

Last week, a client I've worked with since 2017 asked if I could hop on a call at 9pm on a Saturday. "Since you're remote anyway," they said, the way people say it now—treating my home office like a convenience store that's never not open. This wasn't a thing before 2020.

The request itself would have been unusual enough to warrant explanation, but now it's just... how remote work works? Except it isn't—it's how people who've only been remote for four years think it works. They came into this arrangement with assumptions shaped by pandemic-era emergency measures, and those assumptions have become the new baseline.

I've been doing this for fifteen years. Before remote work was a corporate initiative, before it was something you put on a resume, I was already here—figuring out the hard costs of a standing desk in a one-bedroom apartment, calculating what my health insurance actually cost versus what an employer would cover. Those calculations don't show up in any "remote work tips" article because those articles weren't written yet.

The discourse treats this like something new. The discourse is not for me.

For people like me—freelancers, contractors, solo consultants in creative and technical fields—remote work was never a lifestyle choice or a productivity hack. It was the only option that existed. I didn't "go remote" in 2020. I've been remote since before the phrase meant anything, and I certainly wasn't looking for tips on how to make it work from people who were just trying to survive a pandemic while keeping their jobs.

What the pandemic did was put everyone else in my office. And like any good tenant, they brought their own expectations about how the space should be run—expectations built on three years of emergency remote work, not fifteen years of building a sustainable practice from scratch.

The ergonomics discourse alone is enough to make me tired. Everyone's an expert now. Everyone has an opinion about standing desks and blue light glasses and the "right" way to set up a home office, as if I haven't been iterating on this for over a decade. As if I don't know exactly what my setup costs, down to the electricity bill.

Here's what changed: rates are harder to maintain. Client expectations around availability have shifted. The vocabulary around this work—words that used to describe my actual business—has been colonized by people who've never had to bid on a project while explaining why their home office isn't a tax write-off.

That's the thesis here. The pandemic didn't change my work. It changed everyone else's—and then they wrote about it like they'd discovered something I was still learning.