What we lose with remote work — and could working together (at a baseball game) fix it?

Julia Dixon Evans: This March, San Diegan Scott Muirhead posted on Instagram that he'd be working remotely at Pacific Beach on a Friday morning, like right on the sand. Over 100 people showed up to join him

Evans: Videos of the event went viral, like hundreds of thousands of views. They show dozens of barefoot people in beach chairs with laptops on folding tables, some set up right on a beach towel. There's even a guy performing softly on guitar while people try to take calls.

Evans: The event struck a nerve. Some people loved it. Others were skeptical, even bitter. Was anyone there getting any work done? The viral meetup and the viral reaction to it made us curious. Why would hundreds of people who have the freedom to work with zero distractions in the comfort of home sit in the sun with a bunch of strangers and presumably spotty Wi-Fi?

Emma Harrington: I worked from home, and there were days, and I'm sad to say some weeks, that I went by without having any face-to-face contact with another human being.

Evans: Emma Harrington is an economics professor at the University of Virginia. After the pandemic, she became one of the approximately 20 million Americans who transitioned from working at the office to working from home, a mode previously reserved for niche jobs or situations.

Harrington: A lot of people were studying the productivity impacts of remote work from various different angles, but it felt like there wasn't as much research being done on how it affects people's well-being.

Evans: Remote work is popular. Polls consistently show that people overwhelmingly want the freedom to work from home if their job allows it.

Evans: The appeal is obvious: no commute, more flexibility, and trading suits for sweatpants.

Harrington: So when people are directly asked, most people say that remote work is gonna be good for their mental health.

Evans: But Emma wanted evidence. She wanted to see how it was actually affecting people.

Harrington: So what we decided to do was kinda dig into the data and just try to find as many surveys as we could that gave us information about people's mental well-being, and also gave us information about key aspects of their work.

Evans: 2020 created a natural experiment. Suddenly, the number of people working from home skyrocketed.

Harrington: And along with that increase in remote work, you also see disproportionate increases in measures of mental distress, and also mental healthcare utilization, so people taking antidepressants, for example. And you see those increases across the board, but they're much larger for people in these remote-capable jobs.

Evans: So that sets up an apparent contradiction. We want the freedom to work remotely, but at the same time, Emma's research shows it can be quite harmful to our mental health. So what is causing this distress, and what can be done about it? That brings us back to the beach remote work party. It was such a successful event that it launched a movement.

Evans: The organizer, Scott, kept taking his desk to work in unusual locations, and hosted more meetups at bars and more beaches. In June, he hosted his biggest one yet at Petco Park.

Evans: Today we bring our laptops and mics to the ballpark for a remote work Wednesday, an afternoon matchup between the San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds We talked to researchers, Scott, and lots of working Padres fans to try to understand how remote work affects real people and what we get wrong about it and why is it that we often underestimate the importance of being around other people?

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art, and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

Evans: Producer Anthony and I met KPBS video journalist Carlos Castillo at Petco Park a good two hours before first pitch Our plan was to interview people working from the game, but also do some serious work ourselves, making another episode of The Finest from the ballpark. And we wondered right off the bat if productivity was even possible in this environment.

Evans: OK, I'm recording. First, I'm gonna start with you, Carlos. You're gonna be my first interview. Are you excited to work remotely today? Yes. At the Padres game.

Carlos Castillo: Yes, I'm super excited, you know. they told me about this opportunity, and I just couldn't say no.

Evans: So Carlos was up for anything. Anthony was a little less enthusiastic.

Anthony Wallace: I'm skeptical that it's gonna be a great environment to do work.

Evans: Like, literally for you. You're skeptical that your productivity-

Wallace: Yeah ...

Evans: will be fostered? OK.

Wallace: Yeah, very much, and I'm skeptical for everyone else too.

Castillo: Maybe, I think they'll be sending, like, maybe one to two emails and then call it a day.

Wallace: We should try finding the hardest working person that's, like, actually just like, "Don't bother me," have, like, noise canceling headphones in.

Evans: Wait,

Wallace: that's gonna be you. And then that person, I'm gonna ask, "Well, why are you here?" Yeah. Yeah, that

Evans: might be me. Couldn't you have done this for not paying $35? Yeah, exactly. I do think a lot of, like, freelancers pay for a co-working space, or you pay to, like, buy your coffee- Yeah ... and something to work around other people, because I think it gets lonely, right?

Wallace: I think it's, like, more

Evans: of just like the- Out behind center field is a patio area with tables and Wi-Fi, and well before the first pitch, some remote workers were already getting stuff done out there.

Gracie (remote worker): I'm Gracie, and I work in medical education, sales and events. I'm Raha. I work in tech, really fun stuff.

Evans: So are you actually planning on working today? Do you have deliverables?

Gracie (remote worker): Yeah. I actually sent three emails already. Great. She's already on it. I just got here. let's see if I can take some calls. Yeah.

Evans: I think that's gonna be the challenging part.

Gracie (remote worker): Yeah, I think it might be a little loud.

Evans: Gracie and Raha were like a lot of people we met that day, friends who work for different companies but were working side by side for the day.

Evans: They're both confident in their ability to get their stuff done from anywhere.

Gracie (remote worker): But yeah, definitely all my friends that don't work remote are like, "You're so lazy. You don't do anything." I think it actually makes me more productive and overall just happier, and I'll take that lifestyle over anything else.

Gracie (remote worker): Honestly, hot take, sometimes in the office I get too distracted 'cause we're just, like, talking the whole time. Yeah. so those two days that I am in the office is actually probably less productive.

Evans: There's data that backs up Gracie and Raha here, and this gets at one of the big debates and questions around working from home.

Evans: Are remote workers as productive as those working in the office? Like Emma, our researcher, mentioned, this has been studied a lot.

Harrington: Yeah, so the productivity literature on remote work is pretty mixed. My view is that oftentimes it helps increase the volume of work people do. They can focus more and get more done.

Harrington: The quality of work is more of a mixed bag.

Harrington: And that's particularly true for young people and people who are new to their firms, that for them they get less mentorship, and that can end up really harming the quality of the, the stuff they produce.

Harrington: For more senior people, it kind of looks like, at least in our studies, that it's more of a potential win-win.

Evans: So there's no easy answer. This is often the case we found with these big questions around remote work. But if Gracie and Raha know that they can do their work quickly and effectively without a lot of guidance, they're probably right that doing it alone at home is more efficient. And one person who is very sure of his ability to excel while working remotely is the man who put this whole thing together, Scott Muirhead.

Evans: He was kind of a celebrity at the Padres game. Almost everyone we talked to had seen his Beach Day Meetup video. He even got to throw out the first pitch. But we managed to steal a few minutes to talk to him at his signature wooden desk. I'm Julia. I'm with KPBS. Hi, I'm Scott. Nice to meet you. Yeah, you too.

Evans: Oh, my gosh. OK, my first question is, are you productive when you work remotely?

Scott Muirhead: Am I as productive at home? I think so. Why not? You know yeah, yeah. I don't know. We gotta talk to my boss.

Evans: Scott, of course, has a remote job. He works in sales.

Muirhead: Today, actually, I took off. This is too much today. I, I took off today, but typically, yeah, I mean, you know, it's the everyday Zoom call or just answering emails.

Muirhead: Nothing too crazy.

Evans: Scott's shtick can seem like a joke most of the time, but his almost 80,000 followers on Instagram show he's tapped into something people care about.

Muirhead: My whole goal is just to get people out of the house and get them together, and if that's, like, what happens throughout this, I think, you know, that's maxing out this idea, just getting people together.

Evans: And why is that? Like, what is it about remote work, and what is it about getting people together that you think is, like, a part of this puzzle?

Muirhead: Man, I, I would say that, I mean, just, like, work from home people typically, it seems like they're pretty lonely. You know? Like, it's just you in the house. Yeah, alone, and so I just think it's really special if we could all come together.

Muirhead: So why not go to the beach and all work together?

Evans: And loneliness and isolation, Emma says, are really the big concerns with remote work.

Harrington: It does allow you to be in this world where you potentially don't have to leave your house and interact with other people.

Evans: Her study also looked extensively at the American Time Use Survey, which asks thousands of Americans how they spend their time hour by hour.

Harrington: There's just a lot more days that people are spending entirely without much human contact. Mm. So I think a stat that really s- like jumps out to me is that in the past few years, so specifically 2022 to 2024, among people who are living alone, and in these jobs that can be done remotely, any given day, about one in four of them will have no substantial interaction with another person

Evans: To a good chunk of the workforce, remote work can seem like a luxury. Just 50% of working Americans have remote-capable jobs, and the others are required to be on site or in the field just by nature of the work. It’s worth mentioning that many of those workers were also on site at Petco Park that day.

Evans: Event staffers, concession workers, security personnel, even the baseball players themselves. But remote work is something that impacts a lot of people. 35 million Americans worked remotely in 2025. Emma’s not advocating for blanket return-to-office mandates, and she understands why people are worried about how these results could be used as a justification to force employees back into their buildings.

Evans: The debate is complicated. In some ways, it’s an issue of workers’ rights, a conflict between labor and management. But Emma says it’s hard for many people to clearly recognize the downsides of remote work, partly because we don’t notice them at first

Harrington: The costs of remote work are really subtle, and they are slow to take hold.

Harrington: It takes a while to start to feel the accumulated effects of having day after day less human contact. It takes a while to feel these accumulated effects of not having as strong a connections to your colleagues.

Harrington: By contrast, not going on that commute, that happens immediately and is quite salient.

Harrington: And so I think when people weigh those benefits and costs, it is kind of hard to quantify this kind of squishy thing of social isolation vis-a-vis these really concrete things of not having to commute and having all the other conveniences of remote work.

Evans: Emma says the kind of isolation some remote workers experience is pretty extreme.

Evans: Like, they go whole days without leaving home. No grocery store, gym, bus ride, nothing.

Harrington: They're also less likely to do activities that might just cause them to bump into other people. and we think that that is also important because the evidence from psychology suggests that really brief social interactions can improve people's well-being, often much more than people themselves expect them to.

Harrington: So Nick Epley and his co-authors did this really ingenious study where they asked these commuters, they asked, half of them at random to actively interact with other people, and then the other half of people could just go about their commute as usual. And people kind of anticipated that the socializing would be kinda awkward and maybe make them feel worse, not better.

Harrington: But in fact, the people who had this nudge to actually engage with others on the subway, they ended up feeling significantly better about the experience than people who just continued as usual.

ballpark sounds: 50/50 raffle tickets. Gets a changeup, and Michael King pulls him up just a little bit more.

Evans: OK, update from me.

Evans: We're in the-

ballpark sounds: Top of the seventh, I believe ...

Evans: top of the seventh. That's quite a ways through. Yeah, we're almost- During the game's early innings, we spent some time being surprisingly productive on our laptops. I wrote some stuff. We filed a story. Anthony worked on our next episode. We're now gonna see how people are doing

Evans: How's it going, Anthony?

Wallace: I'm actually kind of impressed with how much people seem to be working. I feel like my skepticism has declined a little bit.

Evans: Softened at the edges. Yeah. Well, right now I'm looking at a guy who is on a call.

Wallace: Oh, really?

Evans: He is taking a Zoom meeting.

Wallace: He's on a Zoom?

Evans: He, he couldn't talk to us- Oh

Evans: because... And so that was my first person who's on a call.

Wallace: OK.

Evans: So.

Wallace: We can see that one of them is actively composing an email right now.

Evans: The fans in the stands were honestly kind of crushing it.

Remote workers: I am making sales. I'm binding policies, and I know my fellow work from home baddies are doing the same. I am currently actually working on closing payroll for this week for the month.

Remote workers: So today I've we are designing a couple of new phase two trials. These are early drug development trials in, in cancer so for prostate cancer in particular.

Evans: One day when we cure cancer, we can be like- Yeah ... "I think it happened-

Wallace: It kind of c- It

Evans: did align ... at the Padres game ... with me kind of curing

Wallace: cancer at the Padres game.

Wallace: Totally.

Remote workers: That's the story arc. Yes. Awesome. Let's stay in touch. Yeah.

Evans: In the sunny outfield patio, producer Anthony approached someone who'd briefly stepped away from his laptop to check out the action on the field. Brandon works a fully remote job in marketing.

So what have you done

Wallace: today?

Brandon: today I'm actually working on a new campaign that we're coming out with in a couple weeks.

Brandon: I've been productive while also being able to stay tuned into the game. It's a pretty good game. Oh, yeah. It's a great game.

Evans: Brandon said he became an instant fan of what Scott was doing when he found him on Instagram.

Brandon: I just think it's such a fun idea and it really helps band remote workers together, 'cause at times, you know, you're at home, you don't really have that human connection.

Brandon: So I thought, "Let me get that human connection while also being able to watch a ballgame." I've been able to meet some cool people.

Wallace: What do you think about... Uh-oh, sorry. Let's see what happens in the game. Oh, good catch. Nice

catch. Nice catch.

Wallace: Yeah, we're multitasking. Exactly.

Evans: It's fans. I'm probably gonna do it down there. OK. Everyone loosened up as the game went on.

Kayla: What are you recording? Are you recording me right now?

Wallace: Yeah. It, well, it was on, and then you came over.

Kayla: Oh.

Wallace: Is that OK?

Kayla: Hey, guys. I just wanted to plug my insurance business.

Evans: We met Kayla, who was celebrating closing some deals.

Kayla: I sold a few policies.

Wallace: Really?

Kayla: Yeah. You did it, girl. Sold a few policies. I slang that insurance. They never know where I am. And, and I like to keep it that way.

Evans: Kayla's best friend, Maria, works for the US National Rugby Team, which trains in Chula Vista. Special thanks to KPBS video journalists Carlos Castillo, Scott Mulhern, Emma Hands, and the San Diego Padres for their help with this episode.

Evans: From the ballpark, she was booking flights for young players to come to town and try out for the team. Y'all should support them. They're so good

Maria: at what they

Evans: do, and

Maria: they are gonna kill it at LA '28 Olympics.

Evans: And a big thank you to all the hardworking fans and stands that took a break to talk to us.

Evans: Events like this are right up Kayla and Maria's alley. Gracie, Laura, Amelia, Nicole, Travis, Brendan, Kayla, Maria, Emily, Justin, Aria, and Lindsay. The two friends make a point to seek out random interactions with strangers.

Maria: I think it's cool to see the remote work people coming together for something other than their work.

Maria: I don't know. Anything that brings people together is a good thing. Humans are meant for connection, so get out there, leave your phone at home, and go see the world. Don't have Google Maps, you don't have a plan, and you just go. And you have to meet, like, five people while you're out and about.

Wallace: Wow. That would be

Evans: cool.

Maria: My best friend and I, we're, we do that all the time. We just like to meet people, and I think that- I don't think

Evans: that

Maria: you're ... I'm

Evans: gonna

Maria: do some Julia stuff, and then we can do Jessica stuff ... I think what we found is everybody else wants to meet somebody too. They're just afraid to be the one to go up to you and talk, which is why we came up to you guys.

Maria: We're like, "What the heck is going on here?"

Evans: When I was flying, I was going through a list of media... This is The Finest, a podcast about the people- Glad you guys said it. I've never seen

Maria: a walking around podcast. Yeah, this

Evans: is the first. I'm Julie Dixon Evans. Natalie. We now love calling ourselves a walking around podcast.

Evans: OK. Let's just do it like that, where it's all, like, bold. You should

Maria: trademark that. Walk-

Evans: Bold. Walking

Maria: Podcast. Yeah. We have

Evans: a T-shirt. I'm Jo- Julia Dixon Evans. The ballpark was full of these kinds of happenstance interactions between people who normally would've spent the day working alone. From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art, and movements redefining culture in San Diego.

Evans: I'm Julie Dixon Evans. Coming up, Emma shares more surprising science about how friendships are formed. We revisit our initial skepticism about remote work Wednesday at the ballpark, and the Padres game has an incredible conclusion. Stay with us. To

Gracie (remote worker): build now that my voice is two years older than it was

Evans: Having a job that requires you to leave the house is not only good for encouraging random social encounters, it also opens the door for more purposeful interactions that can have a real impact on someone's career.

Harrington: So our research suggests that unemployment of young people has gone up because of remote work.

Harrington: So more specifically, what we see is that among these people doing these jobs that can be done from home. They're missing

Harrington: out on mentorship and building relationships at a critical point in their careers. We see that for people under 30, unemployment rates have risen from pre to post pandemic. For older people in those same jobs, unemployment has actually declined a bit. And so the age gap in unemployment's increased a lot.

Harrington: We don't see that pattern among young people in jobs that tend to require in-person work.

Evans: Emma has a book coming out called In Person. Along with her co-author, Natalia Emanuel, they argue that remote work, much more so than AI, has contributed to rising unemployment among people under 30. They're missing out on mentorship and building relationships at a critical point in their careers.

Evans: Up in the left field bleachers, I met a young worker using the baseball game as an antidote, a chance to reclaim some of that in-person networking.

Remote worker with resumes: My name's Emily Fabius. I'm a UX designer, so I design apps and websites. I currently work at a startup company, but the startup is going under, so I need a new job.

Evans: She was holding a sign that said, "Hire me."

Remote worker with resumes: Yes. And I brought my resumes as well, so I'm talking to people, handing out my resume. I have 20 resumes with me. I have 15 left, so.

Evans: Gee. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. Outside of the practical advantages of networking and getting mentorship, Emma says that leaving the office environment also means losing a key arena for making friends.

Harrington: Previous surveys had found that work is actually the number one way that American adults form friendships.

Evans: And American adults badly need friends right now. Starting long before the rise in remote work, the US has seen a drastic increase in the number of people who say they have no close friends. Emma told us that making friends takes a real time investment, putting in the literal hours.

Harrington: I think one thing that's worth keeping in mind is that for most people, friendship formation takes a long time. So studies suggest that on average it takes about 160 hours to form a meaningful relationship with other people, and part of that is because friendship formation requires this kind of slow revelation of increasingly sensitive information about yourself.

Harrington: And the nice thing about work relationships is that it gives you that time to do that slow es- es- escalation of intimacy.

Evans: And we found many groups of people at the game, companies that all came together, clocking their in-person hours to build friendships.

Justin: My name's Justin. My name's Aria.

Wallace: Lindsay.

Justin: We work for a video game company, and we, we make content for, like, social and web.

Wallace: What's the video game company?

Justin: Riot Games. Riot Games.

Evans: OK. Justin was one of multiple managers we talked to that day who loved the idea of bringing their whole team out to the ballpark.

Justin: These guys took the Amtrak down to Oceanside, and then we met there, and then we took the coaster and, like, used the Wi-Fi, and we're, like, chatting on the train, and, like, looking at the beach while we go by.

Justin: It was awesome. I think we're still getting the value of the in-office experience here because we're face-to-face. We're talking. We're chatting. We're, like, catching up. and you don't always get that when you're on a Google call or whatever.

Aria: But sometimes it's hard to just get up and do it when you know you have a bunch of stuff to get done.

Aria: Yeah. But once you're actually, like, sitting down and doing it, it feels a lot better than being, like, at home in your room. Yeah, yeah. You know?

Evans: The Riot Games crew was very happy to hear that Scott is planning more remote worker meetups.

Justin: Yeah. So you guys can, you know- I'm super down. We're, I mean, we're down.

Justin: If you guys are down, I'm super down. I'm down. This

Justin: has been great so far. I'm telling you, I was really productive today.

Justin: So I'm- I'm gonna leave it. Oh.

Evans: Oh. Working at home, the distractions could come in the form of a text or Instagram notification, maybe that pile of laundry in the corner. Here, though, it was a big eighth inning hit from the Padres.

Wallace: One more. Padres need one more run here. Keep running.

Wallace: Crazy how many people

Aria: I, that's, that's the one thing we constantly kept talking about was,

Evans: like, I was shocked As the tied game went into the ninth inning, we got together to debrief and reexamine our expectations from the start of the day. All right, so here we are. Talked to a lot of people today. I've been inspired by how actually productive people are being.

Wallace: People were working. I mean, we had someone curing cancer. I-

Evans: Teaching middle school ...

Wallace: I don't know, working around people, even if you're all doing something different, is helpful. And like, in a normal work day, no matter if you're

Wallace: at home or at the office, there's all these little moments where you're not working.

Wallace: So you might as well go somewhere and have those in-between periods be a little bit more interesting, be around people. I think people made friends here, too.

Evans: Yeah.

Wallace: I mean, just being here for a few innings, I did kind of make, like, friends a little bit. Aww. And then they would, like, come up to me when something happened in the game.

Evans: Yeah.

Wallace: So it was fun.

Evans: And, like, they, people came and checked back in. People remembered us, yeah.

Wallace: Yeah. And I

Evans: think that's- I do feel like there was a good community vibe. Like, those two girls we just talked to who are best friends, they don't work together, but they got to be coworkers today. Like, I thought that was really sweet, because those...

Evans: Oh, my God

Wallace: Yadiel Herrera just hit a walk-off home run. Padres win five to four. They're down four to two in the eighth inning

Evans: Their remote work patio, along with the rest of Petco Park, erupted in joy. Friends, both new and old, closed their laptops and hugged and high-fived. If this baseball game was a way to fight the loneliness of remote work and improve the well-being of workers, Fernando Tatis just launched a pretty great moment into left field.

Wallace: Wow.

Wallace: What a beautiful ending. Oh, dude, what a day. It's the perfect end to your guys' outing.

Justin: We, we crushed it today.

Wallace: Yeah. This is such a memorable day at work for you guys. Definitely.

Evans: Special thanks to KPBS video journalists Carlos Castillo, Scott Muirhead, Emma Harrington, and the San Diego Padres for their help with this episode. And a big thank you to all the hardworking fans in the stands that took a break to talk to us: Gracie, Raja, Amelia, Nicole, Travis, Brandon, Kayla, Maria, Emily, Justin, Aria, and Lindsay The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media in San Diego.

Evans: I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Ben Redlawsk is our engineer, and Chrissy Nguyen is our editor. This episode was written and researched by Anthony and me.