Are we all
remworkers?
Each of us has a different reason for working remotely. Some chose it. Others fell into it by accident. But there's one thing we all have in common, and nobody talks about it enough.
Think about how many remote workers you know. How many of them have the same story? Probably none. There's the one who works remotely to travel the world, the one who moved back to be near aging parents, the one who simply can't stand the highway at 8 AM anymore. And all of them, in their own way, are right.
A thousand reasons why
I started working remotely for a very personal reason: I wanted to go home. I lived in Amsterdam, I worked in Milan. For years I convinced myself that in tech and SaaS there was no alternative -- your career was in the big cities, period. If you wanted to grow, you had to be there.
Then I realized that wasn't true. Or rather: it wasn't true anymore. Remote work changed the rules. And I packed my bags and went back to Emilia, to Correggio -- a small town where people make Parmigiano, not startups. And it was the best decision of my life.
But my story is just one of many. Since I started talking about remote work, I've met dozens of people with completely different paths. Each with their own reason.
The traveler. Works from Lisbon, from Bali, from Mexico. A different city every month. Remote work is their ticket to a life in motion.
The one who went home. Had a life in a big city, but their parents are aging back home. Remote let them return without giving up the salary.
The one who chose a small town. Doesn't want to pay $2,000 for a studio in a major city. Wants the garden, the quiet, the reasonable cost of living. Works for a company in Berlin from their living room.
The one sick of commuting. Two hours a day in the car. Ten hours a week. Twenty days a year. Spent staring at the bumper in front. Never again.
The one who works globally. Their team is spread across San Francisco, London, and Singapore. The office doesn't exist -- it never existed. Remote isn't a choice, it's the only option.
The one seeking balance. Wants to do laundry at 11, go for a run at 3, and work in the evening if needed. Remote is the freedom to organize life the way they want.
Six different reasons. Six different lives. Six people who, if you put them in a room, would probably have nothing else in common -- except one thing.
The problem nobody mentions
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you sign a full-remote contract. Nobody tells you that on the third day in a row without talking to someone in person, you start feeling strange. Nobody warns you that eating lunch alone, phone in hand, gets sad after a while. Nobody prepares you for the fact that on Friday evening, when you close your laptop, sometimes you don't know who to go out with -- because your former colleagues are 500 kilometers away and your old school friends have office schedules.
Remote work gives you freedom. But it takes away something we used to take for granted: daily human contact. The casual kind. Coffee with a colleague. The hallway chat. The lunch where someone tells you about their weekend. Small stuff. Stuff you didn't know you needed until you lost it.
It's not that remote work is wrong. It's that it's incomplete. It gives you everything except the people.
And the thing is, everyone has this problem. The digital nomad in Bali with thousands of followers but no friends in their city. The parent who works from home and doesn't have another adult to talk to until 6 PM. The developer who lives in a mountain village where their only social interaction is the cashier at the grocery store. Me, who moved back to Correggio and realized that knowing the area doesn't mean having a community.
Coworking isn't enough
At this point someone thinks: "go to a coworking space." Ok, I've tried that. A coworking space gives you a desk, a Wi-Fi connection, and the chance to nod when someone greets you at the water cooler. It's not bad. But it's not enough.
A coworking space doesn't give you people you want to have dinner with on Saturday night. It doesn't give you someone who understands what it means to have a call with a US team at 9 PM. It doesn't give you the feeling of belonging to something.
What we're missing isn't a space. It's a circle. A group of people who live like us, who understand our days, who share our challenges. People with whom the relationship doesn't end when you close your laptop.
What actually connects us
Let's go back to those six profiles. The traveler, the parent, the small-towner, the tired commuter, the global worker, the balance-seeker. Very different lives. But if you sit them around a table -- maybe at a farmhouse in the Italian hills, with a plate of handmade pasta in front of them -- you'll discover they speak the same language.
They talk about the difficulty of explaining to relatives that "yes, I really do work even though I'm at home." About the struggle to separate life from work when your office is your living room. About the guilt of taking a walk at 2 PM even though you've finished everything. About the anxiety of being always online to prove you're working. About the loneliness.
Especially the loneliness.
Remote work gave us freedom. But it took away the tribe. That group of people you share not just work with, but the life around work. The breaks, the lunches, the evenings, the weekends.
And no app, no Slack community, no coworking space truly solves this problem. Because real connections are built in person. Eating together. Walking together. Living together -- even if just for a week.
Why I created Remwork
Remwork was born from here. From this feeling I know well -- because I live it every day. The freedom of remote work is fantastic. But without a community of people like you, it remains incomplete.
The idea is simple: bring remote workers together in weekly experiences where you actually work in the morning and explore the territory in the afternoon. Not a retreat where you meditate under a tree. Not a vacation where you pretend to work. A real week, with real people, in incredible places.
The first edition will launch from Emilia -- because it's my home, because the Food Valley is the best place in the world to eat together, and because eating together is the oldest way to build bonds.
But before the experiences comes the community. Because there's no point organizing a week if we don't know each other first. If we don't have a place to talk, share, and realize we're not the only ones feeling this way.
If you recognized yourself in any of these words -- in the traveler, the parent, the small-towner, the commuter, the global worker, the balance-seeker, or in something completely different -- then Remwork is for you too.
It doesn't matter what your reason for working remotely is. What matters is that you don't want to do it alone.