Remote work exposed how much of “work” is theater Remote work didn’t kill productivity. It killed performative busyness. The office isn’t just a place where work happens. It’s a stage where work is performed. When everyone is in the same building, you can confuse visibility with value. You can reward the person who looks busy, talks confidently in meetings, replies instantly, stays late, and is always “available.” None of that guarantees results. It just guarantees an audience. Remote work ripped the audience away. Suddenly output mattered more than posture. The job became harder to fake because nobody could see you “trying.” And that’s why so many managers panicked. Not because teams stopped delivering, but because their main tool was gone: surveillance disguised as culture. A shocking amount of office life is ritual. Status meetings that could be an email. Slides built to justify slides. Projects created to create projects. People trapped in a loop of coordination about coordination. It feels like productivity because it fills the calendar. But it’s mostly management proving it deserves to exist. When the rituals fade, you discover what work actually is: focused time, clear priorities, and enough autonomy to do the thing without constant interruption. And here’s the uncomfortable punchline: some roles were exposed as pure theater. If your job depends on being physically seen to feel real, maybe the job wasn’t real. Remote work didn’t break work. It revealed it. So the real debate isn’t “remote vs office.” It’s this: do we want systems that reward outcomes, or systems that reward obedience and visibility. Because forcing people back to the office to “fix culture” often just means restoring the stage.