Factually! with Adam Conover - Work From Home is Making Us Miserable

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

You might think you like working from home, but we're starting to see the harm.--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. So I know we've all mostly memory-hold the pandemic, right? We've put all our thank-you bang-bang pots back in the cabinets. Our sourdough bread recipes have been shredded, and our animal crossing towns sit neglected and unloved. Oh, Raymond, he's probably dead by now. But, you know, there's actually one big cultural shift the pandemic caused that's still with us today. Remote work, otherwise known as work from home.

The pandemic pushed work life out of the office. and into all of our living rooms through this annoying set of apps, Slack, Zoom, and, if you're really unfortunate, Microsoft Teams. I'm praying for you, honestly. Now, this was a huge historic change in how humans perform labor. Since the Industrial Revolution, work generally required you to show up to a place you didn't want to be, to do a thing you didn't particularly want to do, but remote work lets you build your wage prison from anywhere with Wi-Fi.

And work from home has exploded in popularity. since the pandemic. The number of people working remotely quadrupled this decade, and more than a third of Americans worked from home all or some of the time last year, and that's actually up from the year before. So work from home is now a large and seemingly permanent feature of American work life. Now, that sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? I mean, after all, 80% of workers in a 2024 poll said they'd be happier working remotely. And why not? I mean, It cuts commutes, it makes it easier to care for kids and pets, and it lets you do work with your pants off.

And who doesn't love that? I mean, the breeze on my balls right now is delightful. Well, I'm afraid I've got some bad news here because you might be a remote worker yourself. You might wish you were a remote worker. You might think that you love remote work. But the truth is, work from home is probably making you miserable. If you're a young person, it's making you poorer

and it's definitely making our entire society less racially equitable. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but in this video, I'm going to explain why. Now, again, there are definite benefits to remote work that I am not going to ignore or paper over. Working from home saves people real time and real money. One study found that the pandemic shift to work from home

saved Americans 60 million hours in commuting time every day. And that wasn't just one dude who was commuting 60 million hours to his... He lived way too far. He wanted a big house. He wanted to live far away. I mean, not having to pay for gas, dry cleaning, or stuffing your face with Panera's famous Green Goddess Chicken Cobb salad stuffers for lunch adds up. One estimate says that remote workers save about $6,000 a year.

And working from home is also a serious benefit for parents and caretakers. It makes it possible to balance work and family life in a way that was really not possible before. And that is a real benefit that I'm not going to argue with. But the rise of work from home has also hurt and disadvantage. a lot of people who we almost never talk about. For instance, you only benefit from not having a commute if you have a job in the first place,

and remote work is making it much harder to get hired at all, especially for young people. Since the pandemic, unemployment for college graduates under 30 has increased by 20%. And unlike every other problem in the world right now, this one is not caused by AI. A study from the New York Fed found that two-thirds of the increase in unemployment for recent college

grads is due to work from home. In fact, that number was already rising before chat GPT entered the picture. Instead, it started going up right as remote work took off. Why would that be? Well, when you can only communicate with your coworkers over text or video chat, it makes it a lot harder to interact with them. For instance, it makes it way harder to seek and receive feedback, which is, you know, the exact thing every new worker needs to learn how to do their jobs.

I mean, just think about how much extra effort it takes to get an answer to a question, over Slack or Zoom, then it is to just use your human voice to speak with someone in the same room as you. Hey, Adam, I have a question about your notes on page three of the scripts. Sam, it's too late. We're recording the video. I just made the changes myself. Well, nobody slacked me.

If no one slacks me, how am I supposed to know? Yet another excuse from Lazy Gen Z. We're the same age. Look, a job is not just a series of tasks. It's a social ecosystem full of other people. people. And if you never have the chance to see or even meet those people in person, it's harder for you to learn how to be a part of that ecosystem or how to do your job. Like, okay, my first job in a comedy writer's room was for college humor. And by being around

the other writers who worked for the site, I learned how to pitch jokes by watching which ones made them laugh. Because I was able to walk over to a producer and just ask them a question, I learned how to write a script that a director would actually be able to film. And for hanging out with my boss at the time, I learned how to kiss ass. Oh, that little man's butthole was covered in smooches. And that really taught me a lot about how Hollywood works. A million little lessons seeped into me from that experience, not just from doing the job itself, but from being around the other people who are doing the job too. And that social universe is most important when you are just starting your career. I mean, when you're stuck talking to your coworkers of a certain age

over Zoom, you can't get to know them over Happy Hour. You can't teach them how to use TikTok in the break room or impress them with your on-trend yet tasteful office siren outfit. In fact, you can't be a person to them at all. Instead, you're just a face in a box in an app, a face they've never seen before, an avatar that just keeps typing Slay over Slack. And they're like, what is Slay? Does this person want to assassinate me? I mean, that is why bosses in remote workplaces hire young workers less and fire them first, often with zero explanation over video chat. We've decided to park ways with you.

Yeah, I'm going to stop right there. It just doesn't make it. It just doesn't make any sense that you guys has still not been able to give me a reason why I'm being let go. Do you guys even know who you're talking to? Like why you're letting these people go when you don't even understand like the kind of work and everything that they've put in? I hear you in what you're saying.

And sure, bosses can be assholes in real life too, but at least they have to be assholes to someone who's in the same room with them. They have to look you in the eye while they do it. But work from home turns you from a human being, part of your workplace's social universe, into a widget that the boss can just drag and drop into the trash without a second thought.

A log in just waiting to be revoked. And when that happens, especially to a young person just starting out, it has serious repercussions. If it takes you more, time to find your first stable job that has ripple effects throughout your life. It reduces your future wages and stalls career progress. Delaying your first job has an impact on all the jobs you'll have in your life. But while older generations had the opportunity to start their careers in a full social world,

young people are being systematically robbed of that chance in a way that is taking money and opportunity directly out of their pockets. But you know, it turns out that in-person human relationships aren't just important for your work life. The connections you form at work are also essential to your personal well-being. I mean, as you've probably heard, we are more isolated than ever as a society. A quarter of adults report having no social or emotional support in their lives at all. That means one in four people have no friends. And that's not because they're losers, they're just stuck on the computer all day, you know, like losers. And in 2023, you know, back in the days when the government

still did medical science, the Surgeon General declared loneliness to be the most serious mental health crisis facing Americans. Now, why might we be feeling so lonely? Well, guess what the number one place is for adults to form friendships? It's not church or your neighborhood run club, that's more like a cruising spot for straight people. The number one place for adults to make friends is work. And that shouldn't be a surprise because you spend a third of your life working. And it might be nice to do that around other people rather than cooped up in your apartment. Now, of course, loneliness and isolation were already rising when work from home took off. So when we suddenly took millions of people out of the social workplace and made them start

spending eight hours a day on their laptops, well, it poured gasoline on the loneliness fire. The fires of loneliness, the metaphor doesn't make sense, but you get it. The results have been very bad for mental health. There was a recent study that looked at nearly 600,000 people between 2011 and 2024, and it found, quote, that remote work substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health, particularly for those living alone. And you know it's serious when our sponsor Ground News tells you that both left and right-leaning sources agree on this. Like, if you want to see how the press covered this study, check out our sponsor Ground News, because it's not just important to see the science itself. You want to see how the media covered the story,

and Ground News gives you that context and lets you cut through misinformation and media. a bias with features like factuality ratings and ownership details. For instance, Ground News tells us this story was reported on by 48 different news sources, meaning it got a lot of attention. And this story has a high factuality score, which takes into account the credibility of the sources, how fast corrections are made, and whether the language retains context. We can also see that 67% of the story's coverage was from media conglomerates, while 11% of the sources were independent news.

And when you can see the ownership categories for each news source, you can tell exactly where your news is coming from, whether that's a big government entity or wealthy private owners. And if you're worried you're going to miss something in the news, well, guess what, Ground News has a blind spot feature that lets you check your own bias. If you consume news primarily on the left, for instance, this feature spotlight stories that got little to no coverage

by left-leaning outlets and vice versa. So if you want to use Ground News to get a deeper perspective on the stories that matter to you, well, use my special code factually to get 40% off. Just go to groundnews.com slash factually for 40% off. And as always, if you want to support these videos directly and the people who make them, you can head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month to get to every video we make ad free,

and we'd love to have you as a member of our online community as well. And if you want to support these videos and the people who make them directly, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month get to every podcast and video we do ad free, and we'd love to have you as part of our online community as well. So why would working from home affect mental health so deeply? Well, the answer is that we are social animals. We need social contact with other humans to survive and thrive.

But 84% of remote workers spend their day totally alone. And this big study found that workers with fewer social encounters experienced more distress, had more mental health care visits, and were prescribed more antidepressant medications. It found that work from home accounted for one third of the increase in mental distress over the past 13 years. And this has been a distressing period. Like a lot of other shit has happened.

Yeah, sure, one third of my distress is the rise in violent fascism. One third is anxiety about climate change and AI, but it turns out the last third is just that I'm fucking lonely. Now again, at this point you might be thinking, Adam, what are you talking about? Working from home doesn't make me sad. I like it. Or hey, maybe you're watching this on the toilet at the retail job

that makes you miserable, saying, fuck you, Adam, I would kill to work from home. And look, I'm not going to argue with you. That is your experience. It is real, it is valid, and a lot of other people would say, the same if we ask them anecdotally. So how can we explain this discrepancy between our intuition and the science? Well, researchers say that this is because the mental health costs of working from home

happens slowly and incrementally. The damage builds without us noticing at first. It turns us into frogs, boiling in our own loneliness juices, slowly going insane. Hey, it's me again. Just wanted to chat, you know, check in. Yeah, I'm recording right now. Oh, I get it. You're busy.

You're so busy. But old Sam doesn't ask for much, does he? It's okay. Microsoft co-pilot loves me. Co-pilot is my friend. I mean, look, I experienced this myself. You know, when the pandemic hit, I was working on my Netflix show, the G-word, with a bunch of other writers and other funny people,

until we all had to go work from home by ourselves. And at first, I thought working from home was great. I thought it was even liberating. But slowly, it got to me. I started to realize that I felt sadder, more depressed than usual. You know, when we were facing down a tough deadline, I couldn't laugh about it and blow off some steam with the other writers. Instead, I was just stuck with it, marinating alone in my apartment.

I mean, sure, work is always going to suck to some extent. But it does suck a little bit less when you have someone next to you to share it with. And again, I'm going to keep stressing this is not everyone's experience for certain people. Work from home has real benefits that outweigh its downsides. Maybe you're a parent with young children and remote work gives you the flexibility you need to care for them. And hey, you get plenty of socializing when you're taking your kids to their play dates at the toddler park or whatever. Good for you. But your experience is not everyone's and not everyone who would benefit from remote work gets to.

And that's why there's a big problem. even with the good things about working from home because it increases inequality. See, the jobs that benefit the most from work from home tend to be white-collar jobs. So those benefits go to lawyers and software engineers, not construction workers, and dental assistance. More than half of workers with a college degree get to work from home at least some of the time, but less than 20% of workers without a college degree do. That means work from home increases educational inequality. And because,

Because bosses and managers have the power to, well, manage, they can choose to work from home while their employees can't. So the benefits of working from home are essentially a regressive subsidy for the haves in our society, for the people who already have it better off. And it gets worse because remote work policies exacerbate racial inequality in the workplace, because black and Latino people are likely to work in occupations that don't have access to working from home. So they don't get that $6,000 a year in savings.

They don't get that child care flexibility. And even when they're up for a job that does offer the ability to work from home, black and Latino people are still less likely to get hired for that job. In other words, bosses are using remote work to be even more racist. And they were already pretty racist. And that's not the only way that remote work policies transfer power from the worker to the boss. You know that narrative about how employees love work from home and all the bosses hate it? Well, it's not totally true.

Many bosses love work from home, even when they're demanding their employees return to the office. And, hey, why wouldn't they? It saves them money on office space. It actually makes the workers more productive. And oh my God, it is so much easier to fire employees over Zoom. That must feel awesome to them. It's the boss equivalent of a Thanos snap. I feel powerful.

Mass Zoom firings have become a fixture of work in the 2020s. fired hundreds of people that way last year. And here's the Better.com CEO, eliminating 15% of his staff in one Zoom call. Your employment here is terminated, effective immediately. This is the second time in my career I'm doing this, and I do not, do not want to do this. The last time I did it, I cried.

You know, I'd actually be delighted to see this man cry. I'd also love to see him scream in hell. Or, you know, in a pinch, I'd take him dying quietly of an an aneurysm and shitting his pants. I mean, this was so transparently evil that the show Succession satirized it without changing anything about it. There's no easy way of doing this. I've done this a couple of times this week and sometimes honestly just makes me cry. But this is a very sad day.

And I thank you for your time today and your service to Waste Our Royko. Goodbye. Done. Yeah, you know you're a piece of shit when you're getting quoted verbatim by cousin Greg. Bosses love work from home because it helps them ignore your humanity. And you know why they love that? Because your humanity gives you power. Again, the workplace is a social world and your existence as a social actor is a form of real power that you have in your workplace. For instance, when workers form unions, we use the social bonds between us to do it. We organize

by looking each other in the eye, seeing each other as people, and recognizing that we're all in this together. And it's kind of hard to do that when instead of an office or a factory, you only work together over Zoom. You can't run into your coworkers in the break room or the parking lot. Hell, you might not even have all of their contact information. And it's kind of hard to ask someone, hey, how is the boss screwing you when you're talking over Slack where the boss can see it? Your personhood, your presence, your relationships with other human beings. Those things are valuable. They are important. They give you power, especially in the age of AI. But working from home flattens that. It strips that power away from you and turns you into not a person, not even an

employee, but just an avatar on a screen. Or worse, an agent, an interchangeable program, just like the AI they want to replace you with. So what can we do about all of this? I mean, we can't abide. I After all, the boss is still like it, and so do many workers. So it's not going away anytime soon, nor should it. I'm not suggesting that we get rid of remote work for workers who have it and like it. But right now, work from home is just an HR policy instituted by the boss. What we need instead is social policy that gives the benefits of working from home to everyone while reducing the harms that it causes.

We should pass laws that process. pass laws that provide greater benefits to mothers, fathers, and caretakers regardless of their jobs, like paid parental leave and guaranteed elder care. No one should have to choose between work and taking care of a loved one, no matter what your job is. We should require workplaces to offer flexible schedules that allow you to work remotely a couple days a week when you need to, but also allow you to come into the office so you can meet and organize with other workers and tell the boss off together if you need to.

Many workplaces are going hybrid like this, but not enough to stop all the day. damaging effects, we should make sure that more do. And how about we add more and better mass transit to make commutes less expensive and more pleasant? And to combat the isolation of work from home, well, we could add new social infrastructure, places for people to plug in socially

after they clock out. Parks, rec centers, third spaces of all kinds. Hey, maybe we could have community co-working spaces. You know, like a version of we work that serves the public rather than being a giant pyramid scheme that turns into a streaming documentary, you could go there, hang out, meet other people, maybe check out

book, oh, it could be like a library except we could fucking fund them properly. The nature of work has changed and our world has changed along with it. We've gone from bowling alone to scrolling alone and there's no going back. But there's no reason that this has to be so unfair and so bad for so many people. I mean, my sad writer Sam shouldn't be chain smoking alone in his apartment over Zoom. That's not healthy. He should be smoking in an office tower parking lot surrounded by his friends. That was a HeadGum podcast.

What's up everybody? I'm Kyle Mooney. And what's up everybody? I'm Beck By. And man, ooh, we got something to tell you. Oh, yeah, we definitely do. Yes, it's a brand new podcast on HeadGum. That's right. And it's called What's Our Podcast? Yep. And that's because we don't have a single idea what our podcast you'd be about. Yeah, we don't. So we actually have guests come on and they tell us what they think our podcast should be about and then we try it.

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I'm gonna go do it right now.