Source: Cigna — Loneliness in America — research finding remote workers report higher loneliness than office workers, directly supporting the argument here.
When the world locked down in 2020, my life barely changed. I noticed that. I noted it privately, in the way you note something that reflects on you unfavourably, and then I let it sit.
The observation was this. Millions of people were suddenly living the life I had been living for years. They found it very difficult. I did not. They missed colleagues and commutes and the accidental social contact of ordinary working life. I did not miss any of these things, because I did not have them. The absence of the thing I was supposed to miss was not something I had been finding hard. It was something I had been finding comfortable.
That comfort was not a good sign.
What remote work removes
When you work in an office, even an office you do not particularly like, certain things happen by accident. You talk to people. Not the conversations you would choose, not the people you would seek out, but human contact — incidental, low-stakes, unremarkable. The colleague who sits near you and has opinions about coffee. The person you end up walking to the station with twice a week. The small talk that goes nowhere, costs nothing, and is, without your noticing, part of the basic daily ration of being around other people.
Remote work removes this layer entirely. There are no accidental friendships, no incidental conversations, no human contact you did not specifically and deliberately arrange. Every social interaction requires a decision: to reach out, to organise, to make the explicit effort. For a person with social anxiety, each of those decisions is a small cost. And the cost accumulates. Most of the time, it is easier not to.
This is not a remote work problem. Remote work is a good arrangement for many people, and the flexibility it provides is real. The problem is what remote work does to a particular kind of person in a particular set of circumstances. It removes the frictions that were, without being recognised as such, doing useful work. The commute you resented was an hour of being among people. The office you found draining had people in it who knew your name. The lunch you sometimes skipped to eat at your desk was an opportunity to be visible to another human being. And being visible to other human beings, even when it is uncomfortable, is not nothing.
The comfort of the sealed life
What I found in remote work was what I had been looking for long before remote work was an option: a life with the minimum viable social exposure. I could work, earn money, fill the hours with things I found interesting, and never be required to be anywhere I hadn't specifically chosen. The anxiety had fewer occasions to fire. The walls of the known environment grew more familiar and more comfortable.
This is not a description of wellbeing. It is a description of management. The life I had built was extremely good at managing the anxiety and extremely bad at reducing it. Every year the walls were more familiar. Every year the outside was more theoretical. The question of whether I could actually function in the world — form relationships, sustain intimacy — was answered more and more rarely, at longer and longer intervals.
The specific irony is that the comfortable life did not feel like stagnation. It felt like stability. The work was good, the income was adequate, the days were full enough. There was no crisis, no rock bottom, no moment where the situation was clearly intolerable. That was the problem. A life needs some intolerance to produce change.
What you tell yourself
You tell yourself it is a phase. When the income is better, when the circumstances shift, when the right opportunity presents itself, the social isolation will resolve. This is a version of the same story I described in the article on still being a virgin at forty: a story that is provisional at first and structural by the time you notice it has become structural.
You also, if you are like me, tell yourself that you prefer it. This is the more dangerous story, because it is partly true. You are an introvert. You do prefer solitude to noise, depth to breadth, quiet to performance. These preferences are real and they are not defects. But the preference for solitude and the managed elimination of all social contact are not the same thing. Conflating them is very convenient for a life organised around avoidance.
The tell, for me, was the lockdown observation. If the life you have built is indistinguishable from a lockdown, you are not living according to your preferences. You are living according to the anxiety's preferences. Those are different things.
What changes the equation
What changed it for me was not a decision about remote work. It was a change in environment significant enough that the sealed life was no longer available in its previous form. A new city, a new context, a life that required showing up rather than opting out. The remote work continued. But the structure around it — the default arrangements, the social context, the baseline human contact — was different. And the difference mattered.
I am not suggesting you need to leave your country. I am suggesting that if the life you have built around remote work has become, quietly and without much drama, a life in which you are barely present to other people, that is worth naming honestly. Not as a moral failing. Just as a situation with a cost — a cost that is not fully visible from inside it.
The question is not whether remote work is good or bad. The question is what you are using it for.
The argument for why the environment is not neutral — and why changing it is more than a change of scenery — is made in full in the piece on moving abroad. If the "feeling behind" dimension is the part that sits heaviest, there is a separate piece on the timeline and how the gap actually closes.
This article is about the comfort of the sealed life and how remote work can sustain it. The book is the account of what it looked like when that life was finally disrupted — what the disruption cost, and what it opened up.