Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

I think to them, they are totally right that remote work leaves them with enough energy for them to do this, and they are happier for it. What I'm concerned with is the people who do not naturally have such a drive to seek this out, but for whom social activities would be equally important whether they realize it or not.

Personally I find the friction of leaving the house and making new friends in a city I'm not from difficult to overcome, and in this case I love having an easy way to meet people (and in some cases make some of my longest lasting connections) by simply going to the office 2-3 days a week.

> Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work

Remote work is not for everyone so if you are someone who predominantly makes their social connections in an office being forced to work remotely will have an impact.

However I think a lot who choose to work remotely have friends outside of work. I know this study focuses on those who live alone but it may also be very different for those who live with a partner/family/friends.

Anecdotally I have found that people who want social interaction in the office push for everyone in the office (rather selfishly in my opinion) because without enough people in - for example in a hybrid model - they don’t get the same kick.

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.

HN: Preposterous!

I have a partner that I live with but he often works long hours in person so I can sympathize with someone living alone.

With remote work, I hated the feeling of having every human interaction be very transactional all day. As a result, I felt more pressure to make plans during the weekday with remote counterbalance how completely some days felt.

In the office, you'd usually have some friendly chatter, running into people in the hallway, getting a snack, or waiting for a meeting to start. And most of the time, that was more than enough to not feel a sense of malaise.

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".

Lack of social interaction has not been a problem, I either had them digitally and later on, my wife works from home with me.

No office, thanks.

I don't know whom they were asking. If they had come to me, I'd have said 'hell yeah' - make remote work a legal requirement'.

When the city of San Francisco is handing out tax breaks to companies for forcing RTO in shitty Bay Area infrastructure and Paul Graham loudly and proudly calls wfh communism, it’s hard to not take these findings with a grain of salt

Even if true, I am positive the solution isn’t to stuff people back into offices and rob them of the little leverage they got during covid

No dress-code, commuting, open space offices, exhausting small-talk or social masking required.

Love it.

And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.

The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.

America is a pill-popping nation.

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/americans-will-spend...

And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...

What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.

How can you conclude this:

"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."

Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.

How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?

I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.

And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.

But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.

Going out for a walk alone to the beach or the mountains was forbidden. It was so ridiculous. And of course I went out anyway and it was essential for my health and sanity.

I have been working from home for a long time. It gives me freedom. I don't have to waste hours moving most of the time, and time with friends and family that I choose.

When I worked in an office I had to spend one hour moving in and one moving out each day.

This study is equivalent to the drugs study done on caged rats. The caged rats being humans during pandemic.

It was discovered later that if you let the rats freedom and the ability to socialise they did not get as anxious as when caged and they did not look for drugs for escaping their miserable lives.

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?

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.

--Sartre

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.

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?

> 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.