Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
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Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#2I 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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#3> 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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#4This 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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#5„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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#6I 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 lack…
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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#7Gibberish paper
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#8This 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…
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.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#9Working remotely or in an office requires a routine that includes having other interests and hobbies scheduled and on the calendar.
Re: Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health
#10This 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.