Working from Paradise. Paradise Lost?
Remote work gave us the freedom to work from almost anywhere. Then we discovered the slightly less romantic consequence: work can now follow us almost everywhere.
There was a time when going somewhere beautiful was an excellent excuse for not answering emails. Technology has solved that problem.
Today, the fantasy is familiar: laptop open somewhere between an infinity pool and the Mediterranean, one final video call before a swim, perhaps a coffee in a picturesque square after finishing the presentation. Work has escaped the office and apparently acquired much better taste in real estate.
Except that the numbers suggest something more interesting is happening. This is no longer a niche fantasy involving a handful of freelancers with suspiciously photogenic laptops. In the EU, around 23% of employed people could work from home at least sometimes in 2024, compared with 14.7% in 2019. The European Commission describes this as a structural change in the labour market — while also warning about the increasingly blurred boundary between professional and private life.
In other words, we have made enormous progress in solving the problem of where we can work. We may have been slightly less successful in solving the problem of when we should stop.
Paradise is becoming an employee benefit
Temporary working from abroad — often marketed under the now unavoidable label of “workation” — is rapidly moving from perk to expectation.
A 2024 PwC survey of 1,000 German employees whose jobs could theoretically be performed remotely found that 57% considered the possibility of working temporarily from abroad important when choosing an employer. More remarkably, 30% said they would reject a job offer if the company did not provide it. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, that rose to 45%. Meanwhile, 51% said their employer already permitted mobile working from abroad, for an average of 40.5 days per year, up from 30.3 days in the previous survey.
So yes, the demand is real.
But so is the comedy.
Among employees whose companies already offered the option, only about half actually understood the application process. Apparently we have reached a stage of civilisation in which employees may reject an employer for not allowing them to work from Mallorca, while remaining slightly unclear about how to ask permission to work from Mallorca.
Fraunhofer IAO reached a similarly complicated conclusion. Its study of 964 people, conducted between July 2023 and December 2024, found that 68% were familiar with the concept, but only 34% said their employer allowed it, and just one quarter had actually experienced it themselves. Among those who had, the results were positive: 65% reported higher motivation and 71% greater job satisfaction.
So paradise may indeed help.
It just needs IT support.
An extraordinary 97% of Fraunhofer respondents considered stable digital infrastructure essential, while 75% regarded access to nature as important for wellbeing. Almost half — 48% — identified approval procedures as a significant challenge, and 34% worried about unclear costs.
The perfect remote destination, therefore, requires sunshine, natural beauty, reliable fibre broadband, an ergonomic chair, HR approval and preferably somebody who understands international tax law.
Not quite the Instagram carousel.
A beach does not turn a job into a holiday
There is another conceptual problem with the whole idea: moving work somewhere enjoyable does not automatically make the work enjoyable.
If your calendar contains six meetings on Tuesday in Frankfurt, moving yourself to Tenerife may result principally in six meetings on Tuesday in Tenerife. The Atlantic will be magnificent. You will mostly see it between calls.
And evidence on hybrid work suggests that flexibility genuinely can improve work-life balance and productivity, but the benefits come with familiar costs: longer hours, weaker boundaries, fewer structured breaks and ergonomic problems when people work from unsuitable locations. Eurofound’s 2025 analysis makes the point rather less romantically than the travel industry does: flexibility works best when workers have autonomy and organisations have clear rules.
This matters because the most successful version of location-independent work is probably not the most spontaneous one.
It is the organised one.
People who do this well tend to know when they are working, where they will work, how good the internet is, whether they can take confidential calls, what time zone their colleagues occupy and what happens when the Wi-Fi disappears precisely three minutes before a client presentation.
Freedom, it turns out, requires an impressive amount of planning.
And these people are not necessarily backpackers
There is also a persistent problem with the image of the person doing all this.
The cultural stereotype remains young, lightly employed and permanently accompanied by a backpack. The data increasingly tell a different story.
MBO Partners estimates that 18.5 million Americans described themselves as digital nomads in 2025, around 12% of the US workforce and 153% more than in 2019. Even more interestingly, 11.2 million had traditional jobs, rather than working exclusively as freelancers or independent professionals.
Our own NOMAG research produces an even sharper warning against designing the entire remote-work economy around twenty-somethings hunting for cheap coworking desks. Among 1,056 international respondents interested in digital nomadism and Italy, only 4.8% were at the beginning of their careers; 69.2% were senior professionals, managers, entrepreneurs, executives or post-career, while 56.6% reported gross personal annual income of at least €60,000.
That changes the question considerably.
A senior manager spending six weeks working from Italy is not necessarily looking for a hammock, a communal kitchen and Friday-night networking drinks with twelve startup founders. They may simply want an excellent house, good connectivity, privacy and the ability to continue doing a serious job somewhere they would actually like to live.
Less “escape from civilisation”.
More civilisation with better weather.
Then the tax authorities enter paradise
And eventually, inevitably, somebody from compliance appears beside the swimming pool.
The seductive slogan “work from anywhere” was invented by marketing departments. Governments, tax authorities and social-security systems were built around the rather older assumption that people normally worked somewhere.
The conflict has become significant enough that the OECD updated its Model Tax Convention commentary in November 2025 specifically to address cross-border remote working and when an employee working abroad can contribute to creating a taxable presence for their employer. In broad terms, the new guidance says that working from a home in another country for less than half of total working time would not, by itself, normally create such a business presence; even above that level, factors such as whether the employer has a commercial reason for the work being carried out there matter.
That should not be confused with a universal “safe” number of days for the individual. There is no magical 183-day beach pass making tax, immigration, labour law and social security disappear. Different rules answer different questions, and bilateral treaties, residence, nationality, employment status and destination all matter.
Which explains another revealing 2025 MBO finding: 13% of digital nomads with traditional employment said their employer did not know they were nomadic, while another 18% said their company had no formal policy but their boss had informally approved the arrangement.
Nothing says “future of work” quite like international mobility governed by “my manager said it was probably fine”.
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question
The interesting debate, then, is no longer whether working from beautiful places is possible. Clearly it is.
Nor is it whether some people thrive doing it. Clearly they do.
The deeper question is what happens when technology eliminates the physical boundary that once separated work from the rest of life.
For some people, geographical flexibility means enormous freedom: spending longer periods abroad, being closer to family, learning another language, testing a future relocation or simply escaping February in Northern Europe. Those are substantial benefits, not lifestyle trivia.
But there is an opposite possibility.
If every destination becomes compatible with work, every destination can also become a workplace.
The beach no longer means holiday. It means excellent background for Zoom. The mountain house gains a second identity as a satellite office. A month in Spain becomes an opportunity to improve your Spanish — between meetings.
Perhaps this is why the distinction between travelling while working and actually taking a holiday deserves to survive.
We spent decades creating paid annual leave so people could occasionally stop working. Then we invented technology sufficiently advanced to allow them to keep working from the pool.
That is certainly innovation.
Whether it is progress is a more interesting question.
The real luxury of location independence may ultimately have very little to do with being able to open a laptop anywhere.
It may be having enough control over your life to decide when not to open it at all.