A reader on Bluesky read the first version of this and said: “Bit reductive. Remote work scales fine, loneliness is a people problem you solve offline.” They were right, and the fix is worth more than the original piece, so here it is with the mistake removed.
The mistake was in the title. This was never about remote work. Remote work is a job you do from somewhere else: you have colleagues, a manager, a salary that arrives whether or not this week went well, and a Slack full of people obliged to answer you. It scales fine. Millions do it happily.
What the piece was actually describing is narrower and stranger: building something nobody asked for and trying to sell it, without colleagues and without a paycheck. Those two things get filed under the same “laptop lifestyle” heading and they have almost nothing in common. Conflating them lets a hard, specific problem hide inside a lifestyle category, which is exactly how you avoid solving it.
What the isolation actually is
And the second half of that reply lands too. The loneliness is not structural. It is a people problem, and it is solved offline, by seeing people. Nothing about the work requires an empty apartment. Treating solitude as an unavoidable condition of the job is a story you tell yourself, and it is a comfortable one, because a condition you cannot change is a condition you do not have to do anything about.
The genuine difficulty is not being alone in a room. It is being alone in a decision: nobody to tell you the idea is wrong before you spend three weeks on it, no colleague whose shrug saves you a month. That is a real cost and it is fixable too, just not by moving to a co-working space. It is fixed by finding people who will tell you the truth, and then believing them — which is the whole reason that Bluesky reply is the most useful thing to happen to this article.
The part that is genuinely hard
Here is the thing that survives once the lifestyle framing is stripped away. You can do everything right and still get nothing, for a long time, with no signal telling you whether to continue.
A job gives you feedback constantly: a standup, a code review, a manager saying the thing shipped. Selling something you made gives you almost none. You publish, and mostly nothing happens, and nothing happening is ambiguous. It might mean the product is wrong. It might mean the product is right and nobody has found it. It might mean you needed four more weeks. The absence of a response is not evidence of anything, and humans are terrible at sitting inside that.
That, not solitude, is what wears people down. Not the empty room — the empty signal.
What actually changed recently
The tooling collapsed the cost of producing and publishing to roughly zero. One person can now ship what used to take a team, and write a thousand variations of the message before their coffee cools.
Everybody got the same tools at the same time. So volume stopped being an advantage, because everyone has infinite volume now. The number of things being made went up enormously; the number of people with attention to give did not move at all.
What is left when volume is free is the part that cannot be mass-produced: being worth finding. A specific thing for specific people, made by someone who can be identified. That is harder than casting more lines, and it is the only thing that still works.
What we actually do about it
Rebel Studios is a small operation and most of what we publish gets very little response. The honest numbers are small and we would rather print small real ones than none. The useful move has not been publishing more — it has been talking to individual people, which scales badly and works.
Including this: one stranger replied to a post and told us the framing was lazy. That is worth more than a hundred quiet impressions, and it only happened because the post existed and because someone was willing to say so publicly.
Why keep going
Not because the expected value favours it — on the numbers, a salary usually wins, and pretending otherwise is the kind of romanticism that got the first draft in trouble.
It is because the feedback, when it comes, is real. Someone you have never met uses a thing you made, or tells you plainly that you got it wrong. A salary is a steady drip you stop tasting by week three. Being told the truth by a stranger is not.
If you are doing this, the two things that help are the two the reply pointed at: solve the loneliness offline, like the ordinary human problem it is, and stop treating an empty inbox as fate. It is information, and usually it is telling you to go and talk to somebody.
Rebel Studios is a small crew building software and telling the truth about how it is going. If you are doing the same thing, come and tell us we are wrong.