What we lose when we work from home

It’s understandably a lower priority at a time of pandemic and Depressionlevel unemployment. But if a lasting effect of the coronavirus is going to be a movement toward working from home, we’re going to need to reckon with the loss for a large group of adults of the only thing resembling a social life they still have.

Children make friends with no trouble. My kids came home from a few days at summer camp with peers they’d never met and were just as quickly talking about “my friends” as if they’d all grown up together. Whether those friendships last is another story, but there’s always new friends to be made to replace the old ones.

Adults don’t work that way. Studies have backed up the truism that adults have a much harder time making new friends after leaving high school or college, and even those are harder to keep because people move around, have kids of their own, are busy with their jobs and don’t have time for each other. The result is a large contingent of adults who are essentially friendless. They may have families, even large families, but that’s not the same thing.

That hole in their lives can be filled through work relationships. Even if the quasi-friendships amount to nothing much more than complaining about work, they’re at least with a group of people with whom you have shared interests, and maybe a few things in common. For adults without much in the way of traditional friends, those are valuable relationships. COVID-19 has taken all that away. With quarantines and office closures soon to enter their fifth month, there has been little movement toward bringing people back into their previously abandoned workplaces. Almost anyone who makes a living in front of a computer can get by just as easily at home, and so millions of people have been skipping the commute and logging on remotely since the lockdowns went into effect. Even as the economy has started to reopen, office space has remained mostly closed.

Now there are questions about what this means for the future, assuming a post-COVID-19 reality is in the offing at some point. Office space costs a lot of money, and businesses looking to save a few dollars are presumably thinking hard about the future need for all that real estate. If the world has continued to function with no one in those buildings, why go back at all, even when it is safe?

But as much as it is mocked, there is something that would be lost with the death of office culture. Workers at a distance can feel unmoored and overly surveilled at the same time. Email and Zoom meetings are impersonal at best, and when there’s no opportunity to stop in someone’s office or engage in an offhand conversation, important connections can be missed. IT, as well, could present a problem as experts try to diagnose and fix every computer problem from a distance.

Then there are the relationships lost. While online dating is today responsible for more lasting relationships than ever, getting to know people through work is still one of the top ways people get together. And relationships don’t have to lead to marriage to be worthwhile, and something to be missed.

None of this means that many people aren’t perfectly happy to work from home, and have been since long before the pandemic. There are many benefits to getting people out of the office, not least of which are the many tons of emissions that never go into the air because fewer people are sitting in traffic on their way into work. Many others have never been able to work from home due to the nature of their jobs.

But even if it’s low on the priority list, the loss of yet another social outlet for a large chunk of American adults seems like a problem that is going to have consequences somewhere down the road. All that real estate might be expensive, but it could be a cost worth paying.