Working from home and quiet loneliness: what is lost when the corridor disappears

At five the door opens and your partner asks how it went. You say fine — three meetings, report submitted, nothing special. Then you stop and realise something that frightens you a little: today you spoke out loud, in person, to another human being only once. You said “thanks” to the courier.

You weren’t alone. You were on calls all day, answering messages, someone sent you a smiley. And yet you’re left with the feeling of having spent the day behind glass. You don’t quite know what you miss. Nobody there was especially close to you. It was just — the corridor.

This post is about working from home and the loneliness that quietly settles in alongside it. Not because working from home is bad — I’ll write about its advantages too — but because something gets lost with it that isn’t in any contract, and which we therefore don’t know how to name.

What the corridor was

When people describe what they miss about the office, they rarely mention meetings or their desk. They mention coffee with a colleague from another team, a quick word by the printer, a co-worker who asked in passing how the holiday went. They mention the receptionist who called them by name. None of these people was a friend. And yet together they formed a kind of network in which you felt, every day, part of something.

The corridor was also a place where work happened outside the official channels. That’s where you found out a reorganisation was coming, that the boss was in a bad mood, that a colleague was looking for a new job. That’s where you sorted out in passing a misunderstanding that would have taken three days by email. As a family therapist in training, I see something very familiar here: every system — a family or a workplace — has an official structure and an unofficial one, through which information and feelings actually flow. The corridor was the unofficial structure. When it disappeared, it wasn’t only the chat that went. Part of the system went.

The strength of weak ties

In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter published an article with a title that seems almost contradictory: The Strength of Weak Ties. He showed that people often find new jobs through acquaintances rather than their closest friends. The reason is simple: friends move in the same circles as you and know the same things you do. Acquaintances reach elsewhere.

In 2014 the psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn carried this idea over from information to wellbeing. Participants in their research reported more happiness and a greater sense of belonging on days when they had more brief contacts with weak ties — classmates they weren’t particularly close to, people they ran into every day. Not conversations with best friends, but the small exchanges we usually don’t even count.

And these are exactly what working from home cuts off first. You still hear from your closest colleagues — you have scheduled calls. With everyone else, you don’t. The economist Nicholas Bloom and colleagues carried out a well-known experiment at a Chinese travel company, where some call-centre employees were randomly sent to work from home. Their performance rose by 13 per cent. But when the experiment ended and they could choose again, according to the authors more than half of those who had worked from home went back to the office — and loneliness was among the main reasons they gave. Better performance and worse wellbeing can exist side by side.

A system without a corridor

The systemic view says something else that people who work from home often sense but can’t quite name. When a team is scattered, the system doesn’t disappear. It just moves — into private messages, into calls you aren’t invited to, into channels you don’t know exist. The alliances and triangles that were once visible by the coffee machine become invisible. I write more about how a team splits into camps in Office coalitions.

The result is a feeling people describe as “I’m always the last to know”. That isn’t necessarily paranoia. If you aren’t in the room, you don’t hear what’s said in passing in the room. And because information is missing, people fill the gap themselves — often with what they’re used to thinking about themselves. Someone who grew up feeling unseen in their family will quickly read silence in the team as proof that, once again, they aren’t seen. I wrote about how early attachment patterns show up in the relationship with your manager and colleagues in Attachment at work.

In their 2007 meta-analysis of research on remote work, Gajendran and Harrison found that working from home mostly did not harm the relationship with one’s manager. But for those who worked from home for most of the week, relationships with co-workers deteriorated. Exactly those horizontal, everyday relationships the corridor used to carry.

When your partner becomes your only colleague

The system at home changes too when you work from home, and we often notice this last. If all day you have no one to share the small things with — irritation at a meeting, a funny message, relief that something has finally been handed in — it all builds up until evening. When your partner comes home, one person gets everything that used to be spread across ten people.

It’s a load nobody notices until it snaps. Your partner is tired from their own day and needs quiet. You need conversation, because there hasn’t been any all day. There’s a short explanation of why a change in one part of a system rearranges everything else in The family as a system.

This is how an evening might sound when it comes to the surface (composite, not a real person):

“Why are you so quiet again? I wait all day for you to get home.”
“Because I’ve been talking all day. I need half an hour before I can listen to anyone again.”
“And I haven’t been with anyone all day.”
“I know. But I can’t be all of your people.”

The last sentence hurts, but it’s honest. Nobody can replace a whole network. If your partner becomes your only source of contact, the relationship is overloaded and the loneliness stays — because it wasn’t loneliness for your partner, but for everyone else.

Boundaries between home and work

The organisational psychologist Blake Ashforth and colleagues described how every day we move between roles — from “employee” to “parent”, from “colleague” to “partner”. These transitions need something to mark them. The commute was such a transition: twenty minutes in which you put down one role and got ready for the next. Working from home, there is none. You close the laptop on the kitchen table and half an hour later eat dinner at the same table.

People differ here. Some like to blend roles — they hang out the washing between two calls and feel good about it. Others need a clear dividing line, or work seeps into the evening and the evening into work. It isn’t about a right or wrong way, but about knowing which one is yours. You’ll find a short explanation of what personal boundaries are, and why they don’t mean walls, in the knowledge base.

Loneliness and blurred boundaries often reinforce each other. Without a dividing line you work longer. Working longer leaves less time and energy for people outside work. With fewer people around, you look for contact in work messages at nine in the evening. And the circle closes.

Working from home isn’t the enemy

It would be unfair if this post came across as saying the office is the answer to everything. It isn’t. The same meta-analysis by Gajendran and Harrison showed that, on average, working from home gave people a greater sense of autonomy, less conflict between work and family, and slightly higher job satisfaction. For many it meant being able to walk the children to school, getting an extra hour of sleep in the morning, avoiding a colleague around whom they tensed up every day.

For some people the office is a source of constant strain. People with social anxiety, people who need quiet to concentrate, people caring for an ill family member — all of them have often found a relief in working from home that would be wrong to dismiss. Loneliness exists in the office too: you can be among people all day and talk to no one. I wrote about what it’s like to be lonely in the middle of people in Lonely at the top.

So the question isn’t whether working from home is good or bad. The question is what you lost when you closed the office door behind you, and whether it can be brought back in some other way.

How to recognise quiet loneliness

Loneliness isn’t the same as being alone. It is the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need. That’s why it is often hard to recognise when you work from home — after all, you’re “connected” all day. Some signs people describe:

• You wait for your partner to come home as if for a rescue and feel let down when they aren’t ready to talk.
• You look forward to meetings with unusual eagerness, even when they’re pointless — because they’re the only time you hear voices.
• You feel a reluctance to leave the house that you didn’t know before. The world outside seems tiring, even though you miss it.
• Small work matters seem bigger than they are — a curt reply from your manager bothers you all afternoon.
• The days merge, and by Friday you aren’t quite sure what happened this week.

In a 2010 meta-analysis, the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues showed that people with stronger social relationships had around a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period than people with weaker ones. That doesn’t mean working from home is dangerous to your health. It does mean that contact with people isn’t a luxury you allow yourself once the work is done. It’s a need worth planning as seriously as a meeting.

An exercise: a map of your weak ties

You can do this exercise today after work. You need a sheet of paper and twenty minutes.

1. Draw three circles. Write yourself in the middle, the people you’re close to in the inner circle, and in the outer circle the people you had brief, regular contact with — at work, in your neighbourhood, at activities.
2. Compare with the time before you worked from home. Which people have disappeared from the outer circle? Write them down by name or description (“the security guard at the entrance”, “Tina from finance”).
3. Find three places where the outer circle could fill up again. The same bakery every day, exercise at the same time, working in the library one morning a week, an arranged coffee with a colleague from another team.
4. Choose one and put it in your calendar for this week. Weak ties grow from repetition: the same person, the same place, the same time. A one-off event isn’t enough.
5. Decide on your transition. A short ritual that marks the end of the working day — a walk around the block, a change of clothes, the laptop closed away in a drawer. Something that stands in for the journey home.

The exercise won’t get rid of loneliness in a week. But it helps you see that what you miss isn’t some vague “socialising”, but very specific people and moments that you can at least partly bring back.

Where this view isn’t enough

When the loneliness isn’t caused by working from home. Sometimes working from home simply reveals something that the bustle of the office used to cover: that you have no close friends, that the relationship with your partner has long been empty, that you have withdrawn from people for reasons you don’t know. Then weak ties won’t be enough — you need to look deeper. I wrote about how your world changes when you lose people who mattered in When a friendship ends.

When it’s depression. If you withdraw from people because you have no energy for them, if nothing brings you joy and this has gone on for several weeks, the loneliness may be a consequence, not a cause. I wrote about why depression makes us withdraw just when we need people most in Why depression makes you withdraw just when you need people most. In that case, talk to your GP. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, in Slovenia call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day).

When there is no choice. Everything I’ve written assumes that you have some say in how and where you work. Many people don’t. If your employer decides for you, the question of how to work from home without loneliness is also one worth raising with your team or management — not only as a personal task.

What to remember

• When you work from home, weak ties go first — the small, recurring contacts that give a sense of belonging.
• The corridor was part of a team’s unofficial system; when it disappears, information and alliances move to where you can’t see them.
• If your partner becomes your only source of contact, the relationship is overloaded and the loneliness remains.
• Working from home has real advantages — the question is what’s missing that you can deliberately bring back.
• If withdrawing from people lasts for weeks and nothing brings you joy any more, talk to a doctor.