In my team there are two others (there are a handful of teams in our company - all remote), sometimes we need to work together (e.g. to solve a bug) but most of the time we are all just working on our own tickets. If we were in an office we'd be the same - eyes down, headphones on.
You just need to trust people enough, to know that they are going to do, what they say they are going to do. Admittedly that's hard for some people (the trust and being trustworthy), which I'd say is why remote work often gets a bad rep.
You need the job & others around to stay in touch with the pace of what is happening and to keep up your friendships. And then having a quiet place to go, surrounded by nature is also vital.
The challenge is that I was trying to soften the remote aspect by working from home more often, but then caught significant flack from my managers that "it kills teamwork." The most frustrating thing about it all is that I, as a Data Scientist, work on a lot of "skunkworks" types of projects where I spend almost zero time collaborating with others.
The challenge is finding some of the freelance or fully remote jobs for data science work.
The article talks about the flexibility of his lifestyle: "instead of following a fixed plan, I get inspired by random ideas: When the waves are great, I go surfing. When it’s chill and fresh, I work. When it’s hot, I go for a swim." ... which sounds lovely, but I can't see how that works with a full-time job, to be honest.
There are, of course, freelance jobs you can do where you have a task to do and a deadline and (hopefully) not too much real-time conversation required... but it may be hard to get enough of that work to support yourself.