Remote work’s toll on cities
These conversations are kind of like the airplane on the treadmill problem, where there are (approximately) two orthogonal sets of assumptions&#x2F;preferences that lead to obvious but incompatible conclusions, and people end up yelling at each other over the conclusions without realizing the difference is just the underlying assumptions.<p>Personally - I don&#x27;t want to live in a city, or a town, or even a neighborhood. I don&#x27;t mind seeing my neighbors but I don&#x27;t want to hear them and I don&#x27;t really want to interact with them. I&#x27;m perfectly happy driving 30 minutes or 45 minutes into town to run errands. I don&#x27;t think that living out in the suburbs (or further) is &quot;boring&quot; because I don&#x27;t like crowds and I&#x27;m not going to do anything that people in cities do for &quot;fun&quot; anyway.<p>I&#x27;m living in a suburb now because I need to be close to work - and for my career involving hardware, that&#x27;s unlikely to ever change. But if I could truly work 100% remote and I knew this would last me 10 years - I&#x27;d move somewhere further away in a heartbeat.<p>If you think the world is made up mostly of people like me - you think remote work is going to devastate cities because who in their right mind would want to live there if not for work? If you think the world is made up mostly of people who want to live in cities in the first place - you think remote work will make cities better because a lot of disadvantages of city living are due to the need to accommodate a daily commute.