The great remote-work experiment has produced an extraordinary discovery: millions of Americans can do their jobs without going to work. The harder question is what else happens when they do.
The debate over remote work is usually framed as a contest between flexibility and productivity. But work has never been merely about completing assignments. It is also one of the principal places where adults form friendships, find mentors, exchange ideas and encounter people they might otherwise never know.
The pandemic transformed millions of kitchen tables into offices and turned an emergency measure into a permanent feature of professional life. Many workers welcomed the change. Commutes disappeared. Schedules became more flexible. Parents and caregivers gained freedoms that traditional workplaces often made difficult. Those benefits are real. So are the costs.
Research by economists Emma Harrington, Natalia Emanuel and Amanda Pallais points to one of them. Their findings suggest that the growth of remote work may account for roughly one-third of the deterioration in Americans’ mental health over the past decade. Workers whose jobs can be performed remotely experienced greater increases in isolation, distress and depression than workers whose jobs require physical presence.
The researchers are careful about causation, and we should be, too. But their findings fit a broader pattern that has become difficult to ignore.
More than two decades ago, political scientist Robert Putnam famously described Americans as “bowling alone,” withdrawing from clubs, congregations and civic organizations that once created community. Since then, many of those institutions have weakened further. We shop online, bank online, entertain ourselves at home and increasingly interact through screens. Now many of us work alone, too. Something is lost in the process.
Young employees learn by watching experienced colleagues handle difficult conversations, make judgments and recover from mistakes. Ideas emerge from conversations that were never placed on a calendar. Friendships develop over lunch. Trust grows through hundreds of small interactions that cannot be scheduled as a 30-minute video call.
Perhaps most importantly, workplaces force us into sustained relationships with people we did not choose. They may be older or younger, politically different, culturally unfamiliar or simply annoying. Learning to cooperate with them is not merely a workplace skill. It is a civic one.
That function matters increasingly because so much of modern life allows us to choose whom we encounter. Our neighborhoods, social circles, media and online communities can all reinforce our preferences. Work remains one of the places where difference simply shows up at the next desk.
None of this requires resurrecting the five-day office week. Hybrid work may ultimately prove the sensible compromise, preserving flexibility while maintaining enough physical presence to sustain relationships and institutional culture. But the calculation should include more than productivity statistics, real estate costs and commuting time.
We have become remarkably good at designing life around individual convenience. We can shop without stores, worship without sanctuaries, socialize without gathering and work without workplaces. Each innovation offers something valuable.
Taken together, however, they may be building a society in which we need one another less — and know one another less.
Technology has made it possible to work almost anywhere. That does not mean there is no value in working somewhere, together.
