Remote work won a clear verdict in a CoworkingCafe survey published this month. Seven in ten workers report lower stress since leaving the office — partially or entirely — and overall wellbeing scores sit comfortably in positive territory. The flexibility revolution, it seems, delivered what it promised.
For one group, it didn’t.
Gen Z — the generation that came of age on screens, entered the workforce during a pandemic, and had more digital fluency at 16 than most of their managers have now — is struggling with remote work more than anyone else. The generation handling it best is Gen X: the cohort that grew up entirely without the internet.
Lowest Wellbeing, Highest Loneliness
The survey data is blunt. Gen Z registers the lowest average wellbeing scores of any generation — 7.3 out of 10, compared to Gen X’s 7.8. Twenty percent of Gen Z workers experience loneliness multiple times a week, double the rate reported by millennials. Nearly one in five say they cannot mentally disconnect from work at the end of the day, the highest of any age group. Meanwhile, 69% of Gen X workers say they feel lonely less than once a month, or never.
These gaps don’t exist because Gen Z is less capable. They exist because of something structural: Gen Z is the first generation to enter professional life having already spent its adolescence in digital isolation.
What Screens Still Can’t Provide
The CoworkingCafe findings align with a body of research that has been building for years. Gallup’s workplace data identifies Gen Z as the loneliest generation in its surveys — Gen Z employees are nearly three times as likely as Baby Boomers to report experiencing a lot of loneliness on any given workday. A separate study of 2,000 employed U.S. adults found that 77% of Gen Z workers have felt lonely at work — compared to a national average of 64% — and they’re more likely than any other generation to wish they were closer to their colleagues.
Here’s the paradox: despite being the most digitally fluent generation in history, 72% of Gen Z workers say they prefer to communicate face-to-face at work. Digital tools aren’t a substitute for in-person connection — for a generation that has been online since childhood, they may actually sharpen the awareness of what’s missing.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology on group identity and belonging helps explain why. Connection built through digital communication tends to stay transactional — it fulfills task-based needs without providing the incidental, low-stakes proximity that builds genuine closeness. Shared physical space produces what researchers describe as ambient awareness: a background sense of other people that contributes to belonging even when no direct interaction is happening. Remote work removes it entirely.
The Office as Accidental Social Infrastructure
For Gen X — who entered the workforce in an era of mandatory in-person work and built professional social foundations over years of shared office life — remote work is a relief. The relationships are already there. Being alone at home is rest, not isolation.
For Gen Z, who started careers during pandemic lockdowns and often never had the chance to build those foundations, working from home isn’t opting out of office noise. It’s the only working life many of them have ever known, and it’s quieter than they expected.
This is the hidden design flaw in the remote work narrative: it assumes workers arrive at flexibility already socially equipped. The American Psychological Association reports that Gen Z adults register loneliness rates nearly double those of previous generations at the same age. Remote work didn’t cause that — but it has no built-in mechanism to fix it either.
33% Burned Out, and Climbing
The CoworkingCafe survey found that 33% of all remote workers experienced burnout symptoms — emotional exhaustion, detachment, motivation loss — in the past year. Among Gen Z, both burnout and isolation rates run highest across every measure.
The conversation around return-to-office mandates tends to focus on commute times and productivity metrics. The more revealing question surfacing from this data is whether the office was quietly providing something for younger workers that nobody thought to measure until it was gone — and whether the flexibility that benefited one generation came at a cost nobody intended to pass on to the next.