Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
science.org
science.org
I only skimmed the paper, but I presume it is comparing remote workers to non-remote workers who also have gone through the same post-pandemic economic situation.
>Undoubtedly, there are potential alternative explanations for the differential deterioration in mental health among those in remotable jobs, such as the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (AI), political shifts, or lingering effects of the pandemic. Workers in AI-exposed occupations—which also tend to be more remotable—might plausibly show rising distress owing to job security concerns rather than remote work. To test this, we leveraged an AI occupational exposure index (21, 22). We found that the mental health effects load on remotability rather than AI exposure (table S20). Additionally, the time series changes in mental health coincide with the pandemic and not the rapid diffusion of AI following ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. Furthermore, we might expect the mental health effects of AI to be particularly large among those who recently lost their jobs, but instead we found more muted effects for the unemployed (fig. S5). Together, these findings suggest that remote work is a more plausible explanation for deteriorating mental health than generative AI during our study period.
not sure if that answers your question, but your question also seems kind of bad faith perfect v good rather than merits and rigor.
Thoroughly unreliable.
Homeschooled kids can be isolated more because they don't have the forcing function of mandatory group settings, but often there are other opportunities available for socialization beyond just the one normally-compulsory (and, often miserable) environment.
Similarly, remote work for the last near-decade for me has given me a lot more time to be engaged socially with my family and other local communities – time that used to be entirely lost to a long commute. My mental health is drastically better than when I was working in-office, largely because I don't have over an hour of traffic each way to deal with, and especially because I get to be engaged with my family more and be much closer and more involved with my kid than I would otherwise.
Also, those people asking the question you find weird were asking about the experiences and kind of socialization that they consider big deal and was not going on in that place.
Of course, I wouldn’t assume everyone in my shoes would have the same experience. But it definitely cemented my positive opinion about homeschooling generally.
Also being "over socialized" is not a thing. You can be introvert tired of social interactions, but I dont think that is what you mean. If that is the case ease up on kids.
I hear you. I grew up in the "homeschool evangelical separatist" bubble, where sending your kids to public school was seen as a sin. I know I still have some unconscious biases left over from that that I'm still working out, and having never been in the public school system myself, I can't speak from any experience there.
I mostly speak from the hearsay of friends/family who did go to public school, some of whom did both models and were generally unhappier (bullied, left unhelped by overburdened teachers) than when they were homeschooled.
My point was not that the unhappiness is a universal experience, but rather than the mandatory nature of repeatedly returning to the same place for school makes unhappiness, when present, inescapable. Thus, yes, there's socialization happening in those cases, but it's negative, and it's inescapable without major changes (like changing schools, which for many requires moving, given the high cost of private school).
>Also, those people asking the question you find weird were asking about the experiences and kind of socialization that they consider big deal and was not going on in that place.
This is the part where I think you're trying to speak to my experience from a place of assuming you have more knowledge about my life than I do. I know the conversations that happened with us as kids and with our parents. The assumption was that if you weren't around other kids in school, specifically, that you were missing something important that these other adults described as "socialization", but often couldn't actually define beyond just using that term without a good understanding of what it means.
As another commenter points out, "socialization" is different from "socializing"; it's an actual sociological "shaping" process (like how some environments can socialize children towards learning that you shouldn't steal, while other environments can socialize children towards learning that they should do whatever it takes to get ahead, including stealing). Socialization is a process, not a goal; it's how community norms and standards are instilled through both negative and positive reinforcement, but those community norms and standards (like "the biggest kid on the playground gets their way through threats", as in one family member's case) can be negative.
The adults asking these questions, when asked what they meant, could never articulate what they were afraid we wouldn't be socialized towards. Just that we "wouldn't be around other kids", which both wasn't a direction of socialization (but was instead a means of socialization) and was demonstrably untrue by the fact that these questions were being asked at soccer practice, at the playground, at the local YMCA, etc.
In fact, it forced me to go out seek friends in local communities like meetups and various clubs. I have a feeling that people who feel isolated due to WFH would be same people who don’t interact with anyone in the offices as well.
i am experiencing this from a different angle. i am shy in certain situations so i don't easily socialize. what helps me is forced/formalized socialization, like pair programming. forced in the sense that i don't have to ask someone to make it happen. (although asking gets easier as i get older)
so what makes me feel isolated is working alone on a task. the fact that there are dozens of other people around me doesn't help much if i can't talk to them all day unless i need help.
working from home doesn't make things much worse. but, it allows me to avoid social isolation through other means. the advantage of going out to seek friends is that you can choose where to go, and you can go to places that are more open to interaction than the people at work. still i would prefer work where i have to cooperate with others, and not just work on my tasks alone.
Please believe in yourself!
try to talk to people outside work
you mean like what i wrote?:
working from home doesn't make things much worse. but, it allows me to avoid social isolation through other means. the advantage of going out to seek friends is that you can choose where to go, and you can go to places that are more open to interaction than the people at work
As a fellow shy person, I feel the pain when someone basically just tells you to get over it.
But commercial real estate takes a hit and it is not good for investors. They should lead with this instead...
There have personally been times in my life where I’ve lost that bandaid (workplace, academic extracurricular activity, etc.) and thankfully I’ve usually been able to respond by realizing that I had a problem and proactively doing something about it.
Remote work (especially as I have been self employed) has definitely allowed me to spend more time with my children (and allowed me to home educate them!) but they are grown up (the younger one will start university this year), I have divorced and moved house so i do not automatically have the family and social network you have. It does not mean I am isolated, but it does mean its not automatic. I can imagine many people do slip into isolation.
Socially, there might be a benefit to local communities from more people engaging. AT long last a replacement for the role stay at home mum used to play in many communities?
This is reductive to the point of absurdity. Situational friends are still friends. How many of your elementary school friends are still your friends these days? High school? Summer camp? Heck college friends? Unless you're living in the same town with the same people, there's a good chance that most of them aren't anymore. Were these people also not your friends? When you leave that book club, when you stop showing up at the corner cafe, when you move out of the neighborhood, how many of those people will you still be spending time with 5 years later. For the ones that you aren't, were they also not really friends?
Friendship isn't a binary thing. Not every friend you make will help you bury a body, but not every friend or friendship needs to (or should) run that deep. And sure not everyone you're "friendly" with at work are friends, it's a spectrum. But situational friends are friends. People you bond with for a short while over a shared experience and then when life moves one or both of you on the friendship ends are still friends.
In my opinion I consider a friendship any relationship where no matter how long ago it ended or how long ago you last talked you wouldn't mind hearing from them again, even if it might only be awkward small talk. Old schoolmates, college roommates, military squadmates, and co-workers can all be friends. They can all be acquaintances too. But crucially the fact that you stopped talking at one point or stopped spending time together isn't the demarcating factor between the two.
It's been this way for years
> Work friends are not friends.
Some even married coworkers. New jobs but still married
In EU, even relatively good IT salaries are mediocre when you factor in monthly rental. A simple one-bed apartment can easily take 50% of your net income.
Having freedom to move, even within a particular country, allows reducing that 50% to something more sustainable.
Take for example Oxford. A typical rental will be around £1,600 pcm. The median pre-tax salary is around £50,000, which converts to around £3,100 net. So, the apartment is actually more than 50% of your net income. Some programming jobs will pay a bit more, but you get the idea.
Another example, in Barcelona, a median net salary is less than a median rental. IT will pay better, but expect to spend around 40% of your net salary. I could also bring up Stockholm or Copenhagen and, unless you are in very senior IT jobs, it's going to look very similar.
Obliviously, if you live in some small-ish 200k-500k non-touristic city away from the big metro areas, then CoL will be much less and your income will stretch much further and you might be better off financially, but then those cities also have a lot less to offer in terms culture, events, entertainment, along with fewer or even no work and socializing opportunities for SW devs as tech jobs concentrate only in the big metro areas.
So it depends on what you prioritize. Young single people tend to sacrifice savings, to live in big expensive cities for career and social opportunities, while people with families tend to do the opposite. But in general it's difficult to have your cake and eat it too unless you're very lucky.
Covid was an exception because it made "work from home" literal, as the isolation was the point.
Of course even in normal times, coworking spaces cost money and have to be available, so you might now have a situation where workers now have to pay extra to not be isolated. And not everyone can do or wants to do that.
Another angle - people don't know how to deal with isolation if not their work. Remote work has accelerated an aspect that we already knew existed. Social systems are tied ONLY around work which is not healthy.
In most other places, people will respond with their current activity, or their hobby or even religion or believe.
A lot of our culture revolves around work giving us meaning and satisfaction. And this is very obvious now due to recent layoffs and how people are affected in feeling/prospect because of this.
No, it's the opposite, in most places in the world, average people typically respond with their profession just as they always had in every coultre on the planet, from India to Bulgaria to North America from 2000 BC to 2026 AD. Are you a blacksmith, are you a priest, are you a teacher, are you a construction worker etc. In Europe many people's family names are literally the profession of their ancestors.
>In most other places, people will respond with their current activity, or their hobby or even religion or believe.
Again, the opposite, People identifying with their "current hobby" are typically snobby western white collar hippies, who now think their identity transcended beyond their profession due to the privileges of the wealth of their profession, and the social pressures of their politically correct society that views certain professions that generate wealth (like tech bros) with a certain stigma that might be a negative to society, so they they shy away from it and choose another identity not related to their profession.
It is seen as a polite form like "how's the weather", and answer like "just going to grab a snack", inviting others to join. Have worked with many people from different backgrounds due to an international/localization team and open source activities in Asia.
And the name argument in a lot of places was a forced naming. In the Netherlands they were sometimes based on profession, but also their location, or their parents/relationship. The names where a Napoleonic side effect; in 1811 he mandated that everyone in the Netherlands must adopt a surname. Before that, it was very unusual. Note: look for 'van' and what follows, as often it is not a profession.
Probably because Asia isn't much like "the west".
>Have worked with many people from different backgrounds due to an international/localization team and open source activities in Asia.
Well-off tech workers who travel to (or host) open source conferences around the world, are a selection bias of a niche within a niche, not representative of the customs and attitudes of the general population within their respective countries, same how football fans(hooligans) who travel abroad at games, also don't represent the average people of their respective countries.
as I said: a very Western way of answering, but you brought India into the mix too.
> Open Source Local people, not the expats or visitors. I have been a regional manager. Dealt with people from China, Japan, Cambodia, Laos, India, etc. Locals. You assume and limit a lot when I point out "different backgrounds".
Every day when I pick up my son, there is a middle eastern man (nationality not important) who asks the same question; and answers himself too as "waiting for my daughter". Westerners assume this means to ask about job. It isn't everywhere.
Common sense (and assumption) isn't as common, as the environment you grow up in influences this.
OTOH the earth is not flat.
I think that is mostly a US thing.
Being isolated in the way discussed is in my mind a process of reclamation to normal social relationships. At first it’s disorienting and hard. Over time; you adjust.
You're getting paid to be friends with your co-workers? Or are you being paid to work, and work, like many other situations where multiple people gather and share experiences and spend time together are also places that people tend to form friendships in. You had friends in school that you stopped maintaining the friendship when you stopped attending school together I'm sure. Were those people not actually your friends? How long does a "social interaction" have to last, and over what distances before it becomes a "friendship" instead of a "transactional relationship"? If it ever ends was it never a real friendship? It's certainly possible to view every relationship you build with people that you share circumstances with as transactional relationships, but that to me seems like a good way to never actually build a friendship with anyone.
That was always the case historically. Outside of family people mainly interacted and formed social the mainly with the people they worked with. There is nothing modern about that if anything we have more opportunities to met new people outside of your close these days.
One thing is less stability, people tend to form less life long bonds when they change jobs ever few years instead of working with the same people for 20-30 years
> people paid to be there aren’t your friends
Well children are forced to attend school, does that make you can’t make any friends there? Its not that different..
People have understood suburbs are designed for commuters since they first started popping up, this isn't like some bizarre thing that needs careful understanding. It would be like if people stopped using boats, everyone in Venice would be like "people who once used boats are now having trouble getting around town and the streets are too crowded. How curious."
I have so many ideas I feel my problem would be to forget about somes.
That is the real problem. I've been working from home for most of my career, but I also have friends (some i made while working, some from other common interests) and we meet at least every weekend.
When working from home, when 5pm hits, the first thing I want to do is get out of the house. I do lots of group activities, hiking, kayaking, cycling, pool, trivia, photography, etc.
When I have to go in to the office, when 5pm hits, all I want to do is go home. Once I'm home, I'm much less likely to leave.
I understand I'm a sample size of one. And even though several of my who work from home friends feel the same way, it's obvious I never meet the people who stay at home. But I'm curiious as to whether the people staying at home would go out if they worked in an office. Seems like that'd make most sense if you're hanging out with people you work with, which I don't do much. But I doubt there's a good sample size of people who've switched back and forth.
One of those results which is exactly what anyone paying attention would predict. I'm glad there's hard evidence.
There's beautiful views from my current office..but my job is a screen all day and having dim interior lighting versus direct sun fighting it out across my retinas means the effect is entirely lost on me.
I guess there is a cultural component to it too, or maybe I'm just that much disconnected from humanity. It's just hard for me to imagine that spending time alone would, in general, affect someone so much that they would begin to rely on drugs and other means of mental care. Maybe it has little to do with isolation in particular and the source of distress is simply the abrupt change in lifestyle. For example, forcing a person to socialize every day when they aren't used to it would put them in a similar state. I've lived alone for over a decade (since I was 19), and by far the biggest source of mental distress to me are interactions with people. I have never seen a psychologist in my life nor ever taken any mind-altering drugs. Remote work came and, thankfully, hasn't fully left, but I barely even remember the pandemic. Of course, it's just a personal experience, not a generalization.
The sad part is, this is going to be used to hurt workers everywhere! Come back to work for your own mental health.
They don't compare remote vs non-remote workers. They compare workers in job families that could be remote vs workers in job families that are unlikely to be remote. Their control group is nonsense, the pandemic affected people in different job families very differently.
The real effect is living alone or not.
Also, it conflates mental health utilization with mental health status. It makes it seem like not taking antidepressants means you aren't depressed. Maybe the actual lesson is that people in remote-capable jobs have better insurance and time to get antidepressants. And those that aren't, get to suffer with their bad mental health.
This paper says absolutely nothing about the impact of remote work on workers. Zero.
It is valuable though to point out that loneliness is a real issue and remote work could exacerbate that.
For my part, being forced to sit in an open office with chatter all around me is much worse for my mental health than the peace and quiet of my own home.
Get your socialization needs met in an environment where we ask all the people around you to rate your performance and determine whether your salary should continue to be paid.
It does take some work to get a solid social life going though.
You simply can't end an abstract/"editor's summary" with this kind of phrase when your whole field for decades has claimed seeking care and treatment is encouraged and should be viewed as positive. Although I understand they're used as proxy measurements, I can't take seriously a publication so careless in how it expresses itself.
* Federal Reserve Bank of New York
* Department of Economics, University of Virginia
* Department of Economics, Harvard University
They're not doing anything to help the reputation of economics and economists.
The only time I leave the house is gym, to take the kids somewhere, grocery shopping or similar. I have forgotten how to even pretend to care when people speak to me, they are all npcs to me. I don’t remember anyone’s name. To be clear this is a personal flaw due to my isolation, not anything to do with them.
It’s been like this for so long that I have no desire to change, it’s simply the way things are now. When I take the kids to sports my wife asks if I interacted with the other parents and Im not sure why or even how I would do that.
I have the gym though which I love, headphones on, music up and grind, alone in the crowd.
Personally I enjoy working remotely and value time spent alone, but the data looks interesting
For some people, more social isolation is OK. For others, not so OK. YMMV .
I personally think that more socializing is better, if it's with people who I become better by being around. The tough part is knowing who's good for me, and how I can find them.
Preferring something doesn't mean it's good for you.
Maybe WFH allows folks to be more social with the people they want, but the abstract says that they socialise less overall, and are more socially isolated.
[citation needed]
The first is enjoying the company of friends, while the second is a sociological process of internalizing cultural norms and appropriate behavior. How to behave in a group, how to approach a stranger, how to respond to someone who irritates you, etc.
That may well be true for some extroverted people, yes; it is 100% absolutely not true for "all people". You force me to interact with people I haven't chosen and there's a reasonably high probability that I'll subsequently choose to never interact with you again.[0]
> People interacting with different people are less afraid of the world, more trusting etc.
My childhood was largely interaction with people I didn't choose[1] and, nope, I am absolutely not "more trusting" as a result.
> Clustering into echochambers is bad for society as a whole.
Citation needed for that one.
[0] There is a slim chance that the people I haven't chosen to interact with turn out to be reasonable decent people who I don't annoy and, more importantly, don't annoy me.
[1] A bunch of enforced house moves and a paucity of decent locals at each new house/school.
It's true for some of us introverted people as well, especially given that without some "reason" to get together, some of us might never interact with another person ever.
Sure, it's very easy to just "not feel like it" and stay home alone for a week at a time. But I've found that this is usually a reaction to being forced into some situation I don't particularly enjoy, like being compressed like a sardine twice a day on my way to a noisy office where I can't get anything done.
Working from home has actually made me much more social. I'm not drained and annoyed with people at the end of the workday, so I have energy to attend social activities. And, paradoxically, I'm even somewhat closer to people at work: now that I don't have to hear them all day long, I'm much more open to actually interacting with them when I do see them.
Current reality? Of course its more on the (social)media level. Significant proportions of the society in many countries seem to be living in alternate realities.
Real life echo chambers reinforce that as well if you only interact with people with similar lifestyles and worldviews.
> That may well be true for some extroverted people, yes
I would certainly see that’s the case for the overwhelming majority people (certainly not for everyone, though)
I'm not sure that's a truism. But we'll have to agree to disagree here.
Certainly the reverse (anti-echo chambers?) isn't true (which casts doubt on the original statement, for me): cf current US Republicans politicians who constantly interact with people that have different lifestyles and worldviews[0] without it having the slightest effect on their own worldview.
See also: anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, and, extreme[1] religious people; all of whom cannot fail to mix with people of opposing views nearly every day without it changing their minds.
[0] As a small example, they mingle, have lunch, holiday, serve on committees with, etc., their Democrat colleagues all the time and yet not a shred of sanity rubs off on them.
[1] The more culty end of the spectrum; you know the ones.
I had a manager once go thorough one of my slack conversations and go line by line with how I could rephrase things with softer corporate jargon.
There's books on leadership, books like crucial conversations, books on managing up. The industry is obsessed with staff engineers now and there's on that and the differentiator in that role is getting people to do things.
If you really don't deal with that, let me know where I can send a resume I'd love to work with normal people.
The other completely normal expectation is that you will limit general chit chat, unless you are at unusually slacky workplace.
I think the problem is that "being social with" some group isn't always as easy as it seems. Work and family are sort of two "default" groups that you automatically have access to (even if those groups may not always be fitting or rewarding).
For other social groups, you have to invest effort yourself, and that effort can be a lot: Finding communities in the first place, making contact, staying engaged, being socially fluent enough that others want to keep contact, etc etc.
That's a lot of work and also requires some skill (and even luck sometimes). Not everyone may be willing or able to put in that work.
(Specifically for work environments, I wonder if the "shared misery" aspect might also play a role: In a work environment, everyone knows that you're not here for fun - paradoxically, that might make some social interactions easier, because you can stop interacting without sending a negative message. In contrast, in voluntary activities, this is harder, because the basic expectation is that you want to be there. So talking about interactions that didn't work well socially might be harder.)
To survive wfh you need to concentrate heavily on early morning sunlight, walks throughout the day, yoga, acupuncture, blue light glasses at night time, major attempts to get out and socialize outside of work, creating a safe place in your home for working so you don't mix them together, get out in nature, tend to a garden otherwise aka try really hard not to work after hours and offset the toxicity of wfh.
Stress compounds and hides. Our monkey brains are dumb with long term issues and can easily be masked by substances.
Care to share more on what's worked well for you?
I literally don’t know anyone outside of my household and I’m completely fine with it. It’s just how things are now.
I have the gym and that’s enough
¯\(ツ)/¯ works for me!
> blue light glasses at night time
Slowly cooking yourself isn't obvious until it's obvious.
In the US, it already happens to retired people; especially men (my age). I know, for myself, that I'm fortunate as hell to participate in an organization that forces me to interact, fairly intimately, with others, on an almost daily basis.
All that said, there's also strong interests, that want the results to skew one way or another, and we already know that most research needs to be looked at, with a jaundiced eye (not new -people have been throwing research for decades).
> I'm fortunate as hell to participate in an organization that forces me to interact, fairly intimately, with others, on an almost daily basis.
Been at it for over 45 years.
This _can_ also happen in IT and tech, however I think it's more of an issue in all the non-IT spaces that _also_ went remote due to the pandemic.
IT tends to favor a specific cluster of brain wiring that is more likely to strive in such environments, which I think often skews our perspective on things.
Employee management is just hard. At least if you actually try that is.
If you just go with "lol RTO all the way" or "lol remote work all the way", you do not have much work at all. Just likely unhappy employees.
Hyperscaling (and scale in general) unfortunately sets incentives in ways that make good employee management less likely to happen. Oh well.
And they also permit people with kids to participate.
If I don’t plan something social end of day, it can feel like a lonely existence.
Occasionally I will go into office and sometimes it leads to good conversations with people outside of my team, which is nice. I do tend to skip it though since it requires effort and planning.
For those looking for ideas, do a sport in evening after work. Or small group fitness classes, maybe you will see a regular you connect with. Dance and art classes are same and mentally relaxing.
I will say the 1hr evening class doesn’t feel enough. I’ve thought about getting a dog many times.
At the same time, a person working in an office has the illusion of social activity.
Just because a person works in an office doesn't mean they're more well adjusted socially, or more active.
Just because a person works remotely doesn't mean they're a recluse.
Life requires effort and being engaged. Though as a remote worker myself, I do appreciate the tendency to not make an effort. However, when I do make an effort, the effort is easier and the reward greater than social activities that'd be available during an office job.
The existence of families and housemates reveals this to be a false dichotomy: either you're spending in-office time with coworkers or you don't like being around any people, seems to be the claim.
But I do agree that the claim being made is the false dichotomy you point out
This is so spot on.
I would like to see stats for introverts who do not have mental health issues. Those living alone and working from home probably have the best outcomes across the board.
My intention for using that specific language was less with the implied language of introvert/extrovert, and was more intended to point out how simply going to an office is not enough to qualify as "socialization". Compulsory attendance in exchange for financial gain isn't a great example of voluntary socialization....
To an extreme, reclusion rids one of the input from living life around.
Need input and reflection to be an upward spiral, otherwise input without reflection, or reflection without new input trends towards putting a person into a downward spiral.
This may turn out to be a huge wake-up call, perhaps even for the best. People may start going back to a proper 9-to-5, closing their laptops at the end of the day and actually living their lives. Let's hope that the next time the market goes crazy, we remember these lessons - though I'm very doubtful.
About the most absurd thing is twisting the people who socialize in office building for fun into grinding hard workers.
So, I have enough experience to go meh on this rationalization too. Nah, you can have trust, alliances and human relationships without moving all the hobby and relax time to work. Not just "can" in an abstract theoretical term, but they simply happen.
You can design the workplace so that the above is impossible, but that is the deliberate choice. The idea that you need to spend 12 hours a day in the workplace to be liked is a product of kind of management trying to create a cultish culture. Sometimes because they are lonely, sometimes because the frauds they want to happen are easier that way. But, it is not something that becomes a necessity in healthy workplace with various people. And people who are capable to keep relationships dont need that to have them.
And conversely, people with issue in the relationship department need them as a clutch, but then pretend it is necessary for work.
I'm not talking about doing all your hobbies in the office and staying 4 hours more than your official hours just shmoozing every day.
Working effectively with people requires some level of personal connection, whether that's shared lunches, chatting over coffee etc. Some just want to plug their earbud in and clock out at 5, and insist to only spend time by typing code in the IDE. I'm saying that this won't work, no matter how they complain online. Humans are social, you have to deal with it.
May just be a person by person thing though, not saying what you have is bad per say.
Very rarely did anything actually get discussed of any meaning. Ive always found them to end up just being another annoying meeting in my calendar.
And no, not all conversations were easy. The hardest for me was with my associates in an active warzone.
I often heard associates complain that their previous manager didn't have effective talk; mostly just asked "how was your weekend". Associates care you understand them, if they have difficulty with the monetary discussion you help them with this too, etc. for me, their growth helps building the team, and the overall well being influences that!
We also have a team-wide monthly "happy hour" where we bring one discussion point each, usually an interesting article. They're a lot of fun, and I appreciate my colleagues in a much more rich way than I would have otherwise.
It's so obviously important that we maintain semblance of community through live conversation in remote workplaces. I spend more time "with" my remote colleagues than I do with anyone else in my life, including my wife. The human brain does not separate cleanly into "colleagues" and "friends".
I found it more important to emphasize trust, and allow them to handle these conversations/attendance If they couldn't, that's fine. Outside factors can disrupt this, ... So I wouldn't complain if there was a no show once in a while.
We had a monthly tea(m)time to share tea and talk about anything, hobby topic or something technical. It was fun to see what people do with 3d printers, especially those that had no time/space for this.
The happy hours are only an hour a month during work hours, where we talk about stuff everyone on the team is interested in, like economics, culture and politics. Most people seem engaged and bring interesting stuff to talk about.
We also do a more formal "data blitz" in our ML team labs, where folks bring vaguely data-related topic to talk about for 10 minutes, but that requires a little prep. Those are always fun. We've had people rating diaper brands and showing their marathon training schedules.
It's not like we try to fill the 30 mins, but I think we all crave a little connection with our colleagues, so make use of the time to catch up. I've worked with these same team members for over 3 years, so we are all a little invested in each others' lives by now. Obviously I'm not going to force a new team member to divulge everything about their lives, or go through my weekend in detail unless they're actually interested in chatting. It's pretty clear when someone just wants to get on with their work, rather than chat.
I get that a lot of people need this. I don’t need my work to provide a social life, I’d rather get my shit done and leave. When I socialize in a work capacity I’m doing it because it helps me do my job better, not because I want to
There's no consequence to skipping the happy hour but everyone shows when they can and is engaged and contributes to the conversation. We often talk about culture, politics, economics other topics most folks have a general interest in.
> I don’t need my work to provide a social life
Fair, not everyone sees work as a community, but many do. Remote culture is hard to build but it needs to allow for folks who still need human connection in their workplace.
Covid was a breeze because my wife works from home and I have two kids. So I'm not lacking for someone to interact with. And lest I fall into the trap of thinking that it's also because I'm just past 50 now, I occasionally get proof that I'd be just as screwed today. Like the last couple days -- my wife went on a trip for a few days, and my kids are in high school, so I have had the entire work day to myself. If it were all meetings, I'd probably be okay. But Thursday and Friday were both quiet, no meetings, just getting stuff done. And I found myself whistling, singing, making noise, and getting a little punchy by the end of the day when the kids came home.
Some people just aren't cut out to be isolated. People might accuse me of seeming like a loner, and I kind-of-sort-of am in a way, but I do need social interaction pretty regularly.
One thing I love about WFH is that I have more time to be friends with people I want to be friends with on my terms. Work colleagues can remain colleagues.
Some people will have different struggles and deal with it differently, for sure. It’s probably not for everyone. It’s definitely for some people.
I think to them, they are totally right that remote work leaves them with enough energy for them to do this, and they are happier for it. What I'm concerned with is the people who do not naturally have such a drive to seek this out, but for whom social activities would be equally important whether they realize it or not.
Personally I find the friction of leaving the house and making new friends in a city I'm not from difficult to overcome, and in this case I love having an easy way to meet people (and in some cases make some of my longest lasting connections) by simply going to the office 2-3 days a week.
> Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work
Remote work is not for everyone so if you are someone who predominantly makes their social connections in an office being forced to work remotely will have an impact.
However I think a lot who choose to work remotely have friends outside of work. I know this study focuses on those who live alone but it may also be very different for those who live with a partner/family/friends.
Anecdotally I have found that people who want social interaction in the office push for everyone in the office (rather selfishly in my opinion) because without enough people in - for example in a hybrid model - they don’t get the same kick.
HN: Preposterous!
I have a partner that I live with but he often works long hours in person so I can sympathize with someone living alone.
With remote work, I hated the feeling of having every human interaction be very transactional all day. As a result, I felt more pressure to make plans during the weekday with remote counterbalance how completely some days felt.
In the office, you'd usually have some friendly chatter, running into people in the hallway, getting a snack, or waiting for a meeting to start. And most of the time, that was more than enough to not feel a sense of malaise.
Lack of social interaction has not been a problem, I either had them digitally and later on, my wife works from home with me.
No office, thanks.
I think remote work is amazing if you already have a strong social network outside of work, but if you don't, then it's "in order to make friends, you need to have friends".
Do you have a hobby ? Would you do volunteer work ?
Not knowing people is a solvable problem. Whether you like these people is another one, but that comes down to where you chose to live, not remote work or not.
I don't know whom they were asking. If they had come to me, I'd have said 'hell yeah' - make remote work a legal requirement'.
When the city of San Francisco is handing out tax breaks to companies for forcing RTO in shitty Bay Area infrastructure and Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism, it’s hard to not take these findings with a grain of salt
Even if true, I am positive the solution isn’t to stuff people back into offices and rob them of the little leverage they got during covid
I missed that. Deets?
No dress-code, commuting, open space offices, exhausting small-talk or social masking required.
Love it.
And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.
The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.
America is a pill-popping nation.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/americans-will-spend...
And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...
What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.
How can you conclude this:
"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."
Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.
How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?
I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.
And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.
But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.
Going out for a walk alone to the beach or the mountains was forbidden. It was so ridiculous. And of course I went out anyway and it was essential for my health and sanity.
I have been working from home for a long time. It gives me freedom. I don't have to waste hours moving most of the time, and time with friends and family that I choose.
When I worked in an office I had to spend one hour moving in and one moving out each day.
This study is equivalent to the drugs study done on caged rats. The caged rats being humans during pandemic.
It was discovered later that if you let the rats freedom and the ability to socialise they did not get as anxious as when caged and they did not look for drugs for escaping their miserable lives.
I absolutely hate bad science like this. No, your results suggest that remote work IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE 2020s substantially…
The USA is a famously lonely country already and it is incredibly car-oriented culture. And it wasn’t always like this and it might not always be like this. Those are obvious confounding factors that should not be ignored and the fact that the reviewers for such a high profile publication let the authors write a conclusion that doesn’t mention the huge risk to validity is extremely annoying.
Who's more likely to choose a job that can be done from home? People who already have reasons they'd rather not go out and spend their entire day around other people. How do you control for all those reasons?
--Sartre
Every degradation in health (physical) I've had, I can trace it to a day at the office. I didn't know it was affecting me so badly, because back in the day, what else was the alternative? a bad day at work was the cause of so much, even things like starting drinking again, smoking again, not getting enough sleep, actual chronic disease,etc...
And guess what else, I don't spend so much of my time wearing myself out commuting, but at the same time I am now interacting with more people (although not as much) on average than before.
WFH seems like a "new" thing humans are doing, and now shoddy science like this is trying to confirmation-bias their way into pleasing their benefactors. however, consider how rural people lived historically. Not a whole lot of "commuting" to the farm. You don't interact with people outside of your household unless you went to market in the nearby town. Working indoors and being sedentary is new, but not working from home (think: farm, tradesman's shop at their house, etc..).
What is extremely unnatural is clobbering random people in an "open area" "office". even in as recently as the 90s, when you worked from the office, you had an actual office to work out of!!
Not being able to filter interactions, and spending so much of your time commuting and recovering from tiring IRL interactions and a day at the office that you make no friends or associations outside of work: that's what has already caused the loneliness epidemic before covid or wfh became a thing.
These ghouls revel in that, it stokes their ego to see underling looking busy.
I swear, there has to be some sort of reckoning coming, things can't be sustained with this sort of prevalent malice by those in power (this minor topic is just one straw on the camel's back).
Coerced association and socialization is worse than loneliness. People literally kill themselves because of workplace bullying. Those bullies really don't like it when you're not there in person to manipulate and torment.
I would REALLY love it if there was a study on this instead, why are so many people angels WFH but demons in person? is it "monkey brain" mechanics and instincts kicking in that don't when you're remote?
Sentences like this just make my eyes roll. 'Workers' have agency to make judgement on what has a positive and what has a negative effect on their well being.
Personally not having to commute led to me being able to attend meetup groups in the evenings where I formed an amazing group of friends and met my current partner. It had such a massively positive impact on my well-being.
> those in remotable jobs spent an additional 1.1 waking hours alone relative to those in nonremotable jobs
Yeah, it's called commuting time, we don't have to do it when we're remote. That doesn't mean we need to go out and play football with that extra hour. We can also use it to relax.
> Moreover, remotable workers experienced a 1.0 pp (72.2%) relative increase in the share of days with no human contact: no idle chitchat with a barista, no hello from a co-worker, no smile from a passerby at the grocery store
If you're in traffic for an hour a day, you're not getting smiles from people at the grocery store either. You are however probably very frustrated with the traffic or annoying people on the bus.
> Mental distress rose precipitously for those who were in remotable jobs, for whom time alone ballooned. For those in nonremotable jobs, mental distress ticked up only marginally vis-à-vis preexisting trends
They're leading the witness by projecting that it's time alone that caused the additional mental distress (and no mention of other factors). They also completely skip over the fact that the remotable and non-remotable mental distress are now at parity. Everyone is miserable now, but apparently this is only noteworthy because we expect remote workers to be much happier? So, wait - remote work people were happier? And now they're not? They just proved it's not remote work at fault.
So I just asked Gemini to analyze the paper, and it found some big flaws:
- "We compared postpandemic changes in isolation and mental health for workers in jobs amenable to remote work (“remotable” jobs; for example, software engineering and marketing) to changes among people in nonremotable jobs (such as mechanical engineering and nursing)" - in other words, they did not actually check if anyone in these jobs was working remotely. They compared job categories. They did not compare remote workers to non-remote workers. This is an analysis of the depression of software developers vs the depression of mechanics.
- "During this exact window, the tech, finance, and corporate sectors experienced massive waves of layoffs, "efficiency" mandates, and economic anxiety. The increased mental distress measured in the "remotable" cohort could easily be a reaction to job insecurity and macroeconomic stressors rather than social isolation. Conversely, non-remotable workers (like healthcare and retail workers) experienced their most intense, traumatic burnout during the acute pandemic phase" - There were mass tech layoffs in 2022-2024, and those people who got laid off were more depressed.
- "Psychological literature draws a hard line between objective isolation (solitude/time spent alone) and subjective isolation (loneliness). Increased time spent alone does not uniformly equal distress. For many workers, particularly introverts or neurodivergent individuals, working alone reduces the overstimulation and distress caused by open-plan offices."* - Remote workers are more likely to be introverts, and introverts like alone time.
- "The post-2020 era saw a massive boom in the availability of telehealth psychiatry and therapy. Workers in "remotable" jobs are vastly more likely to have high-quality corporate health insurance and the daytime flexibility to attend a midday virtual therapy session." - A lot of us got BetterHelp access through our insurance and jobs after the pandemic, and this is partly why there was more use of mental health services.