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.