One of the advantages of working at home is being able to stay up until all hours and watch the infomercials about the advantages of working at home. I never knew I had it so good.

The pitches are delivered by frantically happy smilers who have mastered the art of making modest boasts and egalitarian one-upmanship come out sounding just right. “I made $18,000 a month just from working at home!” claims one. “I made $9,000 a week working at home part-time!” claims another. We are never told what these lucky housebound stiffs do that is so profitable, but they are always pictured in exquisitely decorated rooms, pin-neat and ready for House Beautiful photographers to come in and start shooting, or else they are getting into or out of luxury cars in the driveway of a McMansion in what is clearly a gated community. The most over-the-top claim is delivered by a woman posed beside her swimming pool, who crows: “I made so much money working at home that I bought the home!”

These testimonials are not aimed at telecommuters who work a day or two at home and the rest of the week in their offices. Combined with the increasing number of articles on the subject in the print media, they seem to suggest that working exclusively at home is the latest thing. This intrigues me because I am not used to being avant-garde. Except for three years on a newspaper and one year as a slush-pile reader on one of the old true-confessions magazines, I have spent the past 40 years working at home, so I’m curious to know why what was once regarded with disapproval and even suspicion has become yet another American Dream.

At first glance it clashes with our national ideal of outgoing friendliness. Told that he must be a “people person” or perish, the average American should recoil at the isolation inherent in self-employment and immediately start worrying about two things: (1) being thought unfriendly, and (2) loneliness. Apparently not, though. These two cornerstones of our collective psyche don’t rate a word in any of the discussions of the subject that I’ve come across so far.

What does crop up with clocklike regularity is the word “stress,” specifically gridlock commuting. People don’t mind going to work; it’s getting to work that they dread. As one who was free to choose to stop driving in 1995, I have been living in a fool’s paradise, innocently amazed to discover how much Americans have come to hate driving. I never thought I’d see the day but it has happened. And it goes far to explain that tiny speck of revengeful glee detectable in the American subconscious over the possibility that Detroit automakers just might go bankrupt. We have come a long way from the Eisenhower years when our self-confident mantra proclaimed: “What is good for General Motors is good for America.” Now we have changed our tune to “Maybe it’s bad for America, but it serves General Motors right.”

Starting a home business in the midst of hard times is risky at best, but it has a well-documented history. In the Depression ’30s people started home beauty parlors, barber shops, and laundries out of desperation, but today’s work-at-home trend has its roots in bitter resentment. “Gold-watch loyalty,” once the pride of the American white-collar worker, is dead, and so is the Organization Man who personified it. In its place we now find distrust and often outright loathing of “the company.” Americans no longer like the people they work for, and regardless of your politics, their reasons are understandable: “First they took away my health care, then they took away my pension, and now they’re going to fire me, so to hell with them.”

Another factor inspiring the current crop of entrepreneurial shut-ins is the sudden, intense praise heaped on “mavericks” in Campaign ’08. When I started working at home, mavericks were out and conformists were in, but now our priorities have come full circle and the maverick is king of the hill. This, too, has a well-documented history, because the men who made America the economic wonder of the world were mavericks who worked at home. Call it the Tom Edison Complex, or the Henry Ford Complex, or name it after the Wright brothers. It doesn’t matter. The main ingredients of the legend are a man who’s a little “different,” who works at home or close by, in a shed out back or in the cellar, and whose wife can’t find her best stew pot because he needed it to mix something in to see if it would melt, and it did.

If enough people take up working at home, maybe one of them will end up inventing the better mousetrap that will save us from ourselves. Meanwhile, a few tips from one who has been there.

1. Get used to paying all of your Social Security taxes — that’s 15 percent because you don’t have an employer to chip in for seven-and-a-half.

2. Forget safety nets like unemployment compensation because as far as the government is concerned you were never employed in the first place, remember?

3. Be prepared for the good-hearted soul who knocks on your door and says, “I heard you never go out, so I came by to keep you company.”

4. When you do go out, even if it’s just to the sidewalk to retrieve a misaimed newspaper, make sure you do not look the way you normally do on a typical workday. Otherwise some passerby will say, “My God, what happened?” and offer to drive you to the emergency room.

5. Guard your psychological balance with regular screenings of You Can’t Take It with You. Remember, they all worked at home.

6. In Strangers When We Meet, Kirk Douglas, a work-at-home architect, is the only husband in the sea of suburban mothers at the school-bus stop. Kim Novak is the only Kim Novak in the sea of suburban mothers, so he asks her for a play date and she says yes. It’s still a man’s world (see #4).