working for yourself has a cost nobody mentions.

30 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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Matthew Kelly explores how remote work's freedom creates unexpected isolation. He sees his girlfriend only on weekdays despite working from home, caught in what he calls the freedom-loneliness paradox: the independence that boosts productivity can trap you if you don't deliberately maintain connections.

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So yeah, it's just funny because you basically create your own loneliness in pursuit of productivity. But then I kind of get to the point where I'm like, okay, I'm actually being really fucking productive, but do I enjoy only seeing my girlfriend Monday to Friday? I don't know, probably not. And she wouldn't mind me saying that because she probably feels the same about me because she also works from home a lot of the time. Yeah, that's basically it. I could ramble about this all day, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot. And it's just like a funny irony that the freedom you create, it almost becomes like a loneliness prison if you don't proactively do something about it. And I haven't been proactively doing something about it, but I have been thinking about it and I'm talking about it and I should probably actually just go and do the things I'm talking about.