Work from home is a silent erosion.

Before the pandemic, I supported work from home fiercely. I romanticised the silence. Fewer hours wasted on traffic. More time with thoughts. The comfort of one’s own room over forced office chatter. It felt like freedom. I told myself this was how real work should happen.

When I was struggling mentally during that time, my father kept repeating one line.
"Roz bahar nikla kar. Logon se mil. Dhoop mein chal."
It didn’t land then. I thought he didn’t understand. I was tired & needed space. I had stopped going out, stopped picking up calls, stopped dressing up. There were no meetings. Or plans. Or reason.

But slowly, I felt something changing inside me.

Work continued. Messages were replied to. Projects delivered. But I had started disappearing.

You don’t wake up one morning and feel lonely. It builds. Quietly. First you skip one plan. Then two. You stop calling back. Stop leaving the house. You convince yourself everything is fine. That this is peace.

But peace isn’t hollow.
Peace doesn’t feel like numbness.

It reminded me of what I had once read about prisoners in solitary confinement.
In 19th-century British jails, convicts were placed in complete isolation. World thought the idea was reform through silence. But the logic was collapse. Their minds began to break because of stagnation that came from isolation.

The truth is, human beings are built to be in friction. To walk through crowds. To overhear conversations. To smell sweat in a metro coach. To argue with an auto driver. To eat samosas with a colleague who just got dumped.

Work was never just output. It was rhythm. Banter over chai. Someone calling you out on your bullshit. A smile exchanged across desks. That unspoken feeling of being part of something larger than yourself.

When you work from home too long, the world shrinks.
Thoughts become loops.
Voices in your head grow louder than voices around you.
Your ability to handle noise, mess, inconvenience starts fading.

One day I stepped into a co-working space again. I didn’t even realise how badly I had needed that energy.
A stranger asked me if I had a pen. Someone nearby was laughing on a call. Two people were gossiping behind me. And I felt alive.

Something in my chest opened.

It wasn’t about productivity but about pulse.

Remote work doesn’t break you. Isolation does.
The absence of shared breath. Shared mess. Shared time.

If you're working from home, find your way back into the world. Sit where people are. Walk where voices rise. Let your day touch another’s.

Because the mind remembers silence. But the soul remembers noise.
And somewhere between those two, we survive.