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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of those results which is exactly what anyone paying attention would predict. I'm glad there's hard evidence.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No dress-code, commuting, open space offices, exhausting small-talk or social masking required.
Love it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think that is mostly a US thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally I enjoy working remotely and value time spent alone, but the data looks interesting
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 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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.