As someone who has worked from home for a decade, I predict a mental health apocalypse in the near future. Working from home permanently requires support infrastructure not everyone has access to. It also requires a different approach to work altogether which, again, not everyone is capable of adopting.
If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
I find this expectation really strange. It's like 'violence in games', if you refer to it everyone will nod, but how it became such a widely accepted fact is at best unclear.
I'm sure some cases of it happened somewhere, there are some papers, and some appeal to authority is a given, but do we really know if WFH equals mental health issues en masse?
For example, I wonder if: long commute, all the preparation before/after a work day, and resulting overall diminished free time causes more mental issues or not.
What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?
Seems to me when "office" is heard everyone thinks of that one nice summer evening after work and had a few beers yada yada, nobody seems to remember that cold-ass winter day where you would rather stay in 5 levels of blankets yet had to go to office, then slipped on ice and landed on your ass.
Maybe it's true and WFH will turn most people to madness. I'm just saying it's not an established fact of life, and opposite is also very much possible.
> What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?
Are you describing working in an office or working from home?
I understand the sentiment here. But there are different lifestyles. For some, home is where they spend a majority of their time outside of work. I've optimized my home around my lifestyle.
WFH doesn't require building a sensory deprivation tank.
Since going remote, I work in a swimming pool about 50% of the time. I have a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, a Panasonic toughbook, and a "floating standing desk" (a raft turned upside down). I smoke a cigar, sip a nice whiskey, and crank through my work. Then I go spend time with my family and friends.
It's not quite a concrete bunker beneath my house. But I'm not coming back to an office anytime soon.
Depends on which office, and whose home we're talking about.
It's not my goal to shoot your anecdote with my own.
My post above is more about the tendency to focus on WFH as a mental health tragedy, while WFO is never held under this scrutiny. Is it possible that herding millions into offices [of various quality] had no major impact on mental health? Yet it's called an apocalypse when opposite becomes a trend.
One's "mental health apocalypse" is another's relief from pressure. If you often hear one angle maybe it's now becoming a chant rather than rational discourse.
Maybe we can do better than approaching this from that one specific angle, and consider both as valid options. Leave the people with choice, and let them pick whatever is best for them. [1]
[1] My anecdata shows most people given the choice pick their homes or places they like over the office, and offices nowadays are almost empty. But obviously it's anecdata, doesn't mean "everyone" wants it that way (they don't) and YMMV.
Preface: I don't think full WFH will happen after COVID, I think companies will try it and slowly end up reverting back to more of a partial WFH schedule like Microsoft just announced, for a number of reasons.
That being said, I agree with you here. I our current work situation right now is causing a ton of stress and mental health issues, but COVID and our current political climate have a much bigger hand in that than just the WFH part. What WFH looks like right now is not what a 100% WFH lifestyle would look like in a year or two. I've had the ability to WFH when ever I wanted for the past 4 years and I can tell you, my current WFH situation is much more draining that it ever was before.
I think your video game analogy is pretty spot on. There are problems with 100% WFH, but "mass mental health issues" just seems like a boogieman.
The thing mostly talked about is social isolation and it seems pretty straight forward that going from time in the office to the same time at home reduces social contact.
Yeah, for me it's less "working was my only social interaction" and more "with covid, we can't work in person and we also can't go do our own things with friends."
Losing in-person work relationships at the same time as social relationships is rough. Luckily I get along well with the person I live with, but the lack of ad-hoc social interaction is unsettling.
Or, it’s good that people will be forced to build social networks outside of their work, as it was a bad development that citizens began to depend heavily on work for meaning and connection.
People have always relied on work for building social lives. Even when I worked in a shop, I'd end up going for drinks with those people and making friends. When I moved to a new city, my entire social fabric stems off of work (even if the majority of friends are now 1 or 2 steps removed, I needed that foundation to bootstrap).
We're already in a loneliness epidemic, WFH will make that 10x worse.
You’ve misread my point, and are arguing against something I didn’t say. I never said that people didn’t have social networks at work before, I said that they didn’t depend so heavily upon them.
People used to also have extensive social networks outside of work through various religious and social institutions, most of which have withered in the past 20 years or so. This is a huge part of this “loneliness epidemic” you mention. We should rebuild those so that people alternating their work structure isn’t a debilitating blow to their social network. This is particularly important since people change jobs much more rapidly now, which disrupts any social network based on work.
I completely agree. I'm single and have worked from home for years, minus a brief contracting gig in an office a few years ago. I made sure to make time for seeing people though. I have friends in my neighborhood and we would meet up for lunch or tea during the week and I would always go out on the weekends. With social distancing it's been really challenging.
I'm fortunate that I have friends that are also careful that live close to me that I can still see. It's not as safe as completely isolating, but I also weighed the risk of completely isolating myself from everyone and I decided that I had to be okay with a certain amount of risk of infection. People don't really talk about the death toll of mental health problems, but it's substantive in certain demographics. I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone.
Complete isolation is not a sustainable plan. I've been looking at what my lifestyle is going to be like until we start getting this under control, which doesn't look like it's coming in the short to medium term.
I'm not telling you to completely isolate, but this is wrong:
> I keep telling my friends that you can't eliminate risk, just mitigate it to an amount that you're comfortable with, and that amount is different for everyone
This is a pandemic, any risks you consciously take are risks you're forcing the people around you to take too.
No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
I don't know about this argument in general: it seems about the same as saying we shouldn't criticize people for drinking and driving because they should decide their own risk tolerance. Sure they're deciding the risk to themselves, but they don't necessarily get to unilaterally decide their tolerance to risking others without criticism.
That's a solid metaphor but it ignores that there's a considerable downside to self isolating. No one has major mental health issues because they can't drink drive. If someone proved medically that they had to drink drive or feel suicidal I'd have a hell of a lot more sympathy for them risking it.
The reason he's confused is that he's thinking of isolation in terms of its impact on community transmission rate. That should definitely be part of your personal calculations (evaluating your personal risk without concern for any risk you create for others is sociopathic, if common).
But the truth is that even the most basic measures of isolation would suffice to properly mitigate the community risk if the community would broadly take them, and the most severe personal isolation on my part will not protect the community in any meaningful way if they don't.
Wearing a mask when it's appropriate and avoiding crowded/unsafe spaces is really all we owe our community. Anything further you do should be based on your personal evaluation of risks - I'm more isolated because we have high-risk relatives that we see regularly.
Edit: It's worth noting that this position is specific to the pandemic in question - it's totally plausible that we will get another pandemic later that requires us all to take more stringent isolation measures. And the evidence suggests that we will probably all die.
You don't think that in the next one, people will be more willing to believe that all the freezer trucks full of bodies in the streets actually exist, and that the nurses and doctors all over the world saying "this is really bad" aren't crisis actors? Because I'm inclined to agree we're screwed.
> No single person can set the amount of risks he wants to take, it has to be decided globally.
globally is a bit of a stretch, but people already do this on a local level. this is what is happening when the government imposes/relaxes restrictions on the number of people that can be at an indoor gathering, the types of businesses that are allowed to be open, whether restaurants can offer indoor seating, etc. as long as the person isn't exceeding the limits set by their democratically elected government, shouldn't they be free to set their own risk tolerance?
There are other risks around mental health, so you have to balance them. I’m a single person who is an extrovert and I get depressed when I’m not around people — to the point it’s hard to function.
The balance is different for each person. Being intentional about the people we share space with goes a long way; nobody I know is going to concerts or crowded bars which makes contact tracing a lot easier.
The fact that you're being downvoted shows how American HN is. You're plainly correct, and anyone who isn't indoctrinated in the Cult of Individualism knows it. The nations that have performed the best this year have been the more collectivist ones.
Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand and probably some others I am forgetting. By the obvious metrics - fewer deaths, fewer cases, smaller impact on economy.
What's also becoming very apparent is how many people use work as a means to escape an unhappy home life.
Things like an unhappy marriage can be dealt with by being at the office a lot, or working at home in a big enough home that you can remain isolated. The current situation forces a lot of these issues to come to a boil.
Even if you're just unhappy with who you are and what 'home' means for you, being forced to deal with it can be rough. Work is to many workaholics the same way a bar is to alcoholics. It's a place where a coping mechanism becomes not just a way to deal, but a sign of success.
Home can equally be a place to escape an unhappy work life.
I've always tried to keep my work, domestic, and social life separate. I work in an office and I live with flatmates/roommates who aren't close friends. My work problems stay in the office, my domestic problems stay at home, and my social/relationship problems don't follow me home. It's less about one or the other being a coping mechanism, but my (lack of) capacity to deal with multiple problems simultaneously.
I don’t think it’s family vs not family. It’s all about personality. To wit: If you’re single, work from anywhere you want is great. But if you have a family, not having a place to escape the distractions of home life can be a disaster.
I'm single, and transition to WFH has made a great improvement to my social health.
Sure, all people need social interactions. But these interactions don't need to be defined by work. I work in caffe 10 meters from my apartment. Sit with laptop in the park. Meet with friends. I don't drive, don't use public transport, but walk an awful lot.
And thanks with great, mostly asynchronous communication at my workplace, I sleep as much as I want to, and work exactly when I feel like it, and never ever hear or see my colleagues — only text, mostly comments as opposed to instance messaging. Sometimes I just slack off for three days straight. Sometimes I go into work binge for a non-interrupted 20 hour refactoring session. Not even because there's some deadline, feeling of responsibility or any other kind of negative motivation like that — just because I enjoy it and don't want to stop!
I feel like I've been on vacation for the last three months, and yet repository stats show me that I'm more productive as I've ever been.
Oh, and the best thing about all of that? I live in a country with much lower cost of living than US, but thanks to headlines like this, I feel that I'll soon be competing for exactly the same jobs and salaries that SF engineers.
My dog is my work buddy. He's always around, gives me an excuse to take a lunchtime walk, always available for cuddles when I need it. I have a family, that are with me in the evenings, but a pet during the day is a great companion.
> But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
During COVID I would say this is more of a problem but in my 8 years of remote work I don't really miss the office at all. In normal times you can get out if you want to head to a coffee shop or something. We do video calls which seems to help some of the team members feel better about the situation. Having a commute was absolutely the most stressful thing for me.
I do most of my socializing outside of working hours. Being alone and remote doesn't seem to effect me but I'm also super introverted. I understand this may effect extroverts differently.
everyone has to get out of the house and making actual friends in life. co-workers aren't friends, bosses aren't friends, clients aren't friends, work relationships aren't friends. we all need human interaction... join a club, a gym, yoga, bike club, whatever, just interact with people that doesn't involve talking about work. and sitting home and playing video games while good, isn't getting outside.
It really saddens me whenever I see this (apparently common) sentiment on HN. Through every job I've had, I've met some of my very best life-long friends. My wedding party is over half people that I met at work. A couple of my former bosses are people I see every couple of months (pre-covid) and are invited to my wedding. Even one of my past clients is someone that I keep in touch with regularly (for nothing related to work).
Not everyone at work is going to become your best friend, but if you're automatically assuming that anyone you meet through your job is completely "off limits" for friendship, you're really hurting yourself. I can't imagine working at a place like that.
HN takes it a bit too far, but there is some wisdom in maintaining a boundary between work and personal stuff. like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I treat work friends as a sort of "probationary friend". I'm happy to meet up and do stuff outside of work, but I'm a bit more guarded than I would be with someone I don't work with. I might hesitate to introduce them to some of my more "out there" friends (for whatever reason I seem to attract a lot of very weird people). once we no longer work together, they can just be a normal friend.
>like suppose you are struggling to recover from alcoholism. you might want to confide in your close friends. you might not want to share this with friends from work. you almost certainly should not share this with your boss, even if you consider them a friend.
I would absolutely share this with my "work friends" and even my current boss. When one of my previous bosses shared with me that he was having trouble at home with his spouse, it wasn't like he suddenly became a bad boss. If anything, it helped our work because it gave me the opportunity to be more understanding when he seemed more worn out or needed to leave early for the day to go spend time with his family. If he had told me he was struggling with drinking, then I would know that maybe we should go play sports rather than to our weekly happy hour. We build each other up, both inside and outside of work, because that's what friends do, and it has the nice side effect of making our professional careers better, too.
Perhaps I just have had a lucky stream of working on unicorn teams, but I would hate to work at a company where I couldn't share details of my life with the people that I spend 40-60+ hours a week with. Obviously every workplace and relationship is unique and you aren't going to share everything with everybody (I'd share the above details with my current boss but by no means with all of my bosses), but I don't understand this attitude that you shouldn't share anything with anyone that happens to have a common employer.
To me, work is just another facet of our relationship alongside the many other facets, no different than if we had met through volunteering or went to the same gym. I don't share everything with every coworker, just like I don't share everything with every other person that visits my gym. But I also don't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they are my coworker, just like I wouldn't shy away from sharing things with someone just because they also use the same weight set that I do.
I'm not saying you shouldn't share anything with anyone, but there are some things where the upside of sharing isn't worth the potential downside. when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist! unless your issue is so severe that it can't possibly escape notice, and/or you have a good plan to fix it very soon, there's just no reason to share this kind of stuff.
also, I would say work is quite a bit different than a gym. it's a lot easier to find a new gym than a new job, and it's much less disruptive to your life if you have to do so.
> when dealing with someone who is responsible for evaluating your job performance, it's unwise to volunteer reasons for them to doubt that. it's hard to judge productivity, especially for engineers. if you go through a rough patch but say nothing, people might never notice that you were less productive for a month or two. if you tell your boss you're having an issue with alcohol/drugs, they might perceive a drop in productivity that didn't even exist!
My boss and I have a good enough relationship at work where I'm 1000% confident this wouldn't happen, and if said boss did "perceive" some kind of drop in productivity, their response would be to help me with that rather than turn it into a negative. Indeed, during COVID when I expressed to my boss that I was having a tough time, his immediate response was to ask how he could help and to offer me a couple days off to recharge.
And the reason we have that relationship is specifically because we treat each other as friends that also happen to have a working relationship, rather than letting the work relationship dominate all else.
Not everyone will have that kind of relationship with their boss, but I believe it is something everyone should aspire to rather than immediately rejecting it as even a possibility.
there is always the exception to the rule and i'm glad that your workplace is an environment you can share stuff like that. however, for most of us, we would get fired or condemned if we spoke freely like that.
It makes me even sadder when people's social circles and even their entire social network align strictly with work.
I've met plenty of good friends at work, but I'm very happy my social network includes mostly people doing different things with their life. It means there is much more breadth of perspective, and you realize very easily that work isn't everything.
It sounds like you also might not have had much experience in the current "everyone is friends!" startup office culture. There's a pretty strong pressure to socialize all of the time, during lunch and after hours, with everyone. The people get laid off and they are erased from that social circle, typically people won't even communicate with them anymore. It's repulsive.
I think all of what you are describing is a symptom of letting the "co-worker" facet of a relationship dominate all other facets. In other comments I've been using the term "work friends", but I use that term loosely because the reality is that they are first and foremost "friends", it just so happens that our friendship was first kindled through work.
For me, being co-workers is just one small facet of our friendship. We do talk about work sometimes, just like sometimes we talk about sports teams we have in common or other hobbies. But we don't only talk about work. I don't feel that my perspective is limited at all because my co-workers have introduced me to their spouses, who might be in totally different industries, or to new hobbies such as surfing or soccer, or brought me along on trips to new places or encouraged me to volunteer. All of these things have expanded my perspective greatly, and if you trace them back far enough, all of them are originating from my co-workers.
In your startup example, I have been on teams where this culture was the case, and certainly with some people I have completely lost touch after they/I left the team. But for others, even though we worked together work was not the dominating reason that we were friends. When I left the team we lost that one facet of our relationship, but our friendship still survives because we have many other facets that facilitate it.
So I think the problem isn't when someone's social circle aligns strictly with work. I think that's fine. I think the problem you are describing is when it turns into a "work-dominant social circle" rather than "a social circle that just happens to have the same employer in common".
Furthermore, I think the "anti work friend" attitude is counterproductive to this. People are saying "don't spend your time building friendships with co-workers because if you leave work you will lose your friend". But if you carry this attitude and don't build a friendship that is strong outside of work, then of course your perspective is going to be limited to work, and of course you will lose your friendship with that person once your work ends. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
I think it's important to make the distinction that while you can be friends with your colleagues it's very important to also have friends outside of work. Having friends from work is great, but if you only have friends from work then you have nothing outside of work which isn't healthy (for example, if things start going poorly at work then it can feel like you are trapped).
I disagree. At any of my previous jobs when work started going poorly, my friendships were, if anything, a boon to me because I had a support system that immediately understood my work situation and challenges. They were immediately in a position to help because of their close proximity both to me and the challenges at work I was facing. After leaving one job, the relationships with my "work friends" were invaluable to me in helping me find another job since they were in the same field and had connections I could leverage.
Outside of work, my "work friends" and I go out to eat, go play sports together, hang out at each other's houses, etc. We talk about work sometimes because it's obviously a common interest, but our friendship doesn't revolve around it, and if someone severs their relationship with the employer that we have in common, it does not mean our friendship also severs.
I would look at this from a different angle. Work friends have extreme pressure to be around you. They get paid to be around and collaborate with you. You can't easily determine the extent of a relationship standing on its own merit if someone is literally being paid to collaborate with you. With that said some of my best friends came from former jobs as well, but if we're talking about emotionally vulnerable people they especially need relationships outside of work. Imagine all of your relationships being tied to work and inevitably you get fired (as most people will experience in their life). That would be devastating without support outside of work. What if it turns out your friendships only lasted because of the financial incentives to be around each other and common in-office conversations?
tl;dr; relationships outside of work are important and that's not sad to me because it doesn't prevent anyone from also having friends inside of work.
I consider my coworkers to be my friends and it's one of the reasons I like working at my current company.
I agree that having lots of different outlets for connection is great, and I also acknowledge that there are a variety of ways in which work can complicate friendships. But, if I'm going to spend 40+ hours per week on work, I'd like to do it alongside people I genuinely like and care about.
i did that for almost 20 years where i previously worked. i thought of my co-workers as family and friends and it got me no where and caused lots of stress (its hard to say no to someone when they are friends). i don't know, maybe it had more todo with co-dependency than anything else.
now i've been working at a place for almost 3 years and i'm not friends with a single person here. i don't let these people know my business and have a complete separation of personal and work relationship. i honestly have less stress cause i can say no without giving a crap if my co-worker gets mad at me or doesn't want to talk to me (which i prefer). i do my job and go home to be with my friends and family.
also, if another opportunity comes my way, i have no problem giving my 2 weeks notice and packing my bags. life is a lot better now.
I have friends in my running club, cycling friends, Peloton (half virtual, half local) friends, friends from cities I used to live in, friends who have moved away.
If you have family, work from home is great...sometimes. It depends on the people. Sometimes small children, or even adults, are better able to cope with you being occasionally gone, than with you being there, but don't bother them. You could end up either being continually interrupted, or else having to say some variant of "stay away from me" to a loved family member. Neither is a good situation.
Not to mention that some people, for financial reasons, must live in places far too small to spend their waking lives in along with their sleeping lives.
Hah, I feel the opposite. Having my family at home is what makes WFH unbearable. I'm constantly exposed to the stress of getting a child through the hybrid learning school schedule.
I get absolutely no quiet time or alone time during the day, whereas my office has many quiet places for me to clear my mind for a few minutes.
I can only speak from my experience, but being a single man living alone in a one bedroom after moving to a new city in January was absolutely awful. After spending two months in a new city, everything was immediately shut down and I was stuck working at home in my 13x13 room I rented.
The room I slept in was my office and my dining room as well, not to mention my entertainment room. Instead of seeing all my coworkers (who I was fond of) every day in the office, I now saw my small team during our 15 minute stand ups, which would only occur about 2 or 3 times a week. I saw the gas station clerks more.
I hated it, and I didn't really have a support system. I'm in my final year of university now (that work experience was an internship), and I will definitely look primarily for places that will have an actual office environment.
I think we are already seeing it. I think the increased polarization I am seeing this US election cycle and here in Canada is partly due to this effect.
I'm not so sure about that. "This" WFH situation we are now in is very different from what a normal remote-only situation would be like after COVID times are over. People are at their wit's ends right now because they cannot do many of the things outside of work that they used to do. If you have a small child, you used to be able to take them with you on errands and impromptu meetups with other parents and families to break up the day and entertain them.
Now, many people carefully plan out these occasions to make sure they're not bringing anything back home to their own family members. The same can be applied to childcare and even senior care. In normal times, you wouldn't have your kids home all day to interrupt you and require help with schoolwork (or even logging into Zoom).
Additionally, I've found the hardest part of this year is that there just isn't much to look forward to on the weekends - no big group dinners to celebrate birthdays, no vacations to other cities, no bar nights with old friends.
>If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.
I like the break from my family. I didn't get it during WFH. Enjoying being back in the office now.
It's all just different strokes.
Having some companies that choose to go all in on remote gives those people who it suits them some options and for those of us who prefer WFO we know to avoid those companies.
It's polarizing, so I think it's good if companies kinda just go one way or the other.
There is already a disaster in being forced to go into the office for some of us. For those of with social anxiety issues, being forced to come into the office every day is incredibly stressful. I haven't had a single panic attack since we went remote for Covid. My mental outlook changed from struggling to get through the day to enjoying life.
When companies say they're allowing permanent WFH, we have to consider this in the context of a non-covid world. After lockdowns are over, people who work from home will not be isolated to the same extent. They can go to a restaurant or park and eat lunch. They can see neighbors in-person. It will not be nearly as isolating as covid-induced WFH is.
Anecdotal but this is exactly what has happened to me. I live alone and have been WFH since March. It's gotten harder and harder and since September I've had outright moderate depression. It's directly linked to WFH and living alone.
The better solution is to not have empty lives outside of work. I realize that's a hard problem to solve, but it's worth solving, and maybe WFH will help spark that change.
It's a harder problem to solve when you've moved across the country (or world) to work for years at companies that actively cultivated a world of "work and play at work"/"hang out after hours" with legitimate professional incentive to participate.
There's a real sense in which Bay area tech companies invested in social infrastructure to make living in a place where you have no real personal connections sustainable, so if they stop providing that benefit, it can be a real problem to those with less social resources.
If you have family, work from home is great. But if you're single, staying cooped up alone at home can be a disaster.