I don't understand how the research methodology used in the article supports this conclusion. How did they rule out the possibility that the post-pandemic economic situation has had a greater impact on these jobs, leading to greater stress? How did they we rule out that remote work has led to greater range of outsourcing, resulting in more intense competition for these jobs, rather than that caused by
the lack of social contact? Or is it simply because the rapid development of AI in the research period has had a greater impact on these jobs, which is an obvious possibility?
Haven't been in an office since the start of COVID. Between being lucky enough to have a great coliving setup with dope housemates, and now having access to co-working cafes in Taipei that have genuine communities, I feel more social than ever with more meaningful connections. I still commute to the cafes, for me remote working is about not having to be tied to a geographic spot in order to keep my source of income, not isolating at home.
This reminds me of growing up as a homeschooled kid and hearing people ask my parents "but how will they socialize?", generally while we were at the youth soccer field or at the playground or somewhere else that the irony should have caught their attention.
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.
I wasn’t homeschooled but I have been working from home for good part of last two decades. And I have not felt any negative effects of it.
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.
Homeschooled people just assume others must be unhappy in those places where they dont go, but that is not the case and not shown in statistics.
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.
> Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.
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.
Yeah, although I suspect the study isn't taking account major economic factors involving ai and remote work jobs - the fact is society is built around jobs you commute to and it takes a little bit of time for society to change.
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."
In most cultures "what do you do" is the first question that people ask, but answered with their job position in most Western countries.
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.
>In most cultures "what do you do" is the first question that people will answer with their job position in most Western countries.
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.
I am in Asia, and do not experience that 'snobby western white collar' attitude here.
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.
>I am in Asia, and do not experience that 'snobby western white collar' attitude here.
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 open source conferences around the world are a selection bias of a niche of a niche, not representative of the customs and attitudes of their respective countries, smae 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.
The people paid to be there aren’t your friends. They’re nominally “coworkers,” which is not a social relationship but a transactional one. The fact we’ve as a society replaced human social interaction with people acting a work persona for money is more sad than being lonely - this should be the state that is considered lonely.
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.
My experience could not be more different. I’ve made life long friends at work, especially when I was working for smaller firms. I don’t think those relationships are transactional.
> After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable jobs spent more time working alone and avoided social activities with their friends, remaining more isolated both during and after work. This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.
One of those results which is exactly what anyone paying attention would predict. I'm glad there's hard evidence.
>This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.
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.
I'm sure this is true. Also true is the mental distress I experience having to work in an crazy noisy open office space. Give me an actual office, and I'll go there.
An actual office is not even that expensive. All they have to do is double the height of the cubicle walls and slap a door on there but they won’t do it.
I'll settle if they double the height so my eyes don't get blasted by sun glare.
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.
IDK I quite enjoy being home alone with no human contact. Interacting with other people is so tiring, and there's not much reward in it for me. Being with other people is stressful.
this is flawed in a way, they're presupposing social contact is always positive or healthy? It is biased because it isn't looking at the mental health state of individuals prior to remote work, as well as post RTO.
But if I want to be social why does it have to be people I didnt choose (i.e. co workers). Why can I WFH and socialise with my family/friends who I choose to be with. This is basically nothing to do with remote work and more about isolation.
Being forced to interact with people you haven't chosen to socialize is good for your mental health and for society. People interacting with different people are less afraid of the world, more trusting etc. Clustering into echochambers is bad for society as a whole.
Work is a fake environment where your communication is policed and you need to read books about how to effectively communicate to influence people do the things you want. Normals socialization isn't like that.
> Being forced to interact with people you haven't chosen to socialize is good for your mental health and for society.
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.
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.
The abstract of the article says that folks who have remote work are more socially isolated, even after work hours.
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.
Most people live with a spouse , kids, room mates though, I live with my family and they are generally around so get plenty of company (too much sometimes). This is about living alone AND WFH, then yes might be good to go to the office.
The abstract doesn't say that isolation is negative (I think). It just says WFH folks are more socially isolated.
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.
True, I meant forced socialisation a.k.a office. You need some socialising most days but most people get that from living with spouse/family/room mates etc i.e. people they have chosen.
I think that it's pretty difficult to do an empirical study, here. The culture makes a big difference. I feel as if Americans can do remote "better" than other cultures, where constant human interaction is common. We already have a fairly isolated culture. That's not necessarily a good thing, though. It could be, that the increased isolation of remote is a "tipping point" kind of thing.
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).
For all the good this shift brought, I think a lot of people genuinely just aren't made for remote working.
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.
Introverts, two-professional family units and affordable housing are all favoured by working remote. Companies have a larger pool of talent to draw from, and probably can lower their salaries.
And they also permit people with kids to participate.
Yes. I also took a lower salary to continue a remote only position. I've had recruiters reach out to offer positions in places I don't want to go back to, and I always politely tell them that they'd have to pay me more than I'm worth to go back.
> Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being
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.
This is also why having a good manager is key; I worked as an engineering manager and kept a near weekly 1-1 with my engineers, not per se to socialize, but to allow them to ask questions about the tasks, implementation comments, etc. but the environment I created allowed them to talk other stuff. All my associates appreciated this mix of technical talk, but also fun discussions, etc. I am sure it help them to stay a bit more involved and sane. You can check recommendations on LinkedIn for confirmation ;-), but my whole team was remote.
I do this with my team. We spend more than half of our weekly 30 minute 1-on-1s talking about anything but work. That isn't written down anywhere, it's just a natural consequence of us being interested in each others' lives, and prioritizing that over "getting back" 20 minutes to do more work.
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've had 1:1s like this and I'll tell you it was entirely performative. Yes my manager and I chatted about non work stuff for half or even all of the meeting but it was all fake, just talk to get through the meeting.
The risk I often see is when the company also emphasizes this 'family' ideal. I think that is unnatural and forced; most of my associates hated this. It ruins the work-life balance.
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.
I had 1on1s every 2 weeks and it was always annoying. Partially, because I didn't feel like "opening up" to this team lead and didn't feel like he was on my side or had my back at all. In the end I should be proven right, due to something he did when I left the company and also right before I left, which was one of the reasons I left. Turned out my gut feeling was right, to distrust this guy. He probably just went through the motions of what he had read somewhere of how to be a team lead, instead of really being in it.
Maybe my managers have always sucked or I'm terrible at sharing info or not very chatty with people at work but I've personally always found weekly 1-1's to end up being fairly useless.
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.
If the engineer didn't want, I never forced them. I made them meaningful. Even had an engineer ask me to continue with them after he changed to another manager.
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!
I've found what works best here is just switching to every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks. If you have little to talk about in a 1:1, feel free to end early, and then double the length of time until the next one.
Yep, time box it, so you know you have time, but allow it to e shorter!!!! Or reschedule. Mostly I had 20mins, every week with most. Some became 45mins or more, as we rambled on about tech or some other topic. And one requested it once every 2 weeks. Fine with me. If that makes them feel better, please.
I think almost all of my managers sucked and probably most in the world do. There's no real training, MBAs have their reputation for a reason or they're engineers promoted and maybe have a random close by mentor at best. The position is filled with career climbers. Career climbing doesn't priotize employees best interests.
My office has a big grad program so there are hundreds of interns and people under 25 in the office. Is really fun for them, I think its a real benefit that people look for now.
working remote was amazing while I lived in a city with my friends/family. it was not so amazing for me once I moved to a new city with my gf where I did not know anyone else.
Does your neighborhood have community meetings and operations ? (cleaning ? helping elderlies ? preparing for festivities ?)
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.
All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.
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.
>All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.
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.
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.
This is a shamefully bad paper hyped up to make Science relevant but with a result that has no relationship at all to what's even in the title, never mind abstract.
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.
> They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely
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.
Yeah. Compare mental health of those with families in remote vs non-remote work and it might flip entirely.
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.
I think trying to solve loneliness by combining it with the modern corporate environment is absolutely the wrong approach though.
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.
I feel blessed to have been married throughout the entire Covid experience and since. I tried remote work a couple times when I was in my 20s, and it was awful. It took a surprisingly short amount of time before I was going a bit nuts. Talking to myself a lot, making noise just to make noise, etc. Turns out I need the interaction.
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.
Yeah. My wife doesn’t work and I have worked from home since pre-COVID. We had a 1 and 2 year old during covid and it was ridiculously convenient in many ways. Very lucky timing for us.
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.
Yeah, remote work is good, many factors need to be there for it to be great, otherwise, it becomes mentally exhausting. The line between work and personal life blurs, it’s great if you have family but also not great because sometimes it distracts you or add more responsibilities on you, the isolation is something to consider too, I had an interview with a company before where they required to do the work exclusively in your house (so can’t do cafe library etc), obviously bad. There’s also the boss/family/society view that remote work isn’t “real work” and you are slacking all day, so you have your company adding more measures to track you, you boss throwing more work at you, your family are asking you other tasks to do since you are home already!
I found the best combo is having an office to go to, but close so commute isn’t an issue, and you go few times a week with flexible schedules.
„Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.“
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.
This is one reason it's hard to trust science, they start of with a bias and confirm it, but make it look like it was objective. You'd need decades of research to even come near a conclusion on something like this. "suggests" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, but the general public, policy makers, executives, hr, etc.. will read "it's a fact", and I suspect whoever funded this knew exactly what they're doing.
anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much here, but it's been night and day for me. yes, much much more isolated but my mental health is 100x better. Even my phsyical health has improved in many ways, i'm eating better, resting more, getting medical checkups, etc... I can't overstate how amazing it has been for me. The only dread is the few times I do have to work in the office!!
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?
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 don't understand how the research methodology used in the article supports this conclusion. How did they rule out the possibility that the post-pandemic economic situation has had a greater impact on these jobs, leading to greater stress? How did they we rule out that remote work has led to greater range of outsourcing, resulting in more intense competition for these jobs, rather than that caused by the lack of social contact? Or is it simply because the rapid development of AI in the research period has had a greater impact on these jobs, which is an obvious possibility?
Unless the research is going to get funded to the tune of billions, they likely had to cut some corners
This is a psychology paper. It’s difficult to attribute anything in psychology easily to a certain factor.
Haven't been in an office since the start of COVID. Between being lucky enough to have a great coliving setup with dope housemates, and now having access to co-working cafes in Taipei that have genuine communities, I feel more social than ever with more meaningful connections. I still commute to the cafes, for me remote working is about not having to be tied to a geographic spot in order to keep my source of income, not isolating at home.
This reminds me of growing up as a homeschooled kid and hearing people ask my parents "but how will they socialize?", generally while we were at the youth soccer field or at the playground or somewhere else that the irony should have caught their attention.
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.
I wasn’t homeschooled but I have been working from home for good part of last two decades. And I have not felt any negative effects of it.
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.
Homeschooled people just assume others must be unhappy in those places where they dont go, but that is not the case and not shown in statistics.
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.
Prison?
> Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.
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.
Yeah, although I suspect the study isn't taking account major economic factors involving ai and remote work jobs - the fact is society is built around jobs you commute to and it takes a little bit of time for society to change.
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."
The difference is in office work it happens by inertia whereas socializing outside requires practicing agency.
In most cultures "what do you do" is the first question that people ask, but answered with their job position in most Western countries.
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.
>In most cultures "what do you do" is the first question that people will answer with their job position in most Western countries.
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.
I am in Asia, and do not experience that 'snobby western white collar' attitude here.
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.
>I am in Asia, and do not experience that 'snobby western white collar' attitude here.
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 open source conferences around the world are a selection bias of a niche of a niche, not representative of the customs and attitudes of their respective countries, smae how football fans(hooligans) who travel abroad at games, also don't represent the average people of their respective countries.
> isn't much like "the west"
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.
The people paid to be there aren’t your friends. They’re nominally “coworkers,” which is not a social relationship but a transactional one. The fact we’ve as a society replaced human social interaction with people acting a work persona for money is more sad than being lonely - this should be the state that is considered lonely.
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.
My experience could not be more different. I’ve made life long friends at work, especially when I was working for smaller firms. I don’t think those relationships are transactional.
> After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable jobs spent more time working alone and avoided social activities with their friends, remaining more isolated both during and after work. This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.
One of those results which is exactly what anyone paying attention would predict. I'm glad there's hard evidence.
>This pattern was most pronounced among remote workers living alone: They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.
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.
I'm sure this is true. Also true is the mental distress I experience having to work in an crazy noisy open office space. Give me an actual office, and I'll go there.
An actual office is not even that expensive. All they have to do is double the height of the cubicle walls and slap a door on there but they won’t do it.
It is all about control and bad leaders do not know how to lead without doing “drive bys.”
I'll settle if they double the height so my eyes don't get blasted by sun glare.
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.
IDK I quite enjoy being home alone with no human contact. Interacting with other people is so tiring, and there's not much reward in it for me. Being with other people is stressful.
this is flawed in a way, they're presupposing social contact is always positive or healthy? It is biased because it isn't looking at the mental health state of individuals prior to remote work, as well as post RTO.
But if I want to be social why does it have to be people I didnt choose (i.e. co workers). Why can I WFH and socialise with my family/friends who I choose to be with. This is basically nothing to do with remote work and more about isolation.
Being forced to interact with people you haven't chosen to socialize is good for your mental health and for society. People interacting with different people are less afraid of the world, more trusting etc. Clustering into echochambers is bad for society as a whole.
Work is a fake environment where your communication is policed and you need to read books about how to effectively communicate to influence people do the things you want. Normals socialization isn't like that.
> Being forced to interact with people you haven't chosen to socialize is good for your mental health and for society.
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.
Not sure about this, most people would rather interact with people the like, click with than some boomer manager who thinks it's still 1950 IBM days.
Socializing != socialization.
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.
The abstract of the article says that folks who have remote work are more socially isolated, even after work hours.
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.
Most people live with a spouse , kids, room mates though, I live with my family and they are generally around so get plenty of company (too much sometimes). This is about living alone AND WFH, then yes might be good to go to the office.
I mean, it's right there in the abstract. The study showed that people working remotely were more isolated outside of work too.
Personally I enjoy working remotely and value time spent alone, but the data looks interesting
Why is more isolation negative, should be a spectrum, 98% alone and the rest socialising.
The abstract doesn't say that isolation is negative (I think). It just says WFH folks are more socially isolated.
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.
I prefer being alone but also feel worse after prolonged periods alone.
Preferring something doesn't mean it's good for you.
True, I meant forced socialisation a.k.a office. You need some socialising most days but most people get that from living with spouse/family/room mates etc i.e. people they have chosen.
Well, the abstract also says they were not feeling well because of that, I guess that's what matters
I think that it's pretty difficult to do an empirical study, here. The culture makes a big difference. I feel as if Americans can do remote "better" than other cultures, where constant human interaction is common. We already have a fairly isolated culture. That's not necessarily a good thing, though. It could be, that the increased isolation of remote is a "tipping point" kind of thing.
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).
For all the good this shift brought, I think a lot of people genuinely just aren't made for remote working.
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.
Introverts, two-professional family units and affordable housing are all favoured by working remote. Companies have a larger pool of talent to draw from, and probably can lower their salaries.
And they also permit people with kids to participate.
Yes. I also took a lower salary to continue a remote only position. I've had recruiters reach out to offer positions in places I don't want to go back to, and I always politely tell them that they'd have to pay me more than I'm worth to go back.
> Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being
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.
This is also why having a good manager is key; I worked as an engineering manager and kept a near weekly 1-1 with my engineers, not per se to socialize, but to allow them to ask questions about the tasks, implementation comments, etc. but the environment I created allowed them to talk other stuff. All my associates appreciated this mix of technical talk, but also fun discussions, etc. I am sure it help them to stay a bit more involved and sane. You can check recommendations on LinkedIn for confirmation ;-), but my whole team was remote.
I do this with my team. We spend more than half of our weekly 30 minute 1-on-1s talking about anything but work. That isn't written down anywhere, it's just a natural consequence of us being interested in each others' lives, and prioritizing that over "getting back" 20 minutes to do more work.
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've had 1:1s like this and I'll tell you it was entirely performative. Yes my manager and I chatted about non work stuff for half or even all of the meeting but it was all fake, just talk to get through the meeting.
The risk I often see is when the company also emphasizes this 'family' ideal. I think that is unnatural and forced; most of my associates hated this. It ruins the work-life balance.
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.
I had 1on1s every 2 weeks and it was always annoying. Partially, because I didn't feel like "opening up" to this team lead and didn't feel like he was on my side or had my back at all. In the end I should be proven right, due to something he did when I left the company and also right before I left, which was one of the reasons I left. Turned out my gut feeling was right, to distrust this guy. He probably just went through the motions of what he had read somewhere of how to be a team lead, instead of really being in it.
Maybe my managers have always sucked or I'm terrible at sharing info or not very chatty with people at work but I've personally always found weekly 1-1's to end up being fairly useless.
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.
Agree. they've always been meaningless ceremony in my experience.
If the engineer didn't want, I never forced them. I made them meaningful. Even had an engineer ask me to continue with them after he changed to another manager.
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!
I've found what works best here is just switching to every 2 weeks or every 4 weeks. If you have little to talk about in a 1:1, feel free to end early, and then double the length of time until the next one.
Yep, time box it, so you know you have time, but allow it to e shorter!!!! Or reschedule. Mostly I had 20mins, every week with most. Some became 45mins or more, as we rambled on about tech or some other topic. And one requested it once every 2 weeks. Fine with me. If that makes them feel better, please.
I think almost all of my managers sucked and probably most in the world do. There's no real training, MBAs have their reputation for a reason or they're engineers promoted and maybe have a random close by mentor at best. The position is filled with career climbers. Career climbing doesn't priotize employees best interests.
My office has a big grad program so there are hundreds of interns and people under 25 in the office. Is really fun for them, I think its a real benefit that people look for now.
Very happy I had my wife and kids throughout the pandemic and continued remote work since then. I would not have done well otherwise.
working remote was amazing while I lived in a city with my friends/family. it was not so amazing for me once I moved to a new city with my gf where I did not know anyone else.
Does your neighborhood have community meetings and operations ? (cleaning ? helping elderlies ? preparing for festivities ?)
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.
Working remotely or in an office requires a routine that includes having other interests and hobbies scheduled and on the calendar.
All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.
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.
>All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.
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.
> illusion of social activity
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.
This is a shamefully bad paper hyped up to make Science relevant but with a result that has no relationship at all to what's even in the title, never mind abstract.
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.
> They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely
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.
Yeah. Compare mental health of those with families in remote vs non-remote work and it might flip entirely.
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.
I think trying to solve loneliness by combining it with the modern corporate environment is absolutely the wrong approach though.
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.
There's a reason people look at the institutions that a study comes from. In this case it's:
* 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.
I feel blessed to have been married throughout the entire Covid experience and since. I tried remote work a couple times when I was in my 20s, and it was awful. It took a surprisingly short amount of time before I was going a bit nuts. Talking to myself a lot, making noise just to make noise, etc. Turns out I need the interaction.
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.
Yeah. My wife doesn’t work and I have worked from home since pre-COVID. We had a 1 and 2 year old during covid and it was ridiculously convenient in many ways. Very lucky timing for us.
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.
As non-neuro-typical I cherish the benefit of being able to work from home since 2010.
No dress-code, commuting, open space offices, exhausting small-talk or social masking required.
Love it.
Yeah, remote work is good, many factors need to be there for it to be great, otherwise, it becomes mentally exhausting. The line between work and personal life blurs, it’s great if you have family but also not great because sometimes it distracts you or add more responsibilities on you, the isolation is something to consider too, I had an interview with a company before where they required to do the work exclusively in your house (so can’t do cafe library etc), obviously bad. There’s also the boss/family/society view that remote work isn’t “real work” and you are slacking all day, so you have your company adding more measures to track you, you boss throwing more work at you, your family are asking you other tasks to do since you are home already! I found the best combo is having an office to go to, but close so commute isn’t an issue, and you go few times a week with flexible schedules.
Oh yeah, my mental health is only improved by sitting in commuter traffic.
Science dot org at it again.
Gibberish paper
„Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone.“
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.
This is one reason it's hard to trust science, they start of with a bias and confirm it, but make it look like it was objective. You'd need decades of research to even come near a conclusion on something like this. "suggests" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there, but the general public, policy makers, executives, hr, etc.. will read "it's a fact", and I suspect whoever funded this knew exactly what they're doing.
anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much here, but it's been night and day for me. yes, much much more isolated but my mental health is 100x better. Even my phsyical health has improved in many ways, i'm eating better, resting more, getting medical checkups, etc... I can't overstate how amazing it has been for me. The only dread is the few times I do have to work in the office!!
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?
It’s hard for me not to be cynical
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
> Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism
I missed that. Deets?
He tweeted this a while ago
He's a twat so its totally on-brand.
ARBEIT MACHT FREI