The Really Big Problem with Remote Work and Who is Suffering

Remote Work Is Hurting Young People. Here’s What to Do About It.

Nobody warned the 22-year-old sitting alone in their apartment that “flexibility” could cost them their career, their health, and their social life all at once.

Remote work was hailed as the future workplace. And for experienced professionals with established careers, strong networks, a stable daily routine, and a home office with a door, it often is.

But for young people just starting out? The picture is far more complicated and far more concerning.

The Data Is Starting to Tell a Difficult Story

A 2023 Microsoft Workplace Trends report found that younger workers, those under 35, are significantly more likely to feel lonely, disconnected, and less engaged when working remotely compared to older colleagues. They lack the established relationships that make isolation feel manageable.

A Gallup study found that fully remote employees are less likely to feel connected to their organization’s mission and culture, and that younger employees suffer that disconnection most acutely. Engagement among remote workers under 35 dropped sharply post-pandemic.

According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on Loneliness, adults aged 18 to 34 are now among the loneliest demographic in America. They are lonelier, statistically, than senior citizens living alone. Remote work is not the only cause. But it is a significant accelerant.

A Stanford study found that remote workers are 13% more productive on certain tasks. That number gets cited constantly. What gets cited far less often: that same study found remote workers felt significantly more isolated and were less likely to receive promotions and mentorship opportunities.

Productivity went up. Career trajectory went down. For young workers, that is a deeply unfavorable trade.

What Young People Are Actually Losing

Remote work doesn’t just change where you work. For young people, it changes what work teaches you.

They are missing informal mentorship.

In an office, you absorb information constantly without realizing it. You overhear how a senior colleague handles a difficult client call. You watch how your manager reads a room during a tense meeting. You pick up professional norms, communication styles, and judgment calls simply by being around people who have been doing this longer than you have.

Remote work eliminates almost all of that. According to a 2022 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, young and junior employees benefit disproportionately from in-person work because their learning is so heavily dependent on proximity to experienced colleagues.

They are missing the professional networking opportunities.

Careers are built on relationships. For most of history, those relationships were built in person, over years of shared experiences. The colleague who becomes your reference. The manager who recommends you for the next job. The peer who later becomes a business partner.

A LinkedIn Workforce Confidence survey found that younger remote workers reported building significantly fewer new professional relationships than their in-office peers. The hallway conversation, the coffee run, the post-meeting debrief, well of that translates to Slack.

They are missing the feedback loop.

When you are new to a career, you need constant, real-time feedback. You need someone to tell you immediately if there is an issue or a better approach. You need to know when your communication style is off, when your work needs more rigor, or when you are doing something exceptional.

Remote work stretches and weakens that feedback loop. Junior employees working remotely report feeling less visible, less supported, and less confident about their professional development than those working in person.

They are missing a reason to leave the house.

This one sounds almost too simple to be serious. It is not.

For young people living alone or in unfamiliar cities, the office was often the primary social structure of their day. It provided routine, human contact, a reason to get dressed, a physical separation between work and rest.

Without it, many young remote workers report their world quietly contracting. The apartment becomes the office, the gym, the social life, and the break room, all at once. And that is an enormous psychological burden for a 24-year-old still figuring out who they are.

Finding Friends

Most people find their friends, and their romantic relationships, through work or work acquaintances.  Remote work drives young people online, where the connection is not the same.

The Mental and Physical Health Toll

The numbers here are hard to ignore.

According to the American Psychological Association, young adults aged 18 to 34 report higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression than any other age group, and that gap has widened significantly since 2020.

A survey by the CDC found that during peak remote work periods, nearly 63% of adults aged 18 to 24 reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, compared to 31% of adults over 65. Young people, paradoxically, are suffering more than the elderly during a period of social isolation.

Sedentary behavior is rising sharply among remote workers. A study published in the Journal of Occupational Health found that remote work significantly increased sitting time and decreased physical activity among young employees. Without a commute, without walking to meetings, without the basic physical movement that an office day provides, many young remote workers are barely moving at all.

Poor sleep habits, irregular eating patterns, and the collapse of daily structure are consistently reported among young remote workers. When work, leisure, eating, and sleeping all happen in the same 400-square-foot apartment, the boundaries that protect mental health dissolve.

The Hidden Career Cost

Here is what may matter most in the long run.

A study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that remote workers, particularly junior employees, received fewer promotions, smaller raises, and less access to high-value projects than comparable in-office colleagues.

Visibility matters in organizations. It always has. And remote work makes young workers functionally invisible in ways they often do not realize until it is too late.

By the time a young remote worker notices their career has stalled, their in-office peers may have already built two or three years of institutional relationships, organizational knowledge, and professional reputation that are extraordinarily difficult to replicate over a screen.

So, What Do You Actually Do About It?

If you are a young person working remotely, the answer is not to suffer through it and hope things improve. The answer is to build the structure that remote work removes. Here is how to do it.

Get Out of the House Every Single Day

This is non-negotiable.

Your apartment is not designed to be your entire life. The human brain requires novelty, movement, and environmental change to function well. Staying inside all day, even a productive day, takes a compounding psychological toll.

Set a rule: you leave the house at least once every day, for a purpose beyond getting the mail. Walk to a coffee shop to work for two hours. Work from a library. Walk around the block before you start work and after you finish. It sounds minor. The cumulative effect is not.

If you have the flexibility to work from a coworking space even two or three days a week, do it. The ambient energy of other people working around you is something remote work cannot replicate and that your nervous system genuinely needs.

Build a Real Schedule and Defend It

Remote work without structure is a slow disaster.

The freedom to work whenever sounds like a gift. For many people who lack the years of a regular schedule and routine, it becomes a trap. Work bleeds into evenings. Sleep schedules drift. Meals become random. The day loses its shape, and so does the week, and eventually so does the month.

Build a schedule as if you were going into an office.

Wake up at the same time every day. Take a shower and get dressed like you are the professional you are. Start work at a fixed hour. Take a real lunch break away from your desk and away from your screen. Set a hard stop time and honor it. Create a morning routine that signals to your brain that the day has started, and an evening routine that signals it has ended.

Structure is not the enemy of flexibility. It is the foundation that makes everything else possible.

Eat Like You Mean It

This sounds so basic, and yet it is one of the first things to fall apart for young remote workers.

When there is no cafeteria, no lunch meeting, no colleague asking if you want to grab food, meals become optional. Young remote workers frequently report skipping breakfast, eating lunch over their laptops, and cobbling together dinner from whatever requires the least effort.

Fix this with intention and health in mind.

Plan your meals for the week on Sunday. Cook real food, even if it is simple. Eat breakfast.  Take a genuine lunch break seated at a table, away from your work, like a human being. Meal prep if you need to. The quality of your energy, focus, and mood is directly connected to when and what you eat.

Exercise Like Your Career Depends on It, Because It Does

Physical activity is one of the most well-documented interventions for anxiety, depression, cognitive performance, and energy levels. And remote work removes almost every natural opportunity for it.

You need to replace that movement on purpose.

Schedule exercise the same way you schedule a meeting. Put it on your calendar. Make it non-negotiable. It does not have to be extraordinary. A 45-minute walk, a gym session, a run, or a bike ride works. But it has to happen, it has to be intentional, and it has to be consistent.

The research is clear. Young adults who exercise regularly report significantly higher levels of mental wellbeing, lower anxiety, better sleep, and stronger cognitive performance than those who do not. For a remote worker already battling isolation and sedentary behavior, exercise is not optional. It is essential infrastructure.

See Friends in Person, Regularly, and On Purpose.

Texting is not a social life. Video gaming friends are not the same as friends in real life. Liking someone’s Instagram post is not staying in touch. A group chat is not a friendship.

Young remote workers, particularly those who live alone, can go days and sometimes weeks without meaningful in-person human contact. And because they are technically “connected” through phones and social media, they may not even realize how isolated they have become until the weight of it becomes hard to ignore.

Put recurring plans on the calendar. Not vague intentions but actual scheduled commitments. Dinner on Thursdays. A walk every Saturday morning. A standing coffee catch-up on Tuesdays. Treat these with the same seriousness you treat work commitments, because your mental health depends on them just as much.

If you are new to a city and your social network is thin, that is the real emergency remote work creates and it requires active, uncomfortable effort to fix. Join things. Say yes to invitations even when your couch is more appealing. The short-term comfort of staying home compounds into long-term loneliness faster than most people expect.

Play a Sport. Join Something. Be on a Team.

This deserves its own category because it does something that no other social activity quite replicates.

Recreational sports, whether it is a soccer league, a tennis ladder, a CrossFit gym, a running club, a basketball pickup game, or a cycling group provide something young remote workers desperately need: a consistent community, a shared physical challenge, and a reason to show up somewhere regularly with the same people.

The research on team sports and mental health is compelling. Participation in organized physical activity is associated with lower rates of depression and anxiety, higher life satisfaction, and stronger feelings of belonging and community which are all the things remote work quietly erodes.

You do not need to be good at sports to play. You need to show up.

Invest in Your Professional Relationships Deliberately

Since remote work removes organic relationship-building, you have to replace it with intentional effort.

Find a mentor and ask directly. Most experienced professionals are willing to give time to a younger person who asks clearly and respectfully. Schedule a 30-minute virtual coffee. Prepare two or three specific questions. Follow up with a thank-you and a next step.

Make yourself visible at work. Contribute in meetings. Volunteer for cross-functional projects. When your company brings people together in person, show up and engage. Those moments are disproportionately valuable for remote workers because they are rare.

Build your external network too. Attend industry events. Join professional associations. Show up to things even when it feels awkward, because in-person professional relationships are now a competitive advantage for an entire generation of young workers who are building their careers primarily through screens.

The Bottom Line

Remote work is not inherently bad. But for young people still building their careers, their habits, their health, and their social foundations, remote work asks them to construct all of that without the scaffolding that previous generations took for granted.

The office is not just a place to work. It is a place to grow up professionally and learn how to operate alongside other people. That scaffolding is gone for millions of young remote workers. And the data is clear that many of them are struggling in ways that are quiet, cumulative, and deeply consequential.

Get out of the house. Build a schedule. Eat real food. Exercise hard. See your friends in person. Join a team. Invest in your professional relationships.

Remote work gave you flexibility. Now use that flexibility to build a life worth being flexible about.

Dr. Mary C. Kelly is a Hall of Fame leadership speaker, PhD economist, retired Navy Commander, and author of 22 books, including Leadership is Tough: What Great Leaders Do Differently.