The Bittersweet Mobility of Remote Work 

The mobility of remote workers’ lives can be easily imagined as romantic and carefree, with social media posts showing people working in nature or by the sea. Behind these Instagram-hit aesthetic pictures, my fieldwork in urban Shanghai reveals more complex life stories tied to this high mobility. I call this bittersweet: this mobility brings clear privileges and benefits, but it can also conflict with more conventional expectations of work practices and personal lifestyle. 

Mobility is often associated with more free time and leisure. Because remote work is uncommon in most enterprises in China, it remains a niche practice associated with privileges or novelty. This is particularly true with fully remote workers who can easily travel. In China, paid annual leave is relatively limited: five days for employees with 1–10 years of service, rising to ten or fifteen days with longer service, in addition to 13 statutory public-holiday days per year. This makes the possibility of remote work especially appealing among younger generations, who would take this chance to explore the world, maintain friendships in other locations beyond their home city, and pursue personal interests. 

Cindy is a 30-year-old female entrepreneur now working as an event organizer, AI instructor, and content creator. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she worked in Web3, a blockchain-based digital industry, as a fully remote worker. Always fascinated by travel, experiencing foreign cultures, and blending work with leisure, she sought a fully remote job. In her first year at the company, in 2024, she traveled a lot outside China. In 2024, Cindy was away from Shanghai almost every month and estimated that she spent roughly half of the year elsewhere. She spent extended time in her hometown, attended a comedy camp in Bali, attended a classmate’s wedding, and attended a summer camp in Europe. She spoke about that year with visible excitement.  

At the same time, the bitter side of mobility is also visible. Mobility can be unsustainable and highly dependent on work arrangements, rather than an inherent right. The second year into the job, Cindy’s company went downhill and cut expenses; Cindy was expected to do more work and had less time to travel. She also constantly worried while travelling that her boss might notice she was not in a conventional work environment and judge her performance because of this, as this is often an unwritten rule. Online meetings made her especially anxious because she could not risk revealing that she was working from somewhere other than home unless she had explicitly communicated this to her boss, which she rarely did. This is common among other interlocutors who constantly worry about a failed VPN, a computer breakdown, or a disconnected work chat while travelling, because they must maintain a consistent professional image and performance for their livelihood.  

The bittersweet nature of mobility also shows up in another interlocutor’s story. Liang enjoys his frequent trips to digital nomad hubs in China and other popular destinations in Southeast Asia, and he enjoys meeting new friends and having new experiences. Mobility goes hand in hand with his perspective on life, where he rejects the more conventional lifestyle his parents expected of him as a small-town Chinese man: a stable job, marriage, and children. In contrast, he wishes for a different lifestyle where he can “retire” from his current job at the age of 40—he runs his own small company and does one-man jobs as a freelancer—and switch to something he is genuinely interested in later in life, which Liang calls “the second phase of his life.” This contrasts with social expectations to be a reliable worker and husband who can consistently provide “financial value.” This clash therefore brings a bitter side: he argues with his parents and goes against a mainstream way of life. A similar bittersweetness also lies in his wider social relationships, where mobility lets him see the possibility of meeting potential dates and friends outside his upbringing and city of residence, while limiting the depth of the friendships he develops on these trips.  

For both Cindy and Liang, remote-work mobility creates new possibilities for travel, autonomy, and alternative ways of living, while remaining constrained by work demands, digital infrastructures, and social norms and expectations.