Distributed Work, Distributed Humanity

The isolation started before COVID.

Working in tech, you spend hours inside your own head. Debugging logic. Tracing execution paths. Running scenarios. The work happens in silence, even when you’re surrounded by people.

Then the pandemic arrived and silence became the default.

Terminal

I was deep in Web3 during lockdown. Building for clients who used aliases. Coordinating with anonymous contributors across time zones. Shipping code to institutional partners who operated behind layers of NDAs and intermediaries. The work was real. The people felt abstract.

Fear was everywhere. Death on the news every night. Markets swinging on greed and panic. And through it all, I sat at my desk, writing smart contracts.

Months into lockdown, I noticed something strange. I’d be at the grocery store, mask on, staying six feet from everyone, walking briskly through the aisles just to get out faster. Physically present but mentally running test cases. Tracing function calls while reaching for milk. Simulating edge cases while sanitizing my hands in the parking lot. My body was on autopilot, executing the safety protocols. My mind was still at the terminal.

It was surreal.

“I am here. I am all here. I am here for me. I am here with all of me.”

I’d say it quietly, like a chant, just to remind myself that reality existed outside the code.

When No One Wanted to Talk

When Crypto Winter hit, the isolation got worse.

Attention moved on. The hype dried up. The anonymous collaborators disappeared. The institutional clients wrapped up their R&D and went quiet. One by one, the projects I’d poured myself into faded.

I remember reaching out to well known projects and companies operating in Web3 space. Applying for roles well below my experience. Hearing nothing. I just wanted to stay in Web3.

I’d started in blockchain with naivety and conviction. Decentralization. Restoring power to individuals. Uplifting unbanked communities. That was the vision.

The reality was greed, loneliness, and 24/7 stress.

My business partners moved on. I stayed, trying to wrap up the work with whatever dignity I could manage. Business dropped to zero. I burned through savings. I turned down Web2 work that came up, all to pay my dues to the Web3 space. The space I’d committed to didn’t want me anymore. Not that it wanted anyone else anyway.

An old business friend and advisor once told me: “you’re smart, you’ve got everything to be successful except you’ve never failed before, and you’ll be incomplete without it.”

I sure found that lesson.

Home

My wife kept us afloat. She’d always supported my career, but during the Winter, she was the only reason I could keep going. We cut back on everything. She never wavered. She has and always will be the champion in all my success stories.

When things finally stabilized and I’d rebuilt enough consulting work in Web2 to breathe again, I took the family out for dinner. It had been a long time since we’d eaten at a restaurant.

My youngest looked around and said: “It feels like we’re on vacation because we get to go out to eat.”

That choked me up.

What I Can’t Shake

A year later, stablecoins were hot again. Crypto was pumping. The same companies that ignored my applications started reaching out. Suddenly everyone wanted someone with real Web3 experience.

I’ve long since recovered from that period. I’m more prepared this time. Older. More cautious about where I put my energy and who I build for.

But something else stayed with me. An observation I can’t shake.

We embraced distributed work. Remote teams. Async communication. Global collaboration. We celebrated the flexibility and the efficiency.

But somewhere along the way, we mistook distributed work for distributed humanity.

I notice it now in almost every professional interaction. The kindness is thinner. The patience is shorter. The awareness that there’s a human on the other end, a person with their own context and constraints and struggles, that awareness is fading.

We’re efficient. We’re productive. We’re also increasingly alone.

And now AI is accelerating everything.

Silence Once More

AI feels like another lockdown. Not the physical kind. The psychological kind.

The fear is quieter this time. It’s not on the news every night. But it’s there, in the conversations people aren’t having. In the anxiety that sits underneath the productivity hacks and the automation wins.

People aren’t sure what’s coming. They’re not sure what their work will look like in two years. They’re not sure what they’re worth anymore.

And just like the pandemic, we’re processing it alone. In our heads. At our desks. Running scenarios while the world moves around us on autopilot.

The first pandemic brought death and isolation. This one brings silence.

The silence of the oncoming train we can all see but don’t talk about.

I don’t have a clean ending for this. I’m still figuring it out. But I know this much: the technology will keep advancing whether we’re ready or not. The question is whether we advance with it as humans, or just as workers.

Distributed work was supposed to free us. It’s starting to feel like it scattered us.

How do you stay human when the work keeps pulling you inward?