> 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.

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28304283409234 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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dyauspitr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	cogogo 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It is all about control and bad leaders do not know how to lead without doing “drive bys.”
	▲	XorNot 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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ZpJuUuNaQ5 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>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.

	▲	shmel 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's certainly personal. I live alone for the last 11 years and I remember the pandemic as the worst period of my life exactly because I couldn't interact with people. Surely moving to another city just before played a role, but I realized that one week stuck at home was enough to drive me completely insane. While going to office doesn't replace normal social life, it's still something that helped me before. After the pandemic I kept WFH, but found a relatively big and diverse friend circle. Now I treat social life as something mandatory like food and sleep because I learned that even "going out" alone (grab a dinner somewhere and go to a cinema or something like that) barely helps when I need to connect with someone and have a meaningful conversation. And yet, some of my friends are exactly like you, they barely noticed the pandemic and were perfectly happy to stay at home and tinker with their side projects.

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SoftTalker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IDK I quite enjoy being home alone with no human contact. Interacting with other people is so tiring, and there's not much reward in it for me. Being with other people is stressful.

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notepad0x90 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.