No, remote work is not making us miserable

People like working from home. It lets us avoid commutes. It lets us live closer to family. It seems especially good for the parents of young children, and it could even boost birth rates.

This seems like an indisputable tech success story. Thanks to a plethora of modern technologies and applications—the internet, smartphones, VPNs, video calls, instant messaging platforms like Slack, cloud-based software and documents, and so on—remote work has become a possibility for more people than ever, and that's a good thing.

But are we all kidding ourselves about the benefits of remote work? Are we suffering from false consciousness? Do we only think we like it while it's actually making us miserable somehow?

You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth's sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.

Name<br>This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Email(Required)

SUBSCRIBE

That's what labor economists Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel suggest in a very frustrating New York Times opinion piece based on a very frustrating study published in Science. "Our estimates…indicate that remote work explains a third of the deterioration in mental health between 2011 and 2024," write Harrington and Emanuel, the authors of a forthcoming book about the benefits of office life.

Their claim—that remote work is responsible for a full third of mental health declines over the past 14 years—is pretty wild, and it immediately sets off some alarm bells. So let's look a little closer at how this study was conducted and what it might actually mean.

'Remotable' workers, not remote workers

Harrington and Emanuel's study didn't actually compare mental health measurements between remote and non-remote workers. It measured the differences between groups they refer to as "remotable" and "nonremotable"—those in jobs capable of being done remotely and those in jobs it's not usually possible to do outside of a job site.

"Remotable" workers weren't necessarily working remotely, and "nonremotable" workers weren't definitively non-remote.

Without actually comparing remote and non-remote workers, it would seem that they're simply capturing differences between people in different types of professions. In other words, this study might tell us about how mental health has declined more in people with desk jobs than among those doing service jobs, medical work, or manual labor. But it doesn't really tell us about the effect of remote work per se.

Those in "remotable" jobs did work from home more than those in the other category, according to the study's figures. Roughly 31 percent of workdays in the former group were fully remote by 2024, compared to around 9 percent of the workdays of those in jobs classified as non-remotable. That's a real difference, but not as large a gap as you might expect from the terms being used, which reinforces the possibility that we might be looking at something other than the effects of working from home.

Remote work, or the pandemic?

The researchers here looked at data spanning 2011 through 2024, excluding 2020 and 2021. But the shifts causing alarm happened mainly in 2022–2024.

"With fewer social encounters, workers in jobs that can be remote saw steeper increases in distress, mental health visits and prescriptions for antidepressants than other workers did," Harrington and Emanuel write in the Times. "This increase in depression…began in 2020 and has not abated, which points to remote work as the driving force."

Hmmm, I can think of something else which began in 2020 and might have caused an increase in distressed feelings. If it hit remote workers (or "remotable" workers) harder, that could be in part because pandemic-era socializing was often limited to work, which meant many remote workers didn't see anybody while at least "essential workers" got some social interaction. In addition, being potentially exposed to COVID-19 regularly through one's job may have helped decrease panic about the virus generally and/or increase a propensity to see others outside of work, since exposure was already possible anyway. (Put another way, people in remote jobs, capable of locking themselves up inside during the day, may have been more likely to try to stay hermetically sealed all of the time.)

Or, again, maybe we're just looking at how people employed in different types of jobs—who likely differ in socioeconomic status and many other ways, not just in their occupations—reacted to the pandemic and its aftermath. Perhaps we're looking at differences in post-pandemic economic prospects, or something else.

The disparities have still "not abated," they tell us— but, remember, the mental health data they looked at only goes through 2024. It's possible that lingering effects of the pandemic hadn't worn off yet then but have come around by now or will come around soon. It's also possible that various...