💪 Remote work is up 4x since 2019

Welcome to the Freaking Nomads Newsletter, your weekly dose of stories, insights, tools, and opportunities for digital nomads and remote workers building a life without borders.

Hey Freaking Nomads,

My first nomad trip happened in the middle of the pandemic.

Which means that for basically my whole nomad life, someone has been telling me remote work is a temporary glitch. Enjoy it while it lasts. The office is coming back for all of us.

So when Business Insider ran a piece this month on the long-term effects of remote work, I read the headline twice.

“More babies, more workers, way more AI.”

Not exactly the obituary I was promised.

The babies part first, because it surprised me the most. Stanford economist Nick Bloom (pretty much the person when it comes to remote work data) estimates working from home has pushed fertility up about 5% in the US and Northern Europe. In couples where both partners work from home at least one day a week, women have on average 0.32 more children than in couples where neither does.

Fewer commutes, more school pickups, more time at home. It makes sense when you think about it.

The workers part is the one that got me a bit emotional, if I’m honest. Labor force participation among Americans with disabilities is up more than 30% since 2020, a record, and researchers link it largely to remote and flexible work. These are people a daily commute had basically locked out.

Zoom out and it’s the same story. Remote work now makes up about a quarter of all paid workdays in the US, roughly 4x what it was before the pandemic. And 34.9% of full-time workers did some work from home on an average day in 2025, close to the all-time high. Despite every single return-to-office mandate. Bloom has data going back to 1965, and working from home has been doubling roughly every 15 years.

So no, remote work isn’t dying. It’s actually winning regardless of mainstream bad press.

The AI part is where it gets more complicated. Bloom argues the shift to remote is what made AI adoption so fast at work (we all got used to recording every call, and now AI writes the notes). But it also means the most repetitive remote jobs are the easiest to automate.

My takeaway: remote work is here to stay, but the kind of remote job that lasts is changing. The ones that stick are the ones where you bring judgment, taste, and relationships.

If you’re looking for one of those jobs right now, I know the search can be exhausting. Half the “remote” listings out there turn out to be remote-ish once you read the small print.

It’s one of the reasons we keep Remote Nomad Jobs going, and why every role on it is fully remote. It might be a good place to start.

So next time someone tells you to enjoy remote work while it lasts, forward them this email. Or just smile and keep living your location-independent life!

I’m curious, has anyone tried to pull you back into an office this year? How did it go? Hit reply and tell me.

Until next week,

Luca

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For a long time, my VPN spent more time switched off than on.

I know, I know. I work from cafés and coworking spaces most days, so I should be using one. But every time I connected, the internet decided I was a bot, with endless CAPTCHAs and several apps suddenly “unavailable in your region.”

Turns out most VPNs route you through big datacenter servers, and websites can spot those from a mile away.

Mysterium VPN is different. On top of regular datacenter IPs, it gives you residential IPs: real home connections shared by people around the world. So instead of looking like a VPN, you look like a person.

You can switch between the two depending on the day. Residential when you want to blend in, datacenter when you just need speed. There are 100+ countries to choose from, down to city level, and one account covers up to 15 devices.

Under the hood it’s all the stuff you’d expect from a serious VPN: WireGuard, a kill switch, DNS leak protection and a no-logs policy. The app code is also open source, which means you don’t have to just take their word for it. And it runs on basically everything: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, routers and browser extensions.

If your VPN keeps locking you out of the stuff you actually need, this is the one I’d try next.

Try Mysterium VPN →

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