The quiet cost of working from home and how to balance in and out.

Most of us love working from home. In 2024, nearly 80 percent of workers said it would make them happiest. We were willing to give up real money to keep it. People say they would take a pay cut of 4 to 10 percent before going back to the office.

Now we are learning what it costs us.

A study published in June  in the journal Science followed more than half a million American workers from 2011 to 2024. The headline is hard to ignore. People in remote-capable jobs have seen their odds of going an entire day with no human contact jump by more than 70 percent. And they do not make it up later. Fewer hellos. Less small talk. More days with no human contact at all.

That solitude leaves a mark. The researchers found the rise of remote work explains about a third of the increase in mental distress across the country during that time. For people who live alone, the damage was almost twice as large.

Here is the part that stays with me. The cost is quiet. It arrives slowly. When loneliness creeps in, we blame a hard season, a rough stretch, getting older. Rarely the empty room.

We built FluidStance on a simple belief. Stillness, as the majority, is the enemy. The body was made to move, and when it stops, something in us starts to dim. This research says the same thing about our connection to other people. Stay seated, stay silent, stay still, and you fade.

The answer is not to rewind to 2019. It is to move. On purpose.

Stand up every hour. Take the next call on your feet. Walk the block before lunch without your earbuds and see who you bump into. Send the text you keep meaning to send, and put a real lunch on the calendar.

Movement is physical. It is also social. Both pull you back toward the world.

Twenty-five years ago, a Harvard researcher named Robert Putnam noticed something. Americans were still bowling, but they had quit joining leagues. They bowled alone. He saw it as a sign of a country slowly pulling apart, trading the clubs and groups that once held us together for time spent on our own.

We are doing it again. This time at work, in silence. And we call it freedom. We do not have to.

Move more with real people. It matters more than we knew.

Here is my "loose" formula for balance.  I protect 10% of my calendar for still, deep work in isolation. 20% of my day for connected work with colleagues, meetings, friends and family and 70% of my day dedicated to getting the job done (Get'n R Done)... some days that is deeper work in isolation and other days that is heavy collaboration.  The secret is protecting the 10, so you can move together in 20 and 70.  

Joel
Founder, FluidStance

Note: Image is AI assisted