there, a podcast from your favorite spiritual guide – and assembling them into a rickety personal spirituality that makes you totally unique – and leaves you home alone. The resulting slurry often proves less nourishing and satisfying than traditional religion. Look further and you will see this trick of disintegration and synthesization elsewhere: in education, in entertainment, and in the disparate personalized cocktail of online and offline social circles we now call “community.”

The unthinking blending of work and home can leave remote workers feeling dislocated and adrift, with a gnawing sense of the meaningless of work, if for no other reason than that the product and value of their work is, in turn, remote from them. Of course, this critique of modern work is nothing new. It’s only more talked about now because those most likely to be able to work from home are also those who tend to do the most talking. Software and management jobs in particular have reached the apotheosis of the abstraction of work and value. Now words and code and numbers in spreadsheets form the corporate medium of exchange. If money as a medium of exchange abstracted modern workers from the product of their work, now this kind of work is remote not only from any corporate workplace but also from work in the classical sense of the transfer of energy by the application of force.

Remote work also smuggles into both home and work the latent potential for resentment to develop between the two. Work and home life compete over scarce attention: if the relationship between them is zero-sum, there can only be one winner at any given moment. The genius of second-act work was that it solved this problem directly: when you were at work, you were working. When you were at home, you were home. But especially when you are trying to teach your children the value and meaning of work, the lesson they may unwittingly learn from you instead is that work is a time of fundamental unavailability, a time when you must in many ways cease to be a parent and begin to be a worker. Work must be explained as a time for you to ignore them and receive money in exchange so that you can buy them food and clothes. I’m not the only one whose children have begun to pantomime “work” by drumming their fingers on an imaginary keyboard. Of course, a reasonable balance can be achieved, which is why the potential for resentment here is only latent. But there is a tension between the demands on a parent in the home and the demands on an on-call worker that must reach a negotiated settlement.

Finally, remote work risks turning the home into a trap. Especially as more homes are now situated in places not easy to walk to or from, the exhausted worker, clocking out after a hard eight hours’ work in one room, may find himself clocking in to a purely consumptive form of leisure in another room. For all its inconveniences, work outside the home makes possible the happenstance of community life – bumping into a neighbor, passing a new shop and deciding to stop in, running an errand. In the remote-work world, these random encounters with fellow humans will happen less.

Redeeming Work at Home

So far, I’ve painted a bleak picture of remote work and its relationship to the home. But there are some aspects that give me hope that new ways of working and living are emerging that are truly whole, not just a confusing collection of incompatible practices of work and life. Economists use the word onshoring to describe the return of the local production of certain goods that were once imported from afar. This is an apt term because it implies that the effort toward wholeness is not all-or-nothing. Over time, and with concerted effort, we can onshore pieces of time, value, effort, labor, and attention back to the hearth. And working from home can be part of this onshoring.

There are a lot of ways to galvanize the return of production to the home. Covid lockdowns did this in many American households, spurring an explosion of fruit tree planting, sourdough baking, and online craft store ventures. But these self-determinative forays were limited and often financially unsustainable; in many cases they were no more than the self-indulgent dalliances of the laptop class. It might therefore seem that such enterprises can reinvigorate the life of the home only for those with the means and with flexible, silicon-based work. But this is not true.

Small and sustainable enterprises can be run out of a home office, garage, carport, or barn as easily as a laptop job can be performed out of one. I have a vivid memory from childhood of taking the family van to the most highly recommended mechanic in town: an older gentleman working out of an outbuilding next to his house. Barbers and bakers could very reasonably work from home; plumbers and bricklayers could base their operations there.

There are obstacles. The strangulating effect of single-use zoning, the proliferation of scolding homeowners’ associations, professional services accreditation and regulation, duplicative food safety and inspection requirements, restrictions on cottage industries, and the tax burdens of self-employment all inveigh against the home enterprise. Yet all of these could be changed. The work landscape we have now is not a naturally occurring feature but a product of these rules: rules made by humans, and malleable by humans.

Indeed, a brief perusal of an American suburb will already find many small enterprises tucked away quietly at residential addresses. My own neighborhood, though zoned as single-use, hosts a tile contractor, a home healthcare service, a jeweler, a church office, a moving company, a custom 3D print shop, a florist, and an online craft store. The fact that small enterprises are more often oriented around the immediate needs of the community is an obvious benefit: the value generated by these business activities is contained within the community itself.

The same wave of technological advancements that created so many laptop jobs for these residential neighborhoods is also providing smaller machines for the production of many goods. The relative affordability of advanced metalworking equipment has made it possible for one of my acquaintances to run a very successful small-scale metal fabrication company. Computer-controlled lathes, mills, routers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, water jet cutters, and 3D printers are bringing capabilities once requiring factories to garages and hobby shops.

Accompanying the standardization of production equipment are hard-won victories in the effort to standardize interfaces between materials, components, and hardware. Universal standards make it possible for fabricators to work together with a common language. Using open-source standards, a metalworker could cut out a frame to fit the work of someone using a desktop-sized circuit board printer to make electronic components. The future of production could quite well be decentralized and miniature.

And what about the laptop class? Can structural changes free the remote workers of today to integrate their home and work life? One way to make it easier is to simply work less. It is hard to cultivate a backyard garden while working fifty hours a week on a computer. Trust me, I’ve tried. Working fewer hours can be a hard bargain to strike. Remote work is already seen as such a valuable job perk that it might be necessary to find a tradeoff, perhaps against salary or the opportunity for future promotion, to accommodate a reduction in hours.

More flexible work hours can also make the integration easier. The standard nine-to-five workday emerged as a negotiated settlement between workers and owners in a synchronous, in-person work environment. It is not necessary to impose this schedule on everyone in a remote-work environment that can often accommodate asynchronous work.

These simple suggestions for loosening the hard-and-fast requirements of remote work have been difficult for corporations to accept. Workers have little leverage in these matters, and large organizations in particular hesitate to carve out exceptions to their policies for individual workers, knowing that developing similar accommodations for every worker on the payroll would be burdensome.

My wife and I often remind each other that we can’t have it all. It is simply not possible to grow all the backyard vegetables we want to, volunteer at every good opportunity, run an interesting side hustle. We must pick and choose with care what things to turn our attention toward. In the same way, our work-life balance is an active negotiation with constantly shifting boundaries between competing priorities. What remote work makes possible for us is much more latitude as we try to make a whole out of the parts of our complicated life. Choosing remote work, and seeking to make more kinds of work fit within the contours of the home, allows others to do the same.