At the beginning, back in March, the surrealness of daily life was enough to distract from the loneliness. Working from home involuntarily, seeing my newsroom colleagues’ and neighbors’ faces pop up on Zoom — a medium once reserved for long-distance or international communication — felt, above all else, eerie and bizarre. “Just wild,” we all said one another, with a mix of awe and anxiety.
But by April, when the “new normal” began to feel actually normal, one particular memory of my old office began to creep into my mind in idle moments.
It was a Friday evening in January, the end of a week when news had started breaking at a relentless pace on Monday and hadn’t let up since. The image of all of us — journalists and editors, sitting in tall chairs around a table in our office kitchen, blowing our cheeks out and laughing and sipping beers before we all caught the subway home — became my personal version of Leonardo’s “Last Supper.”
Now, when newsworthy events were once again materializing at breakneck speed, a beer by myself at home just wasn’t cutting it. Would I ever again get to spend this kind of therapeutic, spur-of-the-moment time with people who knew precisely what kind of week I’d had?
For more than seven months now, office workers worldwide have been working from home to help curb the spread of Covid-19. As a result, millions of us have lost a crucial source of daily interaction with other adults.
It’s too soon to tell whether chronic loneliness is increasing. Research conducted after a month and a half of lockdown doesn’t show an increase in chronic loneliness, but the subtraction of office culture from adults’ daily lives inhibits two kinds of relationships that play important roles in preventing it. So the long-term consequences of a prolonged, widespread loss of work as a social environment are perhaps yet to be seen.
One key relationship the office provides is “weak ties,” or social interactions with people who aren’t family or close friends. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, pointed out that these types of relationships can increase our sense of belonging and happiness, which can reduce social isolation and help stave off loneliness’s detrimental health effects.
Robert Morrison lives alone in Austin, Texas, and is the lead animator for the video-game developer Certain Affinity, which went remote in March. He misses his work friends. “There’s always a lot of interaction outside with the team when everyone’s hanging out and having a smoke or vape,” he remembered of pre-pandemic work life. He estimated that the smoke-break chatter broke down to about 80 percent work and 20 percent relationships, life updates and jokes.
Now, this ritual has disappeared from his weekdays. Mr. Morrison has been broadcasting live from his home on Twitch and YouTube. Interacting virtually with strangers all over the world, he said, is a “way to mitigate some of that loneliness that we’ve been feeling.”
For me, running into co-workers in the office kitchen and the ladies’ room sink served the same function as Mr. Morrison’s smoke breaks. According to Dr. Holt-Lunstad, these kinds of brief, spontaneous encounters can be beneficial to our health.
A friendly hello in a hallway, a door held at an elevator entrance or a “How was your weekend?” in the office kitchen, despite being gestures one could make out of habit, always made me feel like part of a little community. In other words, a co-worker relationship doesn’t need to be a close friendship to be worthwhile.
That said, a second powerful deterrent to loneliness is meaningful relationships — and for many adults, the office is a space where real friendships flourish. Patricia Sias, a professor of communication at the University of Arizona, has spent 30 years researching workplace dynamics and relationships, and she’s found that friendships between colleagues are common.
By virtue of the fact that you’re co-workers working at the same organization, probably in a similar or same role, you already have a lot in common,” she said. A workplace can be “almost like an incubator for friendships, because already you’re selecting people who are alike.”
Indeed, four years ago, I went to a birthday party for a newsroom colleague I was particularly close with and met my future fiancé, who had worked with that colleague in a previous media job. Next year, I will marry my work friend’s work friend, and the three of us still convene regularly to talk shop about our industry.
Dr. Sias also noted that research has linked having a friend to blow off steam with to lower levels of stress, which can benefit overall mental and physical health. The coronavirus’s shuttering of offices, then, means that much of the work force is now alienated from both friends and professional peers whose company might be valuable in overwhelming moments on the job.
Meredith Schleifer, who lives in Rockville, Md., does legal work for a government office. Since March, she has been working from the home she shares with her husband and their 4- and 6-year-olds.
Before the pandemic, Ms. Schleifer frequently popped into her colleagues’ offices to check in about work projects. She also used to drop in “almost daily” on a colleague whose office was a few doors down from hers. Often, the two women talked about work, but sometimes not; sometimes they ran errands together over the lunch hour.
Now, Ms. Schleifer — who paused midsentence when we spoke to respond to a query about the whereabouts of glue sticks — misses the “adult time” the workplace used to provide, and catches up with her work friend about once a month via instant message.
“I’m just so busy,” she said. “I feel badly that I forget to check in on her.”
Ms. Schleifer seemed to realize during our conversation just how much she missed her work friends, and I realized talking to her just how much I missed mine. It’s become a common pandemic-era joke to refer to one’s dog or spouse or baby as “my co-worker.” But in reality, Ms. Schleifer has been finding that the company of her children isn’t quite like that of like-minded adults.
After seven months spending all day every day together, my partner and I would give just about anything for the opportunity to politely ask, “Any fun weekend plans?” in earnest as we fix our lunches.
Neither Ms. Schleifer nor Mr. Morrison has a hard date for when they’ll go back to their workplaces. I have no idea when I will work in an office again, either. For us, and for millions of workers all over the globe, the future stretching out before us is one without lunchroom conversation, without the quiet chatter before a meeting officially starts, without small talk at the bathroom sink.
It is a future without so many of the small daily pleasantries and weekly catch-ups that make us feel noticed, included and connected — a future that seems pretty lonely.
Ashley Fetters (@AshleyFetters) is a reporter at The Washington Post.
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