The 4 Biggest Reasons Work-From-Home Isolation Is So Painful

When it comes to working from home and finishing my larger, personal projects, I sometimes feel a little bit like Tom Hanks' The Terminal character, Viktor Navorski. In the film, Navorski has a noble task to fill on behalf of his late father, but he has to figure out how to take care of himself and cope with the delay of progress when he unexpectedly cannot leave the John F. Kennedy International Airport. He explains his plight simply: "I am delayed...long time."

Delayed and, he might have added, alone.

Throughout the film, Navorski has to find small ways to deal with his isolation: He finds one option in impulsively remodeling one of the walls in the airport's renovation zone. In real life, where many of us are still in pandemic- or economic-related limbo about how and where we'll be able to work and reach goals, the need to cope with isolation and delay during remote work is present, too.

One survey of roughly 2,000 adults showed that a third (33 percent) felt "very isolated" when working from home. Most articles that highlight this phenomenon stress the fact that we need other people. We're social creatures, and not being around other human beings messes us up in serious physical and psychological ways, whether the isolation is work-related or not.

But what is it about being isolated during work specifically that's so stressful? Here's what I find to be the most challenging in my own work-from-home life:

1. Expectation with no safety net

When you work from home, there is still a high expectation that you will produce deliverables, whether that's documents, sales, or some other item of value for your business or client. When you are in an office, it's easy to go to a colleague or your boss to collaborate, ask questions, or problem-solve to ensure you can make this happen. When you are home alone, though, you can feel only one step removed from Matt Damon's The Martian character, astronaut Mark Watney, who gets marooned on Mars.

Now, admittedly, most work-from-home jobs aren't going to require that you figure out how to manufacture water from rocket fuel or grow potatoes on a planet where there aren't any. But often, if something breaks or a hurdle pops up, your boss isn't coming to fix it. Neither is IT. Neither is Sam who used to sit in the next cubicle and who always used to have your back. You don't just have to do your job. You have to troubleshoot everything related to your job, and knowing that nobody else is coming--or at least, not knowing for sure what the job or interpersonal ramifications will be if you're late--absolutely can do a number on your blood pressure. For me, this is by far the biggest work-from-home stressor. My guess is that that's also the case for many of you, simply because the fear of being abandoned and unable to get help is so primal to the human experience.

2. Doubting your own picture

Being in an office allows you to interact with others in a way that helps you feel like you have a broader perspective. When you're isolated at home, you start to lose a sense of whether you can, from the itty-bitty corner of your apartment, condo, or house, really understand what the business needs. At the worst, you can doubt not only what the business needs, but whether you grasp the world at all. Do you really know your industry? Your customers/clients? The debate around issues like equality, race, or a million other things? Social norms at all? Or are you just one fat imposter with massive ignorance who just hasn't slipped up yet?

3. Lack of sharing

Most articles point out that isolation is a problem with remote work in part because it can make it harder to collaborate and share innovative ideas. This is true. But you know what else is difficult to share? Excitement. If something good happens, what are you going to do--give yourself a high five? Eventually, things that should feel genuinely exciting don't anymore, because the knowledge that no one will be available in real time to celebrate with you can deflate the energy of the win.

Over time, this repeated experience of being unable to share enthusiasm and joy can make you minimize your positives. Because things seem more lackluster as a result, it's easier to lapse into depression and feel less motivated. If that's not addressed, you can create a self-fulfilling prophesy where, because you don't feel like others will care if you win, you put in less effort and end up with fewer wins you could crow about.

4. Outside assumption of comfort and entitlement

Recently, entrepreneur Elon Musk made headlines when he asserted that people should "get off their god**mn moral high horse with their work-from-home bulls**t."

I grasp that maybe Musk was, in a poorly communicated way, trying to go to bat for physical, on-site laborers and recognize their enormous contributions to society and the economy. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But his comments are wrapped in the assumption that everyone who works from home is wonderfully comfortable and wrapped in feelings of entitlement compared to those who physically labor. As a now-remote worker who has cleaned bathrooms and who watched my parents survive by getting up and doing, I can testify that that is simply not the case.

Referring back to point #1 above, it takes a MASSIVE amount of mental energy to manage everything alone (and I might add, a ridiculously valuable set of individual skills). People who work from home are often trying to manage well while also dealing with a stupidly high number of interruptions or distractions from loved ones. They can be working with their laptop on top of a cardboard box in the bedroom (my husband did this for months), not perfectly ergonomically positioned in a quiet, designated home office. They also often work longer hours because they want to be seen as participating. To have outsiders assume that those who work from home are simply clicking a mouse while eating bonbons and watching our bank accounts tick up is hurtful, especially when many people who are working from home have a work ethic comparable to Musk's--I have the receipts from RescueTime to prove the 70- to 90-hour weeks I've logged.

Musk's sentiment also ignores the growing number of modern industries where on-site doesn't always make financial or logistical sense. In my field of writing, for instance, publications are seeing revenues drop faster than penguins in the Sahara. They're not going to send journalists to do an in-person interview anymore when Zoom will suffice. It doesn't matter if I'm doing that Zoom interview from a company office or my living room--I'm still showing up and creating the deliverable I'm expected to make.

As companies around the world are deliberately getting rid of office space to keep themselves in the black, it's not always the worker's choice about where productivity happens. Some individuals are at home not because that is their preference, but because that ended up being the only way they could find work after layoffs.

But perhaps the biggest slap in the face is the fact that younger generations would be judged negatively for working via laptop after being directly told and pushed to pursue tech-assisted paths. Lots of individuals went into work they could do digitally only because they were convinced by others that other modes of work would become obsolete, not because they wanted to be millionaires or wear a crown of superiority on their heads. To judge these remote workers for following the career advice that bombarded them and shaped academic curricula for years, or for feeling preferential toward that type of career when it was painted as a golden path to basic security, is ludicrous.

Because outsiders cannot follow remote workers through the day as we are isolated, they always will struggle to wrap their heads around our work-from-home reality. The same, of course, is conversely true. I don't know what a specific office environment is like until l live it. But part of the struggle of work-from-home isolation is the challenge of convincing other people that we do feel significant stress and that we don't always have an attitude of entitlement. Just like in-office workers, we need empathy, and it's not always there because no one's around to see what's happening.

For deep connection that combats isolation, people need more than logistics and technology

What I hope comes into focus for you as you finish reading this article is that dealing with work-from-home isolation is not simply a matter of inviting those on a remote team to a virtual happy hour. It's a matter of making people feel like someone unequivocally will come to get them if the mission goes wrong. Of making sure they can trust their own perspective and subsequent judgment. Of making sure wins don't get put on mute. Of showing outsiders what it's like.

These are not elements that logistics or technology alone can fix. They're elements connected to the culture and attitude of the business. So if you want remote workers to feel included, check your company's values and way of life first.

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