Dr. Shahar Madjar, Journal columnist

My neighbor works from home. I commute to work, sometimes for long distances, seeing patients in remote locations. This past winter, after nearly 300 inches of snow, I often thought about him while driving through blinding snowstorms, my hands firmly gripping the wheel, the heater blasting, my knuckles white. I imagined him sitting in front of the fireplace, peacefully tapping on the keyboard, helping customers with their IT problems. Even worse, I imagined him sitting in a virtual meeting, conducting business while wearing a jacket, dress shirt, and tie above the desk, and pajama pants and slippers below it.

A touch of envy crept in and lingered until I read an article in the prestigious journal Science, written by Natalia Emanuel and colleagues and published on June 4, 2026. Their study was titled “Home Alone: Remote Work, Isolation, and Mental Health.”

The researchers set out to address a crucial blind spot in our understanding of the modern workforce. While previous studies and corporate surveys had widely established that remote work boosts employee retention and maintains high productivity, very little was known about its long-term effects on human well-being. Prior research had shown mixed signals regarding mental health, often failing to separate the stress of working from home from the general chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic itself. The researchers wanted to determine whether remote work inherently drives social isolation and worsens mental health.

The team employed a rigorous methodology. Rather than looking at a handful of companies or relying on brief self-reports, they merged data from five nationally representative U.S. surveys spanning from 2011 to 2024, amassing a sample of 588,322 respondents.

To avoid the classic scientific hurdle of reverse causality–where people who are already feeling depressed might simply choose remote roles–they compared individuals in “remotable” occupations, such as software engineering and IT, with those in inherently in-person occupations, such as healthcare and hospitality. Crucially, they omitted the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 from their calculations, allowing them to capture the structural shift toward working from home rather than the temporary anxiety of lockdowns.

The results were striking and sobering. The study found that remote work substantially increases the amount of time a person spends completely alone each day. Workers in remote-friendly occupations spent an average of 1.1 additional waking hours alone on workdays. Even more jarring, the share of people experiencing an entire day without any human contact increased sharply. On a broader scale, the researchers calculated that the shift toward working from home explains roughly 36 percent–more than one-third–of the nationwide increase in social isolation and mental distress observed between the pre-pandemic era and the 2022-2024 period.

This distress was not merely subjective; it translated into measurable behavioral changes. Workers in remotable occupations showed a statistically significant increase in mental health service utilization, actively seeking mental health consultations and experiencing a corresponding rise in psychiatric and anti-anxiety prescriptions.

This distress did not affect everyone equally. While the mental health impact was relatively modest for people living with family members or partners, it was substantially amplified among individuals living alone, whose increase in psychological distress was nearly double that of those living with others. For these solo dwellers, daily isolation was associated with markedly higher levels of psychological distress. Their likelihood of spending an entire day completely alone rose by 7 percentage points, reaching approximately 83 percent. Even groups we might expect to benefit from the flexibility of working from home, such as working mothers or individuals with disabilities, did not experience reductions in distress. Instead, the overall distribution of workers shifted toward higher levels of anxiety and sadness.

The study is notable for both its scale and methodological rigor, utilizing data from more than half a million individuals across more than a decade to provide a bird’s-eye view of a major societal transformation. However, it is not without limitations. One drawback is that the analysis tracks people in remotable occupations rather than directly measuring whether each individual was working fully remotely, in person, or in a hybrid arrangement. Economists have also noted that the overall decline in well-being, while statistically significant, is modest in magnitude and may partially reflect other post-pandemic social changes occurring simultaneously. Furthermore, because the data end in 2024, the study cannot assess whether people eventually adapt to prolonged remote work.

Ultimately, the study concludes that shifting the primary place of work from a shared office to an isolated home carries measurable psychological costs at the population level. It strongly suggests that workplace proximity provides a valuable source of everyday human interaction that helps support mental well-being.

Should corporations issue an immediate, mandatory return-to-office order? Not necessarily. Instead, the takeaway is that organizations and hybrid workers should coordinate specific in-office days to maximize meaningful social connection, while fully remote workers may benefit from intentionally cultivating strong social networks outside of work.

Yesterday, as I was returning home from work, I caught a glimpse of my neighbor’s front yard and thought about his remote work arrangement. His grass didn’t look greener than mine.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist and the author of “Is Life Too Long? Essays about Life, Death and Other Trivial Matters.” Contact him at smadjar@yahoo.com.