The Work Cut
Approximately 3.83 million people in Great Britain — 7.1% of the adult population — report feeling lonely often or always. This figure has risen from 6% at the start of the pandemic in 2020, and has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. A further 18% report feeling lonely some of the time. Younger adults are most affected: 40% of those aged 16 to 29 report loneliness often, always, or some of the time — more than twice the rate of those over 70.^[1]
The causes are multiple and overlapping. Pubs closing. Community hubs disappearing. The cost of living restricting social activity. And remote work — which research consistently associates with increased workplace isolation, reduced social contact with colleagues, and higher reported loneliness among those working from home full-time. A survey of 2,000 UK and US remote workers found 67% of those aged 18 to 34 said they found it harder to make friends since working remotely, and 71% felt their colleagues had become distant.^[2]
Remote work started as an emergency measure. It was normalised because the metrics that mattered to employers — productivity, cost, commute time — held steady or improved. What those metrics did not capture was what was lost: the accidental conversation, the corridor disagreement that got resolved, the lunch table where people who had not chosen each other’s company nonetheless had to navigate each other.^[3]
That friction is not comfortable. It is also how people learn to tolerate difference, to compromise, to function in a society that contains people unlike themselves. No wellbeing survey filled in alone, at home, captures its absence.
The government’s Community Life Survey found that chronic loneliness in England rose from 5–6% before the pandemic to 7% by 2023/24 — a modest-sounding increase that represents hundreds of thousands of additional people. The survey also found that levels have not returned to pre-pandemic norms even as restrictions ended years ago. The Campaign to End Loneliness describes this as evidence that for some people, social life simply did not recover.^[4]
The civil service is now adopting AI tools built by technology companies whose workforce is predominantly remote, communicating through structured digital channels. This is not a criticism of remote work or of those companies. It is an observation: the people designing the systems that will mediate public services have, as a working culture, less incidental human friction in their daily lives than the populations those systems will serve. What gets encoded may reflect that difference.
Friction is not a malfunction. It is a mechanism. It is how rough things become smooth — not through removal, but through contact.
Question: When the people designing systems for public life have been insulated from the friction of public life, what do they optimise away?
Footnotes
^[1] ONS, Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: January 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/publicopinionsandsocialtrendsgreatbritain/january2025
^[2] TheHRDirector, “Is remote working fuelling a loneliness epidemic?” https://www.thehrdirector.com/features/flexible-working/remote-working-fuelling-loneliness-epidemic/
^[3] Ferreira et al., “A cross-sectional investigation on remote working, loneliness, workplace isolation, well-being and perceived social support in healthcare workers,” BJPsych Open (2024). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10897687/
^[4] Community Life Survey 2024/25: Loneliness and support networks, GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/community-life-survey-202425-annual-publication/community-life-survey-202425-loneliness-and-support-networks
Morgan Hale is independent verification without the editorial filter. Every cut is evidenced. Every question is open. Because it matters