A sweeping study of 588,322 American workers, published in the journal Science last June, found that workers in remote-capable jobs spent roughly one additional waking hour alone each workday after the pandemic — and did not compensate afterward. They socialized less outside of work hours too. That finding — combined with a landmark UK survey of more than 135,000 adults published this week — documents what data has been pointing toward for two years: the pandemic lockdown ended for most of the country in 2022, but for the roughly one in three workers whose jobs went remote and stayed that way, an inner version of it did not.
England Study Reveals Where Loneliness Has Taken Root
The Imperial College London research team, led by public health researcher Dr. Austen El-Osta, recruited 135,725 adults across England for a five-month survey in 2023. Nearly one in six reported feeling lonely “often or always.” More than one in five said they regularly felt a lack of companionship, a sense of being left out, or cut off from others. The study, called INTERACT and published in BMC Global and Public Health, is believed to be among the largest dedicated loneliness investigations ever conducted in a single country.
The pandemic’s fingerprints were visible. Nearly 44% of respondents said COVID-19 had worsened their sense of loneliness, while 48% reported that it had deepened their feelings of isolation.
“Loneliness is often treated as a private experience,” Dr. El-Osta said. “But our findings reinforce that it is also a public health and community issue.”
Senior author Dr. Azeem Majeed, also from the Imperial School of Public Health and a practicing NHS physician, described what the research reflects in his daily patient consultations. “It contributes to problems such as anxiety and depression, increases the risk of long-term conditions, and often leads to more frequent GP consultations,” he said.
Remote Work Removed the Infrastructure
The INTERACT data maps the scale of the problem in England. The Science paper explains, with national-level survey evidence, why it has not recovered.
Natalia Emanuel, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and co-authors Emma Harrington of the University of Virginia and Amanda Pallais of Harvard pooled five nationally representative US surveys covering more than half a million American workers from 2011 to 2024. By comparing workers in remotable occupations — software engineering, finance, marketing — against workers in jobs that require physical presence, and by excluding the acute pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, they isolated the specific effect of the remote work shift that followed.
The result was clear. Workers in remote-capable jobs spent roughly one additional waking hour alone each workday after the pandemic — and did not compensate by socializing more after work. They simply socialized less, across all hours. The authors estimate that the rise of remote work accounts for roughly a third of the post-pandemic surge in isolation observed between the 2011–2019 baseline and the 2022–2024 measurement window.
A companion Perspective published in the same issue put the implication plainly: Emma Zang and Rourke O’Brien wrote that workplaces constitute essential social infrastructure — for many working-age adults, the workplace remains one of the few settings providing regular, structured opportunities for social interaction.
That observation reframes what the remote work debate has been missing. The endless coverage of productivity, engagement, and real estate costs has treated the commute as the main thing workers gave up. The social contact was the larger cost — and because it was ambient, accumulated informally across hallway conversations, coffee runs, and shared lunch breaks, nobody scheduled it, nobody noticed it was gone until the surveys started coming in.
“Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online,” Emanuel and colleagues concluded.
Crisis That Pre-Dates — and Outlasts — the Pandemic
The isolation trend the Science paper documents is an acceleration of a longer decline. In 2018, roughly half of U.S. adults already reported measurable levels of loneliness, a baseline documented before the pandemic fundamentally changed the picture. By 2020, Cigna’s annual Loneliness Index — which uses the validated UCLA Loneliness Scale — found that figure had climbed to 61%. By 2023, with lockdowns long over, it had edged down only to 58%. The pandemic did not create the loneliness crisis; it deepened a structural condition that had been building for a generation, and its aftermath has not reversed it.
The failure to revert is the critical finding. A temporary spike in isolation during a period of enforced lockdowns would have been expected to recover when restrictions lifted. It has not, and the Science paper provides a structural explanation: the primary mechanism keeping it elevated — remote work — is not a pandemic artifact but a durable feature of the post-pandemic economy.
The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection documented the global scale in its landmark report, published June 30, 2025: one in six people worldwide experiences persistent loneliness, a toll linked to an estimated 871,000 preventable deaths every year — roughly 100 every hour. The Commission placed the burden of loneliness on par with other major public health emergencies. “Social disconnection is as deadly as smoking and heart disease,” wrote co-chair Chido Mpemba.
Cities, Not Just Countryside, Bear the Heaviest Burden
One of the INTERACT study’s most counterintuitive findings was geographic. Researchers expected loneliness to concentrate in rural areas, where physical distance from neighbors is a persistent barrier. Instead, they found some of the most chronically lonely people clustered in urban environments: London, Birmingham, and Manchester showed some of the highest rates in the dataset.
“The key message is not simply that many people feel lonely,” Dr. El-Osta said, “but that loneliness is strongly influenced by people’s surroundings, social network, and their environment.” He made the comment in the study’s official release.
This is what researchers call the “urban paradox”: cities that offer greater economic, cultural, and social advantages often produce weaker personal connectivity and lower life satisfaction compared to smaller, more intimate communities. Density is not connection. And the combination of urban density with high rates of remote-capable work — concentrated precisely in major metro areas — may be compounding the effect in exactly the cities where it would otherwise seem least likely.
The pandemic also sharpened pre-existing inequalities in who recovers. Research has found that people with physical disabilities, individuals living alone, those on lower incomes, and those who lacked strong social ties before COVID hit were both harder hit during lockdowns and slower — or unable — to recover afterward. Men with access to team sports and recreational activities recovered faster, because male friendship patterns tend to be built around shared activities. Women’s recovery was slower and more uneven. A 2024 multi-country study found that personal finances and mental health consistently determined who fell into — and who escaped — persistent loneliness, reinforcing inequality rather than equalizing it.
Gen Z Is the Loneliest Generation on Record
Perhaps the most durable counterintuitive finding in the loneliness literature is the generational one. Conventional wisdom has long associated loneliness with old age — bereavement, declining mobility, shrinking social circles. The data now tells a different story.
According to the WHO’s Commission, loneliness is most common among adolescents and young adults, with roughly one in five affected globally. Cigna’s 2023 Loneliness Index found that 71% of adults aged 18 to 26 reported feelings of isolation — higher than any other age group surveyed. Among those working remotely, Gen Z workers reported high-frequency loneliness at double the rate of Millennials, according to the CoworkingCafe 2026 Remote Work Well-Being Survey.
UK research has found that many people — particularly men — experienced what researchers describe as social “pruning” during the pandemic: they discovered that friendships they had assumed were close were in fact more superficial than they had believed, and the habits of regular interaction that had maintained those friendships had quietly atrophied.
What Loneliness Actually Costs
The consequences of persistent loneliness extend well beyond emotional discomfort, and the data on physical and economic toll is specific enough that health systems and employers can no longer treat it as soft.
The Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory established that lacking meaningful social connection carries a mortality risk matching 15 daily cigarettes — exceeding the documented risks of obesity and physical inactivity. The same advisory estimated that stress-related absenteeism attributed to loneliness costs U.S. employers approximately $154 billion annually. Research has linked chronic loneliness to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke, depression, and dementia.
Lonely workers are also measurably less productive. People who describe themselves as not lonely are more likely to say they work harder for their employers than those who do — a gap of about 11 percentage points in willingness to go above and beyond.
Can I Work Remotely Without Getting Lonelier?
The Science paper is explicit that not every remote worker is equally affected. The isolation effects it documents are concentrated among workers living alone. Workers who live with family members or partners show a different pattern — they did not lose as much social contact, because domestic life provides substitute ambient connection.
The research also found that the harm is not uniform across all remote arrangements. Even one or two days per week in the office significantly reduces the isolation associated with full remote work, according to data from the CoworkingCafe 2026 Remote Work Well-Being Survey. The gradient is meaningful: full remote produces the most isolation, hybrid provides a middle ground, and on-site work provides the most baseline social contact.
The policy implication the authors name is accessible: coordinating anchor days, when an entire team comes in on the same days rather than randomly distributed, produces actual incidental social contact rather than the sterile efficiency of scheduled check-ins. An anchor-day policy is not a return-to-office mandate — it is a social-infrastructure policy dressed in workplace language. The distinction matters, because the remote-work flexibility debate has been structured entirely around productivity and real estate costs, and the social health argument has been absent from most employer policy conversations. Emanuel and colleagues’ conclusion underscores this point directly.
What Comes Next
Dr. El-Osta called for public health responses to look “beyond individual resilience and consider the environments, services and community assets that help people feel connected, supported and able to participate,” in the study’s official announcement. Community-level interventions — structured group activities, social prescribing by general practitioners, and “link worker” programs that connect isolated individuals with local support — have shown meaningful results in reducing loneliness, particularly among older adults and those with chronic conditions. Scaling those interventions remains a political and resource challenge that few governments have treated with the urgency the data warrants.
The science has arrived at the same conclusion from two different directions: a population survey documenting who is lonely and where, and a workplace economics study documenting a structural mechanism that explains why the crisis has not self-corrected. The workplace was not just a place to earn a salary. For working-age adults, it was one of the primary environments in which social bonds were quietly, incidentally built and maintained. When that environment changed, the bonds did not automatically migrate online. They shrank.
The pandemic may be over. The structural conditions it normalized — and the isolation they sustain — are still very much in effect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does remote work cause loneliness?
The causal link is now supported by large-scale data. A study of 588,322 American workers published in Science in June 2026 found that workers in remote-capable jobs spent roughly one additional waking hour alone each workday after the pandemic, compared to workers whose jobs required physical presence — and they did not make up the difference by socializing more in the evenings. The study estimates remote work accounts for roughly a third of the overall rise in isolation and mental distress between the pre-pandemic baseline and the 2022–2024 period. Importantly, the effects were largest among workers living alone; workers who live with family members or partners showed smaller differences. Hybrid arrangements — one or two in-office days per week — significantly reduce but do not eliminate the effect, according to the CoworkingCafe survey.
Why are young adults lonelier than the elderly, when they are more digitally connected?
This is one of the most consistent counterintuitive findings in recent loneliness research. Cigna’s 2023 Loneliness Index found that 71% of adults aged 18 to 26 reported feelings of isolation — higher than any other age group surveyed. The WHO Commission on Social Connection confirmed the pattern globally: loneliness is most common among adolescents and young adults. Digital connectivity does not appear to substitute for in-person ambient contact. It may actually compound the isolation by providing a sensation of connection without the physiological and social-bonding benefits that come from physical presence. For Gen Z workers specifically, remote work appears to be an additional compounding factor — they entered the post-pandemic workforce without the prior social networks that older workers had built during years of in-person work.
How can employers reduce loneliness for remote workers without mandating return-to-office?
The Science paper’s most accessible recommendation is anchor-day coordination: rather than individual hybrid workers choosing their office days independently, teams coordinate so that everyone who comes in does so on the same days. This generates the ambient social contact that produces connection — the incidental conversations, the shared lunch, the casual interaction — rather than isolated desk time in a quiet building. Emanuel and colleagues spell this out as a practical intervention. Beyond scheduling, the research supports deliberate informal touchpoints and, for employers willing to invest more, organized activities outside working hours. The Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory also recommends that employers evaluate whether their remote policies are considering the social health consequences — not just productivity and real estate costs — of where people work.
Why is loneliness highest in major cities when cities have more people and more activity?
This is what researchers call the “urban paradox,” and the Imperial College INTERACT study — published this week in BMC Global and Public Health — documented it across England’s major cities. Cities offer more economic opportunities, cultural resources, and social diversity — but that density does not automatically generate connection. Urban environments typically involve more anonymity, less stable neighborhood-based social ties, higher housing costs that reduce time for social activity, and more competitive social dynamics. The combination of urban context with high rates of remote-capable employment — concentrated precisely in major metro areas — may be amplifying the effect: large cities have the highest density of workers whose primary incidental social environment (the office) has been removed.
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