When Work Stopped Being a Place
How we gained flexibility and lost apprenticeship.
Welcome to Unknown Arts — I’m Patrick, your field guide to the creative frontier. Join thousands of builders around the world navigating what’s next.
I’ve worked remotely for years now, and in many ways, it suits me. I can design my days, live where I want, travel when I need to, avoid LA traffic… All great things.
But over time, I’ve realized what disappeared when work stopped being a place. The real loss isn’t offices or productivity. It’s community, apprenticeship, and the quiet ways people used to learn from and rely on each other.
Learning by immersion
When I started my career in 2012 I had no idea what I was doing. I had talent and some basic skills but no experience to guide me. I learned by working alongside senior professionals.
I watched how they approached their work and how they made decisions. Most of that learning happened by osmosis, absorbing lessons naturally through immersion like a student of a foreign language. Other lessons arrived in the informal moments between work: a quick hallway conversation, a walk around the block to get some fresh air, a coffee chat where I could ask a dumb question without scheduling a call. Everything was a learning moment.
Slowly but surely, that was how I became fluent in my profession. It didn’t come from a structured educational program, and it didn’t come from winging it on my own. It came from immersion: the everyday rhythm of being in the presence of people worth learning from.
Why remote work works for me now
Now, 13 years into my career, I’m fluent enough to work alone. I know how to navigate the ambiguity and lead projects. I don’t need constant guidance or feedback. And in that sense, remote work works well for me.
For a lot of people at my life stage balancing work and family responsibility, remote work is a gift. It allows more flexibility, fewer interruptions, and deeper focus. It’s rational to want that.
But that same structure that works so well for the experienced leaves fewer ways for others to get that experience in the first place. As a junior teammate, you can’t feel a leader read the room and make a tough call on Slack. You can’t absorb their intuition from a calendar invite. You just can’t develop judgment in a vacuum.
The invisible scaffolding we dismantled
When work was a place, it wasn’t just where people did the work—it was where they learned to do the work. The office was never really an efficiency machine; it was an ecosystem for knowledge sharing and apprenticeship.
Where I live in the United States, work also became the main way for adults to find community (for better or worse). It’s where people made friends, got invited to things, maybe even met their spouse. Companies organized happy hours, recreational sports leagues, charity drives and volunteer days. That stuff may have felt like fluff, but it also served an important role: it was civic glue.
Now, that layer is gone for many people. It’s easy to recommend that someone “join a club” or “find a place to volunteer”, but the truth is most people don’t. It requires too much activation energy to gather and so many people just stop gathering. And over time, participation quietly declines and the bonds of the community dissolve.
What gets lost
Remote work allows more personal freedom, but it also makes personal connection harder to come by. There’s still no substitute for simply being in someone’s physical presence. Without that connection, it’s easy for relationships to feel purely transactional. People become nodes in a system instead of members of a community.
When everyone optimizes rationally for autonomy, the collective fabric thins. We lose the informal support networks that build future experts, and we lose one of the main social structures that kept us connected.
A million rational choices—to save time, to stay flexible, to work where we feel most focused—add up to something irrational in aggregate: a society that allows itself to weaken and leaves its next generation to fend for itself.
The question that remains
To be clear, I’m not arguing for the end of remote work (I benefit from it!). But I do think it’s time we discuss more openly the macro level costs and how we might reduce them.
The question isn’t whether we should work remotely. Many inevitably will. It’s how we rebuild community and support structures for the next generation when work no longer provides them.
Until next time,
🎯 Try this
Think back to your early jobs. Who did you learn from simply by being near them?
Now ask: who’s learning from you today?
Pick one small way to recreate proximity: invite a junior colleague to shadow a meeting, start a recurring “open studio” hour where people can drop in, write an article or record a video to share your thinking or process with the world.
📚 Go deeper
On Work by Derek Thompson — A thoughtful collection of essays exploring how the meaning of work has shifted in the modern era.
Social Connection and Worker Well-Being — A CDC report exploring how social networks, belonging, and informal workplace relationships shape worker health and productivity.
Working from home Is here to stay, but how does it affect workplace learning? — A 2024 study examining how remote and hybrid environments reduce opportunities for practical knowledge transfer and mentorship, especially for early-career employees.
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The part about learning by immersion realy resonated. How can we replicate that organic learning in a remote setup? Very insightful analysis.