A Week in Barcelona - and a Reminder Not to Work Alone
July 22, 2026 · Juan P. Aparicio
Working from home has many obvious advantages. There is no commute. It offers flexibility and long stretches in which to concentrate. It allows teams like ours at the Institute for Replication to collaborate across countries and time zones.
But, at least for me, it has also been hard.
The difficulty did not arrive dramatically. It accumulated quietly. A day full of meetings could still be a day spent physically alone. Messages arrived, projects moved forward, and conversations happened, but almost all of it came through a screen. It is possible to be busy, productive, and constantly connected while still feeling isolated.
Last week, I traveled to Barcelona for a team activity. I expected it to be useful for our work. I did not quite expect how good it would be for me.
Working in the same room, continuing conversations over meals, laughing about things that would never make it onto a meeting agenda, and simply spending time together made an enormous difference. My coworkers stopped being a collection of faces arranged on a screen and became, once again, people occupying the same physical world as me.
And they are wonderful people.
I already knew that the I4R team was intelligent, curious, and deeply committed to improving the credibility of science. In Barcelona, I was reminded of everything that is harder to see remotely: their generosity, humor, patience, and genuine interest in one another. They are the kind of people who can take ambitious ideas seriously without taking themselves too seriously. Being around them made me feel lighter, more energized, and more connected to the work we are building together.
What the research says - and does not say
My experience is personal, but it is not unusual. Recent research has begun to examine what the shift to remote work may be doing to our social lives and mental health.
A large 2026 study by Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington, and Amanda Pallais compared changes among American workers in occupations that could and could not be performed remotely. After the pandemic, workers in remote-capable occupations spent approximately one additional hour alone during each workday. They also became less likely to socialize after work. The increases in isolation and psychological distress were especially pronounced among people living alone.
That finding feels familiar to me. One of the strange things about working from home is that the consequences can extend beyond working hours. After spending an entire day inside, it can become easier to remain inside. Isolation can reproduce itself.
But the evidence does not support a simple claim that working from home is always bad for mental health. A 2026 NBER working paper, using UK data, found that the adverse effects associated with the transition to remote work were relatively small and temporary, disappearing by 2023. Another study using UK panel data found that choice matters: access to voluntary WFH was associated with better mental health, while the pattern was less favorable when remote work was imposed during the pandemic.
A systematic review of 96 studies reached an appropriately cautious conclusion. The effects of home working depend on the employee's circumstances, the nature of the job, the employer, the home environment, and the wider context. Much of the available evidence is observational and comes from an extraordinary period, making confident generalizations difficult.
That complexity is important. Remote work can offer autonomy, concentration, and more time with family. For others, or for the same person at a different moment, it can produce loneliness and blur the boundaries between work and the rest of life. Both can be true.
This is not an argument for forcing everyone back into an office. It is an argument for noticing what remote work can quietly remove from our lives.
People do not appear automatically
When we work in person, social contact is built into the day. We greet someone in the morning, have an unplanned conversation, share lunch, or walk somewhere together. These interactions can look inefficient from the perspective of a calendar. From the perspective of being human, they are essential.
When we work from home, we have to create them deliberately.
That might mean working from a coworking space or a library occasionally. It might mean joining an exercise class, making plans with friends, visiting family, having lunch with someone who lives nearby, or simply leaving the house before the workday ends. It also means allowing relationships that have nothing to do with our jobs to occupy real space in our schedules.
The precise solution will be different for everyone. The principle is simple: do not forget to find people around you.
Online colleagues can be real friends, and remote teams can build meaningful communities. But video calls cannot carry the entire weight of our need for contact. Digital connection and physical presence are complements, not substitutes.
And if isolation begins to feel persistent or overwhelming, reaching out to a friend, a colleague, a family member, or a mental-health professional is not a failure to handle remote work properly. It is an appropriate response to a genuinely difficult experience.
A podcast comes back to life
Barcelona also gave us the opportunity to reactivate I4R's podcast, Allegedly Does Not Replicate.
We recorded, discussed future guests and topics, and recovered the momentum that is difficult to create through another scheduled video call. The podcast explores the replication crisis, controversial research findings, and the work of people trying to make science more credible. But at its heart, it is about conversation, and conversation is considerably more fun when people are together.
New episodes are on the way. You can learn more through the I4R website and subscribe to our YouTube channel so you do not miss them.
I returned from Barcelona excited about the podcast and grateful for my coworkers. More personally, I returned feeling better.
The trip did not resolve every difficulty associated with working from home. I still value the freedom remote work provides, and I am not interested in pretending that an office is a universal cure for loneliness. But Barcelona reminded me that connection cannot always be postponed until it becomes convenient.
Sometimes we need to close the laptop, leave the house, and go find one another.