Why You Should Work From Home

Are you bored with the conventional work paradigm of getting in a car and driving all the way to some building? When you arrive in buildings that are not your home, do you crumple to the floor in a huddled ball and cry? Does the sight of fluorescent lights poison your eyes? If forced to cooperate with people IRL, do you throw up? Do you throw up on people? Are you constantly throwing up on people? If so, you may want to consider working from home, a rapidly expanding production model for web designers, freelance writers, transcriptionists, and agoraphobes who don’t “work” so much as “stream vaguely intelligible text onto the internet”.

By working from home, you can adjust your hours to whatever is most convenient for you. Then, due to procrastination, this schedule will shift later and later; from early morning, to late afternoon, to evening, to night, until finally, you’re up at 2AM, writing an article about the top ten movies where someone sneezes (Neverending Story, The Man Who Knew Too Little, The Last Station, etc.), feverishly googling “movie sneeze” in a bleary eyed fugue state. Your work becomes less “substantive” and more “abstract/avant-garde”, with irregular spelling and punctuation and long digressions about the nature of consciousness, apropos of nothing. Articles begin appearing with titles like “If I Die, How Long Will It Take For Someone To Find The Body” and “How To Be A Thing In A Place In Your Twenties Sex Playlist Jennifer Lawrence”.  You’ll forget the sensation of the sun on your skin. Your body will grow pale and malnourished, bony and grotesque, elongated and wet. Neighborhood children will tell stories about the man who haunts your apartment. This is all to be expected.

During office work, you’re surrounded by multiple distinct entities, fellow animals with which employers require your sedulous cooperation despite the fact that they are utterly outside yourself and therefore unknowable. Who are these “colleagues”? Rapists? Pedophiles? Murderers? Are they all murderers or just Claudia? You gaze into their bottomless black eyes, searching for the faint glimmer of a soul, probing the bathypelagic depths like a deep sea explorer on the hunt for giant squid, but you always find nothing, nothing, nothing. “Please leave me alone,” says the animal. “But you already are,” you whisper. “We’re all alone.”

In contrast, by working at home, you need never encounter another living being ever again except via media or the occasional mouse. You can complete your work, unencumbered by the psychic incursions of non-self animals, uninterrupted by the social compulsion to greet and discuss weather/traffic/Amanda Bynes. After all, these creatures are unpredictable and beyond your control, meaning at any moment, they could say something to hurt your feelings or, in a moment of dark whimsy, bash in your skull with a coffee mug; there’s nothing to stop them. Worse, they might share anecdotes regarding their irrelevant offspring: ignorant things it said due to lack of education, hilarious emotional outbursts, non sequiturs, and so on. Terrible.

The earth is filled with these creatures that exist only to wage a psychological war on you personally. Example: the other day, while walking to the 7/11, a man pointed to me and said, “You’re a woman.” I said, “No, I’m a man.” He said, “Shut up,” and continued on his way with a blank facial expression. Afterward, I wondered if I might be the only real person and everyone else a conduit for Evil. Regardless, it’s one more reason to work from home.

Another great thing about working from home: less work and more reading Wikipedia pages. Personally, I don’t feel intellectually engaged with my work unless it’s punctuated by two hours of reading up on Kang the Conqueror/Immortus/Rama Tut for every ten minutes of legitimate productivity. It’s distracting to my writing process if I’m plagued with thoughts like ‘What happened on the last season of Gilmore Girls?’ or ‘What are Apocalypse’s powers and abilities?’ or ‘Are cats smarter than dogs?’ I believe education is important to living a meaningful life. And if you maintain a consistent routine of 98% “internet knowledge acquisition” and 2% work, you will still earn just enough money to quietly starve to death in your bedroom, which is, of course, the long term goal of a work-from-home career—death.

If you often feel a strong antipathy toward the universe external to your apartment, then working from home is definitely for you. You’ll learn to comment on internet forums, consume hours and hours Netflix, and order groceries over the internet. Your brain’s Broca’s area will atrophy until you can only grunt and squeal, and you’ll find yourself skulking and slinking rather than walking. Eventually, you’ll run out of money for traditional groceries and transition your diet to palatable non-foods like paper towels, cardboard, dirt, deodorant, etc.; then unpalatable non-foods: aluminum foil, rocks, your own fingers, etc.

That’s why working from home is so great; it allows you to exercise your resourcefulness. You can circumvent the financial obligation to interact socially, and instead, drown in sweet solipsism, sinking deeper and deeper into your own thoughts, becoming more insular, less connected, until you forget what is a reasonable mental state. Plus you save money on commuting, which is nice.