Why working from home might not be as good for you as you think, says a startling new book

September 2019 and I am in a chic cafe when Brittany arrives. Long-limbed and athletic, her smile widens as she sees me. ‘Hey, love your dress,’ she says. At £30 an hour I’d expect no less. For Brittany, 23, is the ‘friend’ I have rented from a company called Rent-A-Friend.

Founded by an entrepreneur who had seen the concept take off in Japan, and now operating in dozens of countries including the UK, its website has more than 620,000 platonic friends for hire.

As we chat, at times I forget I am paying for Brittany’s company. But just as the meter on our encounter begins to run out, she ramps up the charm. Smile perma-fixed, banter upped, she gamely joins me in trying on hats in a shop. Apparently, they really suit me — although presumably she would tell me that whether it was true or not.

It’s a sign of our times that a growing economy has emerged to service those who feel alone. Even before the coronavirus pandemic triggered a ‘social recession’ with its restrictions on gatherings, one in eight Brits did not have a single close friend they could rely on, up from one in ten just five years before.

Three-quarters did not know their neighbours’ names; the problem had become so significant that, in 2018, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, appointed a Minister for Loneliness.

The rise of remote working — before the pandemic made home-working the norm, it was already estimated that, by 2023, more than 40 per cent of the workforce would be working remotely the majority of the time — risks making loneliness significantly worse.

Data from other countries is similarly troubling. In Japan, crimes committed by people over the age of 65 have quadrupled over the past two decades — with many believed to be choosing prison to escape their isolation by committing minor offences such as shoplifting.

Yet the youngest among us are the loneliest. In the UK, three in five 18-to-34-year-olds say they are lonely often or sometimes and, in the wake of Covid-19, that is likely to be significantly higher. We are in the midst of a global loneliness crisis and none of us is immune.

Indeed, loneliness is making us physically ill. The research shows that it is worse for our health than not exercising, and twice as harmful as being obese, and as bad for our physical health as a 15-a-day cigarette habit. Which also makes it an economic crisis. Even prior to Covid-19 in the UK, employers were losing £800 million a year because of loneliness-related sick days.

Why? The chemical presence of loneliness in the body — the stress hormones it sends coursing through our veins — is essentially identical to the ‘fight or flight’ reaction when we feel under attack.

Our bodies are not designed to be repeatedly lonely. By keeping us in sustained ‘high alert’, loneliness over time damages our immune system and leaves us more susceptible to illnesses, including the common cold and the flu.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

This state of affairs didn’t emerge overnight. Smartphones and, in particular, social media have played an integral role: stealing our attention away from those around us and fuelling our worst instincts even during lockdown.

Alongside the local online groups in which neighbours who had never spoken before shared advice, racist attacks escalated on social media and counsellors told me of a spike in clients feeling lonely because their partners were even more consumed by their phones.

Just having a smartphone with us changes the way we interact: researchers found that strangers smile significantly less at each other when they have their smartphones with them.

Moreover, the danger is that the more we adopt a contactless lifestyle, the less naturally adept we become at connecting in person. Already, before the pandemic, we could bypass the server and order a Big Mac on a giant screen, avoid a conversation with a bookseller by having our reading matter recommended by Amazon’s algorithm, and order restaurant meals to our homes via delivery apps. Is it not inevitable that we feel lonelier even if surrounded by people?

By 2050, almost 70 per cent of people will be living in cities. Yet when confronted with all those people our response is often to withdraw — whether by covering our ears with headphones or burying ourselves in our phones.

The speed of life does not help. Urban walking speeds average ten per cent higher than they were in the Nineties, and the wealthier a city the faster our pace — time is money. Texting on the go, it’s easy not to notice others.

Meanwhile, our cities are being designed to keep ‘undesirables’ out: ‘seats’ in bus stations barely wide enough to perch on, pink lights to highlight uneven skin are installed as an ‘anti-loitering strategy’ targeting vain teenagers.

However, we all pay the price. That sloping bus-shelter seat is not just inhospitable to ‘loiterers’, it makes it harder for the person with a walking stick to take the bus to go shopping or meet friends.

But it is not just our physical environment that is making us feel lonely. A decade ago, if you needed to discuss something with a colleague you would probably have walked over to their desk.

A 2018 global study found that employees typically spent nearly half their entire day sending emails and messages, often to people a few desks away. Remote working exacerbates feelings of isolation: office gossip, laughter and small talk were just some of the things people missed during lockdown.

We are in the midst of the most significant reorganisation of work since the Industrial Revolution, with power increasingly ceded to technology. That has allowed increasing numbers of workers not just to be watched — warehouse workers wearing scanners to track how fast they are moving — but also constantly rated.

Uber driver Hasheem explained to me why, counter-intuitively, a job which appeared to demand so much interaction felt so isolating: ‘As I can’t risk offending a passenger because of how they might rate me, most of the time I am silent.’

In response to our loneliness, a new business model sees community itself as a product it can sell: commercial co-working spaces with names such as Work.Life, Second Home and WeWork. The trouble is that community is not something one can buy. People have to invest time and participate if it is to thrive.

TALK TO YOUR BARISTA

If we are to come together, we all have significant roles to play. Some of this is about each of us taking small steps that may not seem much, at first glance.

In 2013, sociologists investigated whether ‘micro-interactions’ had a quantifiable effect on people’s wellbeing.

Staking out a coffee shop, they recruited arriving customers to take part in an experiment: half were instructed to make friendly small talk with the barista, while the other half were told to ‘avoid unnecessary conversation’. Though the interaction lasted just 30 seconds, the ‘friendly’ group reported higher levels of happiness.

Given how important face-to-face interactions are, as we seek to rebuild our post-Covid-19 world, we need to acknowledge the important role entrepreneurialism can play here. Many local businesses that contribute to community — often independent shops and cafes — are under existential threat.

If there were ever a time to take up former Sainsbury’s supermarket chief Justin King’s call for a halving of business rates for high street stores — a campaign the Daily Mail has been supporting — it is now.

We each must do our part. We need to support our local cafes, even if that means paying a little more. We need to commit to shopping, at least some of the time, in local stores rather than online, Without us, it will be impossible for them to stay afloat.

More generally, we need to interact more with those around us. Slow down. Chat. Smile — even if we are wearing masks. Now, more than ever, we must be prepared to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of our communities.

There is also a cultural shift that is needed, so that compassion is accorded the value it deserves. The ‘claps for carers’ that echoed across the world must be translated into something tangible.

At the same time, a number of factors, including ever greater emphasis on productivity and ever longer commutes, have combined to make socialising either during or after work less and less the norm.

In a 2016 UK survey, more than 50 per cent of respondents reported never or rarely eating lunch with colleagues. Yet just taking a break at the same time as other employees can make a big difference for both morale and productivity, studies show.

Similarly, we should not embrace remote working unthinkingly. As we have known for some time, loneliness can be remote workers’ toughest challenge.

When U.S. blogger Ryan Hoover, 33, posted on Twitter last year that he was writing about remote working and wanted to know people’s biggest frustration, loneliness was the most common issue cited by the 1,500-plus respondents. Most alarming, though, was that several had noticed the impact creeping into their daily lives.

‘When I stay alone in front of the laptop for a long time and then go out somewhere, I feel like I forget how to talk and communicate with people properly for a couple of hours,’ said one.

Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom, one of the leading researchers into home-working, has found ‘it’s very easy for remote workers to get depressed and uninspired at home’.

In a 2014 study he ran, in which 8,000 Chinese employees were randomly assigned to work at home for nine months, half of them opted to return to the office at the end, even though they had an average commute of 40 minutes each way.

What this suggests is that employers should resist the cost-cutting temptation to significantly ramp up remote working after the pandemic.

And, as most of us humans who Zoomed our way through lockdown came quickly to realise, communicating via screens, while better than communicating exclusively by email or text, is still a limiting experience. The loss of full-body gestures and subtler cues makes communication more prone to misunderstandings and the bonds between us less strong, while challenges with internet connection speeds can make face-time feel actively disconnecting.

This is why most companies that successfully deployed remote working before the pandemic were ones that circumscribed the amount of days employees worked remotely.

Laszlo Bock, the former head of human resources at Google, investigated the optimal amount of working-from-home time and found it to be just one-and-a-half days a week — allowing employees both to connect with each other and to do uninterrupted work.

‘The reason tech companies have micro-kitchens and free snacks is not because they think people are going to starve between 9am and noon,’ he told The New York Times, ‘it’s because that’s where you get those moments of serendipity.’

At work, as in our private lives, contact beats contactless.

We should be aware, too, that even with a clear office-home divide, for many our jobs had already become inescapable at weekends, evenings and on holiday because of that repeat offender, our smartphones.

We must ask ourselves how complicit we are in this always-on culture. We check our phones an average 221 times each day, yet one landmark study found that when it came to improving subjective wellbeing, deleting Facebook was up to 40 per cent as effective as attending therapy.

So, commit to digital-free days. Deploy ‘nudges’ that might help curb your cravings — putting all your social media in an inconveniently-placed smartphone folder, or deleting your social media apps.

You might even want to consider buying an intentionally ‘low-tech’ device.

FUTURE IN OUR HANDS

This is also a time of hope — a real opportunity to create a different future. Already, the humble phone call has surged in popularity.

In the UK, mobile phone operator O2 revealed that a quarter of its clients aged 18 to 24 phoned a friend for the first time ever after lockdown began in March.

The NHS was founded in the aftermath of World War II: a powerful symbol of a new commitment to compassion.

Now, too, is the time for game-changing steps from politicians and businesses.

For instance, governments could use today’s unemployment challenges to create a new workforce of people paid to help others feel less lonely.

But taking personal responsibility daily will be just as crucial. We need to rush less and stop and talk more.

We need to encourage our children to ask the child sitting alone at lunch whether they would like company.

We need to show more gratitude to those who care for others, and say thank you more — whether it’s to our partner, our colleagues or even to our new artificial- intelligence helpers such as Alexa, so that we do not lose the habits that foster human relationships.

The antidote to the Lonely Century can ultimately only ever be us being there for each other.

• Adapted by Emma Rowley from The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz, published by Sceptre on September 10, £20. © Noreena Hertz 2020. To order a copy for £16 visit books.mailbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3308 9193. Free p&p on orders over £15. Valid until 11/09/20.