Remote work is bad for you
Lately I've been emailing people at random between 4am-6am, right as I have my first cup of coffee.
I've been emailing CEOs of small startups I have a positive relationship with, former poetry professors, and cold-emailing people I find interesting (this includes poets I like who are alive still, good writers I find on Hacker News and Bear blog, and CEOs/people with blogs at interesting companies who I don't know.)
I believe I'm doing this in large part because I'm harrowingly lonely. Lonely in a harrowing way. I don't love the way the word 'harrowingly' looks right now but that is the only word that works, I think.
I work for a fully remote company. I am married and I have the normal amount of friends. I have a great relationship with my family, who lives nearby (within an hour). My wife works from home 2 days a week so I am only completely alone 3 days out of the week, which isn't bad.
And yet, some days I wake up and lie on the couch in my office with a blanket over my face and wonder how my life got this way. I stand on the porch and look at the woods behind my house and wonder if I am invisible, or just a Boltzmann brain surrounded by inventions of my imagination. I don't actually believe this stuff, but sometimes I think to myself, 'I bet I could convince myself of this if I really tried,' which is disconcerting enough.
Like many 'knowledge workers' (dumb term), I've been remote since the very first wave of the pandemic in 2019. I was living with my grandmother at the time and commuting into the city. She was 89. As soon as we got the option to stop coming into the office to limit exposure to this mysterious new ailment, I took it. Her health was fragile and also commuting was a pain in the ass.
At first, the arrangement felt too good to be true. We all felt this. Obviously we were all passively (or actively) scared of COVID, but we were also like 'holy shit, I can open my eyes at 9 am on the dot and pull my computer up from under my bed and go on Slack in my sweatpants with my laptop on my chest, and do work like that. I could do it for the whole day, almost, except meetings.' This was a liberating realization.
However, 7 years later I am going insane.
I am sure I'm not alone, though the debate between remote work vs. in office rages on. I am not making an argument that work should be 100% in office. I don't think that's true. Rather, I believe a hybrid schedule — 1 to 3 days in office, the rest remote — is a truly utopian setup. And if we have the technology to allow for a small utopia, just in this one way, why wouldn't we do it?
Further, I believe not giving most people the option to work at least some days in office is making society worse.
Granovetter and the people you don't like
We need to be around people we neither like nor hate. We need to have conversations with them in person and say hi to them when they pass us in the hall and ask them when they'll be done with a conference room, then they make a little joke, then we make a little joke, and the interaction is entirely pleasant despite us thinking they have shitty politics and not liking the way they talk to their wife on the phone with an irritated affect at lunch.
This was a good part of life. The office gave us access to this. It served as the ambient social substrate where tolerance, community, and begrudging, low-grade, constant connection took place. We had access to these micro interactions at all times, even when we were busy, and, crucially, even when we did not feel like it. It was a forcing function that kept us socially healthy and participatory in the imperfect, charming activities of daily living.
Now, at 32, I believe I am at risk of social thinning. My wife is pregnant with our first child, which I am over the moon about, but I've also heard it can put a dent in your social life.
I am not one of the people included in 17% of people who, heartbreakingly, reported having zero close friends in 2024 (this up from 2.5% of people in 1990).[1] But I feel myself becoming myopic, self-obsessed, lonely, fearful, resentful, and repulsed by strangers from the private enclosure of my home in the suburbs.
What does this slow, zoomorphic slide into complete atomization portend for us? What is it doing to the vast middle ground of social life? Where are the casual, repeated, low-stakes relationships with people I never would have chosen, but who I increasingly think I need?
In 1973, Mark Granovetter published "The Strength of Weak Ties".[3] The core argument is the basis for what we are experiencing: your casual acquaintances are more socially valuable than your close friends. They connect you to parts of the social graph your close friends aren't part of.
Your close friends (strong ties) tend to know each other. They move in the same social world as you. They share your assumptions, your reference class, and your blind spots. But when you need new information, a novel perspective, or a job lead that doesn't circulate in your immediate circle, it comes from your 'weak ties', or these passive acquaintances. Granovetter's original data showed that only 16.7% of job-seekers found positions through contacts they saw "often", whereas a whopping 55.6% found jobs through contacts they saw only "occasionally."[4]
This is just an example of the transactional value of 'weak ties', which isn't the important part IMO, but still. There is value there, is the point.
The office, as a social institution, is a massive weak-tie generation machine. It is where I personally got every last one of my weak ties. I don't go to church and I don't do rec sports leagues. I am part of a secret underground society, of course, but I consider those ties largely strong.
So losing the office has destroyed a whole vector for crucial relationships for me, and for a bunch of other people, too.
Why society is being crushed by the loss of the office
You already know about the mere exposure effect, no need to rehash. It's self-explanatory: merely being exposed to something makes you like it more (to a point).
Well, the same is true of people and cultures and opinions. Interacting with a heterogeneous pool of people everyday makes you less scared of them and their ideas, and what they may think of you.
For people like me (technical writers, developers, backend engineers, researchers, and other people who basically disappear into their hovels to think and type on their computers), it creates the perfect conditions for us to enter an echo chamber and never return.
I don't have to tell you about The Algorithms. They are making us more extreme in our thinking one way or the other, in regards to just about everything (not just politics, but also, of course, politics).
People like me who spend minimum 8 hours a day on their computers, with few meetings and no reason to interact with customers or travel for work, and who spend much of their leisure time also on their computers, are at serious risk of becoming unreasonable. We are the perfect target for radicalization, even if that radicalization only relates to which TV shows we like and which ones we think are awful.
The real tragedy of the elimination of the office is the elimination of third and second places.
In 1989, sociologist Ray Oldenburg published The Great Good Place, which was about urban planning, community design, and the sociology of everyday life.[8] Oldenburg argued that healthy social lives require three kinds of place: the home (first place), the workplace (second place), and informal gathering spaces outside home and work (bars, coffeehouses, churches, parks, barbershops, etc.).
Third places, Oldenburg argued, are the primary sites of genuine community formation in modern societies. At best, they are social levelers: fundamentally inclusive, offering a rare setting where status, income, or occupation play little role in determining who belongs.[9]
Third places have been in decline for a while, probably since people stopped going to church en masse. People are going back to church in droves now, but the point isn't the church. The point is third places. So while it's good that people are finding third places, the fact that we still haven't reimagined third places outside the construct of organized religion is kind of baffling. I digress.
Anyway, so third places started disappearing a while back. But since COVID, we're now seeing what happens when even second places disappear.
Second places do double duty. They're both functional for work, but they're also a compensatory third-place-like institution where you make acquaintances and hang around people you may not have chosen yourself, as we've established.
So now we've got no third place for most people, and no second place for a big enough faction of people (who also happen to be very online, given they do computer work.) That is very bad. All you have left is one place: your home. You and whoever you live with, or nobody.
Once again, we've innovated ourselves into something that has outpaced what we are evolved to handle. We are social animals, if nothing else. But more and more, we're isolated, inherently suspicious, jaded, dismissive, frightened animals with small broken hearts.
If you read this, please email me.
I am bored.
mrmarket@kindasortastudio.com
Sources and notes
[1] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
[2] IE Insights (2025). "From Third to Fourth Spaces." https://www.ie.edu/insights/articles/from-third-to-fourth-spaces-immersion-that-builds-belonging/ — Survey Center on American Life (2021) for men's friendship data.
[3] Granovetter, Mark. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 6 (1973), pp. 1360–1380. Citation count: Stanford News (2023) https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/07/strength-weak-ties
[4] Granovetter (1973), ibid. https://www.timetrex.com/blog/the-strength-of-weak-ties-in-the-modern-labor-market
[5] Rajkumar, Karthik, et al. "A causal test of the strength of weak ties." Science, Vol. 377, Issue 6612 (2022). https://ide.mit.edu/insights/new-study-proves-that-weak-ties-have-strong-employment-value/
[6] Yang, Longqi, et al. "The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers." Nature Human Behaviour 5 (2021), pp. 1342–1350. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4
[7] Zajonc, Robert B. "Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement, 9(2, Pt. 2), 1968.
[8] Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place. Paragon House, 1989.