The Cost of Working From Home

I do not think working remotely is going anywhere, but at the same time, I feel it means what most people assume it means here, and the distance between these two things is where exactly we should be starting our conversation from.

As far as I know, and for a good number of people in my country, we got to know about remote work during the 2020 coronavirus breakout. And it isn't a lifestyle choice; it is currency arbitrage. My currency has kept losing its naira value. One of the things that has been helping is earning in dollars from foreign work while spending in Naira has become one of the reliable and helpful things against Naira. And looking at it, the particular incentive isn't disappearing just because a lot of people are now getting to discover it too. And if at all, the more it has spread across to people, the more it has made the underlying strategy more entrenched, not less.

But I cannot pretend that a lot of people haven't gotten to know about it, but not just everywhere equally. And currently, some of the few saturated works in remote jobs, content writing, visual assistance, chat management, social media account management, and SEO writing rates for works like that have dropped because of the competition between people all over the world trying to drive the prices toward nothing.

So, that part of remote work has been filled with pressure, and I think some are just managing it for now while they are using the other hand to search for government work or other employment. This is not that remote work has failed or something, but some parts that I mentioned have stopped paying meaningful money to justify the hassle.

What most people hardly talk about is the difficulty and cost that is attached with working from home here. In a government or private establishment, there is already a solar or generator somewhere, free internet, and different backup arrangements; this is absorbed into overhead nobody working there personally has to think about.

So, working from home as a remote worker means I will be running my own generator and going some extra mile for a stable internet connection and calls with clients because of the light abnormality over here that can go off for hours, spending so much on a data bundle and building redundancy that in a normal day it would have been normally handled by an employer. For most people who are into remote work, except those who have other side income, the math is not always adding up at the end of the day when they account for the work done.

What is hanging over the value of remote work is never relevance in the first place, looking deeply into it. Now, the tools will always be available, even forever. The real thing is who is earning way enough doing the remote work to make the sacrifices worth it.

So, will people be forced to fall back into doing regular jobs? Definitely, some will be forced in the long run, and that is mostly when it is saturated, when there's not much profit again. But even with that, there's a part of remote work that needs to be protected, and it's the dollar-earning aspect, the various skills, and how it has become so competitive all over, like I said, because that shows that it's not losing its relevance. It just means that not everyone can still afford to do it and keep up with the traffic it's gaining.

Thank you for reading.

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