After a year, my WFH dream has become a nightmare - I'm paranoid all the time (2025)

Let me kick this off by saying that working from home has its positives. That goes without saying. Being able to do the school run. Not having to commute each day. Fitting your work around a busy life. However, after a year of WFH as a freelancer, I’m starting to notice a few strong disadvantages too.

In the old days you got up, had a shower, got dressed, then got on public transport, maybe reading a book on the way or listening to some angry music (to vent those rage feelings towards colleagues you didn’t like so much). You felt part of a collective of people. You got to know your colleagues on a deeper level.

In the office there was order, routine and structure. There was no chaos, mess and Lego bricks stuck between your toes. You had meetings where you sat opposite one another, and perhaps noticed that Jim from accounts was in the middle of a traumatic marriage collapse. You also saw that the junior executive was crying in the toilet, and you made a mental note to check in on her later to see if she was okay.

There was the work lunch break where you would walk around the block with your work besties (usually punctuated by a long, detailed conversation on what you were going to eat), and catch up on their lives, also the details on who would wounded them the most that week, who was wearing terrible shoes, and what could be done to right at least some of these things. I miss those work lunches.

I miss the social connections. Seeing the whites of peoples eyes. Reading their body language. Understanding that they have a context which explains their behaviour. When I work with Gen Z colleagues now I feel they are often paranoid about what’s going on around them. This is perfectly valid. I feel paranoid too – all the time.

It’s hard to understand the context when you’re dealing solely with a few typed words on a screen. So the email that you get from your manager which asks you to do something as it’s super urgent? Well, it could just mean that they want something to be done because it’s super urgent. Or it could mean that they are angry with you. And is the lack of a smiley face on their recent Slack message because they hate you?

I have often found myself sitting on my sofa, at home, in silence, waiting for an email to arrive. In the office I’d go into the kitchen, make myself tea, talk to a work colleague, maybe we’d chat about the new season of whatever show was the equivalent of The White Lotus, then I’d come back and if there was no email from my manager, I’d go and seek them out. I might also notice that they were really stressed, and had been in back-to-back meetings and this was the reason they weren’t replying – because they were busy, not because they were in a pow wow with HR because they needed to fire me.

Humans have a negative bias, which means that they pay more attention to negative events rather than positive ones. Some of this might stem from our pasts, living in caves and needing to remember the snakes under that tree in order to survive. Paying attention to dangerous threats in the world was a matter of life and death.

In a WFH context this negative bias means that we often assume bad news in the silence. It also gives us no real opportunity to vent or process our work. When I used to finish a big presentation to a client, it was common to travel back with my colleague on the train, and we’d usually treat ourselves to a coffee or even a beer in the pub if it was a Friday. We’d debrief what had happened, who’d been listening and who’d been difficult – we processed the meeting together and put it all to bed. Now those work spectres float about my house confronting me in the bathroom in the middle of the night when I get up to go to the loo. Keeping me awake and firmly in work mode.

I recently presented a big report to a group of clients on Zoom from my kids bedroom (I have no office). I felt all the familiar adrenalin pumping as I tried to lean as far forward as I could, to judge how the feedback was landing. Some of the clients had their screens off. One was working on something, and their face was at a weird angle. I finished the presentation, and was left sitting on my own in silence. Did they like it? Did they hate it? I wanted to talk to someone, or pat myself on the back for a job well done. The only creature I could talk to was one of the three fairly disinterested cats.

I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic for the days of moaning about the client in the pub. Even if something had gone wrong, it was worked through so that by the time you got home you felt grounded.

Now when my partner comes home he is met with a verbal brain dump that can last anything up to one hour. “Can I take off my coat first?” he asks as I go through each piece of writing I’ve done; theories about why people hate me or haven’t replied to my pitches; why my career as a freelancer is now officially over. “I need a lie down now,” he says after performing the role of stress absorber for his lonely wife.

One thing I’ve noticed is how many people are now replying with very short one-word answers. In the office this would have perhaps been a nod from your boss as they ran past to go into another meeting. Now the one word leaves so much space for that old negative bias to come creeping in again.

For many mothers working from home it also means a never-ending to-do list. Work that is paid and unpaid (i.e. washing/tidying/cooking/cleaning/school admin) has become mixed together in an unhealthy cocktail of burnout. The assumption is that if you’re WFH then you have time to do even more than you did when you were in the office. Most of the mothers I know who WFH use their breaks to pick up toys, hang washing up, prepare tea, and to fire off a thousand WhatsApps to the various school and mum channels.

It’s like working at air traffic control – no time off, no time to zone out, juggling many things, and always staying engaged in work of one form or another. At the office there was definitely downtime. Would I want to be in an office all the time? No. Do I miss it sometimes? Yes. Am I lonely and mainly hanging out with my cats, feeling paranoid? Yes. Do you fancy chatting about White Lotus with me? Answers on an email please.