Remote work and mental health

Working from home has become normalized during the pandemic, but it could be bad for our mental health.

The Big Idea

When the coronavirus pandemic hit North America in early March, it immediately changed the way we communicate.

As schools and office buildings shut down, most people took to working from home. Not that anyone was complaining, but by normalizing remote work and school, the pandemic accelerated existing trends, making us more reliant on technology and giving our devices even greater importance in our lives. 

As more people develop new online habits, joining Zoom calls from the bedroom and Google Classroom meetings from the dining room table, we have to consider the consequences presented by the increasing use of technology that remote work and school demand. Namely, that replacing in-person interaction with excess screen time can have a detrimental impact on mental health.

It’s important to note that technology affects not just how we spend time, but also where we spend time and who we spend time with.

As Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic in an essay titled Every Place Is the Same Now, “Habits like these compress time, but they also transform space. Nowhere feels especially remarkable, and every place adopts the pleasures and burdens of every other. It’s possible to do so much from home, so why leave at all?”

Of course, we have no choice at the moment: we are restricted to the home and, being the social creatures that we are, continue to find new ways to communicate through technology. But I worry that this increased time alone and online will become the new status quo, continuing long after the pandemic is over. I worry this because that is the path we were already heading down; the coronavirus only sped things up.

There was a 159 percent increase in remote work in the United States between 2005 to 2017, according to an analysis by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics. And about 29 percent of college graduates worked from home at least some of the time prior to the coronavirus outbreak.

And while remote work has been on the rise for adults, young people have been experiencing an even more drastic shift towards online communication.

According to Jean M. Twenge’s book iGen, citing the Monitoring the Future survey which asks American high school students more than 1,000 questions every year, 12th graders in 2015 spent an average of six hours a day with new media, twice as much time online as 12th graders in 2006 (2018).

One result of increased time online is less in-person interaction: iGen’ers (also known as GenZ) see friends an hour less per day than GenX’ers or early Millennials did, according to the American Freshman Survey (Twenge, 2018). Furthermore, the number of teens who get together with their friends every day or nearly every day has been cut in half in fifteen years, down to just 30 percent in 2015 (Twenge, 2018). 

The few spaces people can normally rely on to experience in-person interaction — work and school — no longer hold the same promise.

Yes, some of the control measures in effect today will slowly be relaxed and people will eventually start flooding back to offices and the classrooms. But, as Charles Eisenstein explains, “Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, [control measures] are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits.” Some companies such as Twitter and Shopify have already announced that employees can work from home permanently.

There are a number of problems associated with increasing the time we spend online including the lack of practice we get building social skills or navigating complex relationships and emotions, the fact that it’s exhausting to be “on” all the time, and the evidence that people working remotely are currently working longer days. Most importantly, though, screens just don’t make us happy.

In fact, increased screen time has contributed towards making us a historically lonely, anxious, and depressed society. 

While the impact of social media use is most alarming (something we will examine in the coming weeks), other screen activities can also have negative effects on mental health. Eighth-graders who spend an above-average amount of time texting or on the internet are roughly 48 percent and 59 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy, respectively, than those who don’t (Twenge, 2018). And eighth-graders who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in-person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who don’t (Twenge, 2018). 

It’s no coincidence that since 2007, the homicide rate among American teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased by 46 percent as of 2015, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Twenge, 2018). As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves.

I mention teenagers not only to highlight the direction society is heading but also to demonstrate that the future of our potentially remote workforce is, by all accounts, already using the internet too much. 

Plus, it's not just young people that we should be worried about: Already in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, a worldwide study of remote workers found that, among their biggest struggles, 22 percent cite "unplugging after work" and 19 percent cite "loneliness." It’s no wonder 54 percent of Canadians feel lonely or isolated during the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Global News.

Prolonged social isolation is associated with a 26 percent risk of premature death. And some scientists estimate that loneliness and weak social connections “are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.”

There are benefits to online work and education — particularly that, in theory, more people can participate — but, just like any space that big tech enters, there’s going to be a reduction in humanity. That, and the worsening of what the Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) calls a “mental health crisis” that affects one in two Canadians who have (or have had) a mental illness by the time they turn 40.

Meanwhile, there is a growing body of research demonstrating that face-to-face social interaction enhances well-being. That alone should make us think twice before accepting remote work permanently.

Despite the dopamine-induced pleasures our devices give us, we, the working class, are not the winners in an online economy. The winners are business firms that no longer need to pay for office space. The winners are big tech, the select monopolies obtaining more and more of our personal data and money while having proven not to work on our behalf. The winners are the American billionaires who got $434 billion richer during the pandemic. 

Remote work is good for business. But is it good for us?

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In the News

• After Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok announced that posts wishing death on Trump from COVID-19 will be removed, Twitter is being accused of double standards after having failed to protect women and minority users from similar abuses in the past.

This is the latest controversy in a long line of social media platforms attempting to walk the thin line of regulating hate speech and misinformation while also upholding the first amendment (freedom of speech), an increasingly hard line to walk without any government regulation.

• In other social media news, Facebook — who has been under fire for refusing to fact-check political ads and for helping spread misinformation and fueling right-wing extremism — recently moved to clamp down on any confusion about the November election on its service (another topic we will get into in the coming weeks).

They rolled out a sweeping set of changes including a ban on ads that claim widespread voting fraud, suggest U.S. election results would be invalid, or attack any method of voting. They also plan on banning political ads one week prior to Election Day and clamping down on posts that discourage voting.

However, with Facebook’s history of repeatedly violating its own rules in order to accommodate right-wing agitators, there are plenty of reasons to distrust the company’s claim that it will stamp out election misinformation.

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Questions

If you have started working from home during the pandemic, how do you feel about it?

Do you like working from home more than going to the office? Or do you miss your colleagues and the office atmosphere?

How would you feel if your employer moved to a remote work model permanently?

In terms of the news, do you think the U.S. government should regulate speech on social media platforms so that the platforms don’t have that responsibility? Or do you think the free market model is fair, where the power lies in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey instead of the U.S. government?