How Remote Work Died: A Girardian Tragedy in Corporate America
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Businessmen are consumed by the emotional obsession that their employees and their customers are stealing from them, and that all laws and norms are designed exclusively to prevent them defending themselves from that theft.
I think deep down many of them know they provide zero value to a company and project their own fears of being a fraud. If an employee is not building a product/service or selling a product/service, he or she is part of the vast and bloated department of the "Bullsh*t Economy", its the largest department of every company.
If Remote Work is incredible and extremely productive, you can literally arbitrage away and create remote-first companies and crush your competition who insist on WFO. According to the logic of WFH backers, it should be incredibly easy to attract the highest talent and that talent should be working at peak productivity and should have no trouble in beating competition.
The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty
- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.
- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.
- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.
- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure
The fact that none of the companies can do it, means WFH is a massive productivity failure. The reasons are aplenty
- Self-Reporting Employees or Researchers simply can't measure productivity that matters.
- WFH research is typically done and funded by WFH-friendly entities skewing it's benefits. There are no neutral social science research.
- Startups, which are a better unbiased WFO/WFH study (because all startups have the same starting conditions allowing us to control more variables), clearly show that teams (both technical and sales) sitting in room can crush/outrun Startups that are remote-only.
- Productivity measures done by these studies are almost always individual, but team productivity and firm productivity are emergent properties and hard to measure
It’s not that companies can’t do it; plenty do. Companies are bad at hiring. The whims of managers and middle management decide the best person for a job. These people also frequently get duped by fast talkers and people who use AI. Companies have a hiring issue (sucking at it), so they use WFH as the excuse that they would have made better hires if they were in the office. And yet, Sally has been cruising on payroll for 10 years while barely doing anything and no one batted an eye until Sally wasn’t in the office and people started seeing she wasn’t working. The solution? Bring Sally back to the office because WFH is the problem.
Companies also realized that if all the jobs are WFH, suddenly how well you pay and your benefits become more important than corporate BSing. The major companies were all advised they should end work from because it will lead back to lower wages in the long run. Instead of having options, employees will be sucked back into a down labor market with artificially inflated numbers where there aren’t a lot of jobs in your area so you have to suck it up and take crappy pay and benefits so you don’t end up with even worse pay just to avoid becoming homeless.
Companies also realized that if all the jobs are WFH, suddenly how well you pay and your benefits become more important than corporate BSing. The major companies were all advised they should end work from because it will lead back to lower wages in the long run. Instead of having options, employees will be sucked back into a down labor market with artificially inflated numbers where there aren’t a lot of jobs in your area so you have to suck it up and take crappy pay and benefits so you don’t end up with even worse pay just to avoid becoming homeless.
If your competition figures out a way to cut overhead by 10% and you don't, they win. This is the normal outcome between similar businesses
The only thing that will save RTO companies now is graft and corruption.
The only thing that will save RTO companies now is graft and corruption.
the office culture / remote workers don't collaborate always makes me laugh. It reminds me of a time when I worked in an office and a PR spent over a week waiting to be reviewed because one team didn't tell another team. They were literally sat two benches apart and the requesting team had to walk past them to go to the toilet, to the exit or each time they went for a coffee.
Girard's theory is nonsense. For an excellent read on why, see https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/publications/rofl/issues/vol...
To me, the most repugnant part of Girard is how he tampers with the evidence. Take Oedipus, for example. Does it support Girard's position? No, Oedipus deserved his exile, he was not a scapegoat. "Oh, but that part is a lie; of course a myth doesn't tell the truth." So Girard rewrites Oedipus to make it fit his theory, and then claims Oedipus as evidence that he is right! That's not evidence; it's forgery. And Girard does it all the time - the linked article lists example after example.
So, no, I can't take Girard seriously. And, sorry, but I can't take a Girardian analysis of anything seriously either.
Now, you can claim that the end of WFH is bogus. That's fine. Just don't think of it in Girardian terms.
To me, the most repugnant part of Girard is how he tampers with the evidence. Take Oedipus, for example. Does it support Girard's position? No, Oedipus deserved his exile, he was not a scapegoat. "Oh, but that part is a lie; of course a myth doesn't tell the truth." So Girard rewrites Oedipus to make it fit his theory, and then claims Oedipus as evidence that he is right! That's not evidence; it's forgery. And Girard does it all the time - the linked article lists example after example.
So, no, I can't take Girard seriously. And, sorry, but I can't take a Girardian analysis of anything seriously either.
Now, you can claim that the end of WFH is bogus. That's fine. Just don't think of it in Girardian terms.
Interesting, you go around the internet bestowing an imaginary permission for people to have ideas when they align with yours (ending WFH is bogus) and imposing some kind of imaginary restrictions on thought that doesn't align with yours (Girard offers insight).
Are you aware of the bizarre egocentrism this kind of psychology implies?
Are you aware of the bizarre egocentrism this kind of psychology implies?
Are there any reliable numbers on this topic?
How many Work From Home jobs were there at the peak, and how many are there now?
How many Work From Home jobs were there at the peak, and how many are there now?
If you RTO maybe you’ll write your own essays instead of AI slop.
Gray font? Single sentence paragraphs? Good Lord...why would I bother to try to read this?
For the same reason everyone else reads HN during working hours, you're an unfulfilled worker bee and you don't enjoy your job enough to be fully engaged in what you do.
They fled San Francisco for Lisbon, New York for Buenos Aires, D.C. for Kraków. They claimed the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, slashing their tax bills. They worked from cafés, beaches, and co-living spaces—delivering the same (or better) output than their office-bound peers.
Then, suddenly, the backlash came. CEOs demanded a Return to Office. Managers moralized about “collaboration.” HR departments spun up surveillance tools to track badge swipes.
What happened?
The usual explanations—productivity! culture! innovation!—are weak. Study after study showed remote work didn’t hurt performance. So why the crackdown?
The Girardian Unmasking
French philosopher René Girard’s theories on mimetic desire and scapegoating explain this better than any MBA analysis. Here’s how:
1. Mimetic Desire: The Office as a Shared Delusion
Girard argued that humans don’t desire things directly—we desire through others. For decades, white-collar workers mimicked a single model of success:
Live in an expensive city.
Grind 60-hour weeks.
Chase promotions for status.
This system worked because everyone bought into the same fiction. Then came remote work—and a new model emerged:
Geoarbitrage.
Tax optimization.
Lifestyle freedom.
The moment workers saw colleagues thriving outside the system, the old model started crumbling. The desire shifted. But instead of adapting, corporations panicked.
2. The Scapegoat Mechanism: Sacrificing the Digital Nomad
When mimetic rivalry escalates, Girard says societies restore order by uniting against a scapegoat. Remote workers became that scapegoat.
Executives couldn’t admit the truth (“We’re jealous you escaped”), so they invented moral crises:
“Remote workers aren’t collaborating!” (Yet Slack/GitHub metrics disproved this.)
“We need office culture!” (But only after commercial real estate values tanked.)
“It’s not fair if some work remotely!” (A classic Girardian complaint—masking envy as justice.)
By forcing RTO, they ritually sacrificed the remote worker to restore the old order.
3. The Sacred Myth: “Offices = Serious Business”
Every institution has sacred myths it defends at all costs. For corporations, the myth is: “Real work happens in offices.”
Remote work exposed this as a lie. Worse, it revealed that:
Middle managers exist to supervise, not produce.
Commercial real estate is a paper tiger.
The tax-optimized nomad is winning capitalism better than the CEO.
The backlash wasn’t about productivity—it was about protecting the myth.
Today, hybrid work is a compromise no one loves—the worst of both worlds. But the genie won’t go back in the bottle. The more companies enforce RTO, the more they reveal the system’s fragility.
If you have a scapegoat story, share it.