Home Alone: The Hidden Cost of Remote Work

I've worked from home for about fifteen years, and I like it. I'm a writer, I'm fine being on my own, and I've got the cats for company. But there's one thing I miss, those little water-cooler conversations with colleagues, and a new study published in the journal Science speaks to exactly that. Economist Natalia Emanuel and her colleagues at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what does remote work actually do to our mental health? The catch is that you can't ethically grab a thousand workers and order half of them to stay home for two years, so they had to get clever about how they studied it. In this episode I walk through that workaround, comparing "remotable" jobs to "non-remotable" ones, and what they found about isolation, anxiety, and well-being.

I also put my skeptic hat on, because there's a real question hiding underneath the findings. Maybe working from home makes people lonelier, or maybe people who are already a bit more solitary are the ones who gravitate toward jobs they can do alone, in which case it's personality doing the work, not the office setup. That's the self-selection problem, and it's the reason random assignment matters so much in research. Along the way we get into why losing daily human contact can affect not just your mood but your immune and cardiovascular health, why I think community theater is part of what keeps my own solitude from tipping into isolation, and what both employers and remote workers might do about all of this.