Remote work is bad for you | Mr. Market

Remote work is bad for you

19 May, 2026

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<br>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...