A recent survey of 1,000 people with fully remote jobs suggests that one in four people who work from home believe their social abilities have declined since switching to remote full-time. Now, these claims are self-identified, and the percentage of people reporting a decline is only 25%, 23% of whom have noticed only “somewhat” of a difference. Is this a big deal? Working from home might have little to do with the participants’ difficulty conversing. What if the real issues existed long before their workplace and home became the same place? Perhaps surveyors and armchair crusaders are looking at this all wrong.
Maybe Remote Work Isn’t the Problem
Twenty percent of the participants reported not leaving their homes more than once a week, and “3% say they rarely or never leave home for any activities,” explained Resume Builder, the company that conducted the survey. What that likely means is that these workers – before their jobs became strictly remote – probably left their homes primarily just for work. That sounds more like a personal issue than a corporate one. Occupations aren’t meant to be a person’s only contact with other humans, nor are they intended to be a main source of socialization.
Since 1970, Americans have spent less and less time in their communities. Fewer people are members of social clubs, associations, and churches. Americans don't volunteer as much as they once did and seldom participate in community organizations, an issue that sociologist Robert Putnam discussed in his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000. Putnam introduced myriad data showing Americans had ditched social institutions for social isolation, causing negative consequences for society. His assessment was bleak, and the problem has only worsened.
From 2003 to 2022, face-to-face socialization among men declined by roughly 30%, according to Derek Thompson’s research at The Atlantic, published in February 2024. The drop in human interaction for unmarried Americans was 35%, and for teenagers, 45%. After doing a deep dive into the American Time Use Survey, “an annual government poll of how people in the U.S. spend their days,” Thompson found that “real-world socializing has declined for both men and women, for all ages, for all ethnicities, and for all levels of income and education. Although COVID-19 clearly increased time alone, these trends predate the pandemic.”
“In short,” said Thompson, “there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.”
The Struggle
The most common complaints from the participants in Resume Builder’s survey were that, since transitioning to work-from-home full-time, they have felt more anxious and self-conscious, having difficulty with small talk. This is not surprising. Americans are more worried and nervous than ever, and the American Psychiatric Association confirms it: “In 2024, 43% of adults say they feel more anxious than they did the previous year, up from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022.”
Another factor to consider is that Americans’ mental health is deteriorating. Pew Research Center found that between 2020 and 2022, 41% of adults reported experiencing high levels of psychological distress at least once. The younger the age group, the more widespread the distress. In addition, the National Institute of Mental Health estimated in 2022 that “any mental illness” was prevalent in 59.3 million US adults, while 15.4 million had “a serious mental illness.”
Perhaps working remote jobs has slightly worsened some people’s social skills, but anxiety is ubiquitous nowadays and has been for at least a decade, long before COVID-19 and the rise of working from home. However, if the workplace had been a person’s only source of socialization, those skills were probably already waning. More than likely, the problem is that the primary source of human interaction for too many people is in the workplace. If somebody is not socializing outside work, that’s a separate issue altogether.
A Moral Panic?
Many people thought for the longest time that homeschooling children sheltered them and ruined their ability to socialize, a quasi-moral panic probably devised by media outlets and parents who had no experience with homeschooling. Regardless of how the gossip started, that myth has long since been debunked. Researchers have discovered there’s often no difference in social skills between homeschooled children and kids in traditional schools, except sometimes homeschooled students are better at socializing than their conventionally taught peers. Kids do not learn all their social abilities from other children, nor do they only speak to people inside classrooms, just as employees don’t only interact with other adults at the workplace.
In fact, people learn how to socialize way before they enter the workforce and often maintain those abilities by mingling with other people in their downtime, face-to-face, and making eye contact (a lost art). It’s doubtful that a switch to fully remote work is solely responsible for these workers' social abilities deteriorating. Instead, remote work appears to be calling attention to decades-old issues: widespread self-isolation, declining mental health, and the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. One could probably draw a neat, chronological line from one to the other beside a timeline of technological advances and learn a lot more than one would from reading surveys. Perhaps a moral panic is warranted, or has the nation already passed that part? Either way, surveys likely won’t help. Screens appear to be replacing in-person conversations as social skills among adults and kids seem to wither. The change needed here, unlike scrolling, can’t be done alone, and working from home probably has very little to do with it.
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