7 ms·

Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health

• rootusrootus 5mo ago
  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.
  • Waterluvian 5mo ago
    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.
• ajkjk 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • 28304283409234 5mo ago
    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.
    • dyauspitr 5mo ago
      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.
      • XorNot 5mo ago
        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.
      • cogogo 5mo ago
        It is all about control and bad leaders do not know how to lead without doing “drive bys.”
  • notepad0x90 5mo ago
    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.
  • ZpJuUuNaQ5 5mo ago
    >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.
• light_hue_1 5mo ago
  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.
  • Insanity 5mo ago
    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.
    • XorNot 5mo ago
      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.
      • Insanity 5mo ago
        Yup, agreed. I worked fully remote for a few years and never felt like I lacked social interaction. Apart from being married, I had some hobbies where I'd meet people and was fortunate to have a tight-knit group of friends who I'd meet up with for boardgames every few weeks. It does take some work to get a solid social life going though.
• FabCH 5mo ago
  „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.
  • notepad0x90 5mo ago
    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.
• beezlewax 5mo ago
  Gibberish paper
• j45 5mo ago
  Working remotely or in an office requires a routine that includes having other interests and hobbies scheduled and on the calendar.
  • reg_dunlop 5mo ago
    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.
    • ubertaco 5mo ago
      >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.
      • reg_dunlop 5mo ago
        Part of the study specifies remote workers living alone. So it appears the focus of the study excludes those fortunate enough to have family or housemates. But I do agree that the claim being made is the false dichotomy you point out
      • j45 5mo ago
        Maybe the difference is what can happen passively going to a workplace, vs you get the life you design, learn, plan and execute on.
    • sublinear 5mo ago
      > 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.
• ubertaco 5mo ago
  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.
  • watwut 5mo ago
    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.
    • card_zero 5mo ago
      Prison?
    • bentley 5mo ago
      As someone who was public schooled six years and homeschooled six years, public school definitely made me more unhappy, and was worse for me socially. 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.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
    • 5mo ago
• gxs 5mo ago
  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
  • antonvs 5mo ago
    > Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism I missed that. Deets?
    • gxs 5mo ago
      He tweeted this a while ago
      • outside2344 5mo ago
        He's a twat so its totally on-brand.
• Devasta 5mo ago
  Oh yeah, my mental health is only improved by sitting in commuter traffic.
• chjail-11 5mo ago
  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.
• willXare 5mo ago
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• the_gipsy 5mo ago
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• ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  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).
  • throwaway2037 5mo ago
    > I'm fortunate as hell to participate in an organization that forces me to interact, fairly intimately, with others, on an almost daily basis. Sounds cool. What org?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
      Won’t mention it explicitly (them’s the rules), but it’s a program of personal Recovery. Been at it for over 45 years.
• budududuroiu 5mo ago
  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.
  • stringfood 5mo ago
    The worst thing about office friends is they immediatley cease to be friends when you are laid off or change jobs, only maybe 2% do I actually stay in contact with, and frankly that is just because of the nostalgia I have of working with them and the networking benefits. Work friends are not friends. People you meet near your home and at your book club are more likely to stick around through the thick and thin. That being said yes being in office can benefit some people's mental health
    • Cyclone_ 5mo ago
      You probably just never got to know them that well and did things outside of work with them. I've met people at the office and stayed in touch with them and hung out after they left or I left the company.
      • stringfood 5mo ago
        That's a great point I never thought of! I'm also an introvert and don't relate to my peers who normally are always older than me by 10 years for some reason lol
        • Cyclone_ 5mo ago
          That does make it tough at times when there's the age gap. Every younger place I've been at has been lord of the flies so I've since then looked for places where people are a bit older lol. One of my good friends now is about 10 years older and I've found once you get past 30 whether you click with them matters more. One piece of advice I'd say is just try and find people where you do things with them regularly outside of work.
• gbraad 5mo ago
  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.
  • Jcampuzano2 5mo ago
    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.
    • mschulkind 5mo ago
      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.
      • gbraad 5mo ago
        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.
    • gbraad 5mo ago
      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!
• pirategurt 5mo ago
  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.
  • makeitdouble 5mo ago
    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.
• bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
  Science dot org at it again.
• tamimio 5mo ago
  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.
• small_model 5mo ago
  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.
  • oytis 5mo ago
    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
    • small_model 5mo ago
      Why is more isolation negative, should be a spectrum, 98% alone and the rest socialising.
      • oytis 5mo ago
        Well, the abstract also says they were not feeling well because of that, I guess that's what matters
      • aok1425 5mo ago
        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.
      • ahtihn 5mo ago
        I prefer being alone but also feel worse after prolonged periods alone. Preferring something doesn't mean it's good for you.
        • small_model 5mo ago
• bilbo-b-baggins 5mo ago
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• tchalla 5mo ago
  > 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.
  • gbraad 5mo ago
    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.
    • joe_mamba 5mo ago
      >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.
      • gbraad 5mo ago
        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.
• rr808 5mo ago
  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.
• notepad0x90 5mo ago
  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?
• ronbenton 5mo ago
  Very happy I had my wife and kids throughout the pandemic and continued remote work since then. I would not have done well otherwise.
• hypfer 5mo ago
  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.
  • jleyank 5mo ago
    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.
    • hunter-gatherer 5mo ago
      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.
• tianqi 5mo ago
  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?
  • anukin 5mo ago
    This is a psychology paper. It’s difficult to attribute anything in psychology easily to a certain factor.
    • steve1977 5mo ago
      And often it also doesn't seem to be desired.
  • sharts 5mo ago
    Unless the research is going to get funded to the tune of billions, they likely had to cut some corners
    • Cyclone_ 5mo ago
      Billions? Where are you seeing a need for billions to do a study like that?
  • munificent 5mo ago
    > 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? 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.
    • 5mo ago
• proofofcontempt 5mo ago
  > 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.
• eqiq 5mo ago
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• Mwntalhwalth 5mo ago
  Wfh since long before covid (15 years) . It will 100% burn you out slowly while you think you are better and stronger than it. Feels good at the beginning likely b.c your current job is super toxic and your away from your boss but there are many factors largely due to isolation that will settle in. 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.
  • Cyclone_ 5mo ago
    I've felt the same way. At first it felt great to be able to get more done both at work and at home. But I did feel more isolated as time went on. The last in person place(with some hybrid) I was at had super toxic coworkers but the 2 places I've been at that are fully remote all had great ones. So it's a little disappointing now that they don't allow in person.
  • hdgvhicv 5mo ago
    WFH since 2011, I don’t recognise your statement at all.
    • Mwntalhwalth 5mo ago
      Nothing is completely binary. I've studied stress and one of the other big factors to note is loss of control and what that can do to oneself. It's nice to be able to walk into someone's office and just settle something vs letting it cook and propogate among the many other intracscies from long term wfh. Greatly depends on if your running things I think, working with a team, the type of work you do etc 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?
  • wonderwonder 5mo ago
    I’ve been isolated via work from home for so long I don’t even see people who aren’t my wife and kids as real anymore. When I interact with them it’s like they are just npc’s in a game. They vanish as soon as they are out of sight to preserve system resources. Wife will start talking to me about someone Ive met 5 times before and I have no idea who she’s talking about. 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
• wonderwonder 5mo ago
  I’ve worked remotely for about 8 years now. I currently have zero IRL friends and if not for my wife and kids I would go months without speaking to another person. For the last 4 years I didn’t even have standups, I could go weeks without speaking to anyone at work besides the occasional teams message. I have daily standups now and they are mentally exhausting. 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.
• smeej 5mo ago
  This seems like such a classic example of mixing up correlation and causation. 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?
• khalic 5mo ago
  Where’s the control group?
• thi2 5mo ago
  I can understand that being isolated is a real issue. But if your only joy and socialization happens in a corporate office you still have a problem.
• cladopa 5mo ago
  It is kind of ridiculous to link working from home to working alone, specially after the braindead strategy that was applied by politics on COVID, like forbidding going out in controlled groups, like you could do in Japan during COVID without problems. 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.
• throw-the-towel 5mo ago
  Wow, this comment section is a veritable gallery of "works on my machine^Wbrain".
• albatross79 5mo ago
  Have they done a study on how being fake in the office all day and having to tolerate other people's narcissism affects one's mental health too?
• Fire-Dragon-DoL 5mo ago
  I have been working from home for the last 20 years, that's the entirety of my work life. 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.
• sreekanth850 5mo ago
  Woeking from home is not easy. Went to depression and took medication for two years. Social isolation is a big thing.
  • booleandilemma 5mo ago
    [dead]
• devindotcom 5mo ago
  ITT: the REAL scientists
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  Do I really have to say "correlation is not causation" ? A lot of things happened between 2022 and 2024 to make people depressed. Particularly in 2024. > 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.
• _HMCB_ 5mo ago
  I’m just here for all the tech bro comments saying that this couldn’t be true.
• chrisbrandow 5mo ago
  This is so obviously true. Most people that had sudden wfh transitions after or during COVID that I know even with well established networks and families, have really grieved the loss of daily contact with coworkers.
• diiaann 5mo ago
  It became clear to me that just a little bit of socializing during the work day goes a long way. 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.
• snvzz 5mo ago
  Hell is other people. --Sartre
• kisamoto 5mo ago
  > We focused on occupation-level shifts in remote work rather than personal choices, as decisions to work remotely may themselves reflect individuals’ mental health status > 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.
• penguin_booze 5mo ago
  > Our results suggest that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone 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'.
• anal_reactor 5mo ago
  My problem is that I am highly extrovert, but I just don't like most people. When I go to most places where I'm supposed to socialize, I end up not doing so, simply because we don't "click". Work is the only place where I've managed to meet non-zero number of people with whom we mutually enjoy our company. 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".
• xg15 5mo ago
  Paper: People working from home all alone have a greater risk of mental health problems. HN: Preposterous!
• Jamesbeam 5mo ago
  I respect the work, but for most of the world, this paper is absolutely useless. 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-half-their-lives-taking-prescription-drugs-study-finds 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/S2211335525002189 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.
• xchip 5mo ago
  Nvidia fully supports remote work, people love it and they are doing great, not sure why others companies have issues with this.
• realjohng 5mo ago
  I can say I agree with the thesis. I live alone and have been working remotely and have been struggling with this issue. 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.
• gmiller123456 5mo ago
  My experience is the exact opposite. I worked remotely for a good 10 years, after a buyout we returned to the office for a couple years, and returned to remote during 2020. 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.
• storus 5mo ago
  Not sitting in a noisy open office surrounded by colleagues that hate and backstab each other but instead at home seems to me like a major mental health win. Instead we got "remote work bad" study... Feels like another soft science "desired outcome" result.
• foysauce 5mo ago
  I'm seeing most people's arguments here explaining that remote work has given them the opportunity to voluntarily engage in extra curricular social functions. 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.