Work. Today, Tomorrow and Beyond

So this will be a stream of consciousness post while my brain goes in all different directions but I thought I would type it out and see what you guys think.  To start on a personal note, over the past couple years my wife has been very vocal about moving.  I live in southern California, I was born and raised here, went to school here, I work here, my friends are here, I've been pretty much anchored here my whole life.  My wife grew up in the midwest and only came to CA for work so she's not as tied to the area as I am.  At the moment I live in a town house with the wife and two kids and this town house gets smaller by the day.  Naturally the logical solution would be to move but...move where?  Into another house that we can't afford?  Into an apartment that's smaller than what we have now?  Real estate/rental prices are absurd all over the country and it's even more crazy here.  The next logical solution, for my wife that is, is just to move somewhere that's not California.  Anywhere.  And no matter where we move it will almost certainly be an upgrade.  We each have family all over the country and personally I don't mind living in a new place.  My only main concern is my job and while I've been working remotely or hybrid for the past 3 1/2 years I'm not sure how easy I'll find remote work if I were to head out of state.  I'm sure I would find something but the fear is not being able to provide or being forced to do something different.  First world problems I know but concerns nonetheless.

This dilemma has made me think of work on the whole.  One of the side effects of this pandemic is that it has really blown the lid off of whether people need to come into an office for 40-50 hours a week.  People have found themselves to be productive at home and at least in Los Angeles they've gotten quite used to not sitting in traffic for an hour to and from work.  They like working on their own terms, whether that means logging off at 4:00pm when work is finished or following up on emails at 9:00pm.  They like not having to shell out $20 a day on lunch or being forced to stay after work for a dumb meeting.  Naturally there's been a lot of pushback to this, people calling remote/hybrid workers 'lazy' and 'entitled' and 'not wanting to be team players.'  I've noticed though that all the people who are making these accusations are older.  They're in their 50s, 60s or older.  They have their homes, their retirements, their vacation time, their kids are out of school, they're used to the way things were done when they were coming up the ladder.  They complain how millennials and Gen X-ers aren't doing the things they did.  They aren't buying real estate, they aren't getting married or having kids and conveniently ignore the fact that it's much, much more difficult to do any of those things these days.  It's the modern version of the 'kids these days' argument.  As as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, a lot of people I know have split from California so they can do these things, so they can afford a house and therefore get married and have the kids, something that's difficult to do due to the enormously high cost of living in some of these big cities.  And what's the baby boomer response?  'No, you can't do that, you have to live in these big cities and go to work and sit in traffic and do all these things that you really don't need to do anymore.'  I have my own beefs with the people of my generation but the response to a pretty horrid state of affairs that's been dumped on them, from the great recession to cost of living to student loans, isn't one of them.  People are reacting in order to better themselves, better their physical and mental health, better their quality of life, better the lives of their families, and they use technology to their advantage to pursue their own goals.  

I'm pretty pro-remote working and admittedly it's for selfish reasons.  I want to work remotely so I can up my quality of life and those in my family.  If people want to work hybrid then they should get that opportunity.  But the idea of 'everybody needs to sit in traffic, slog into work and chain themselves to their desks' seems to be antiquated and there's definitely a push to make that happen again from the CEOs and the publications they own (how many bullshit articles are published each day with bullshit headlines like 'sleeping in your cubicle is actually good for your mental health, bullshit studies find').  Granted not all work can or should be remote or hybrid.  Teaching for example, service jobs or healthcare and the like.  The benefits to those jobs though is that you can do them anywhere, you aren't planted in one location.  Other jobs are and if remote work can let them life a better life elsewhere, why is that a problem?  Anyways, I'm sure there's a lot I missed but I'm blowing off steam.  What do you guys think?  Disagree wholeheartedly?  Trying to do the same for yourselves?  Where do you sit on this kinda thing?