I'm seeing a lot of tweets from academics who don't want to return to the office. But these are often from senior, established academics with stable homes. At @MPI_NL most of our people are younger. And from them I'm hearing mostly isolation stories like this ... 1/ https://twitter.com/DrRachelFloyd/status/1300740955490975744

A lot of our people are living away from home, sometimes continents away from their families. Lockdown for them has meant real isolation from their loved ones. Some have flown home to be with family. But being in a different time zone from colleagues mean they miss a lot. 2/

And/or the physical distance means they feel somehow distanced from their work and colleagues here. This doesn't help with motivating themselves to work. 3/

Add to that the anxiety - worrying about stalled experiments and implications for being able to finish projects before contract end, and you have a recipe for depression 4/

Some of us are also noticing a decrease in our intellectual creativity and curiosity – a narrowing of our scientific focus - as a result of the isolation. We're not getting those unexpected sparks of insight that come from just chatting to a colleagues about science. 5/

Again, this doesn't matter so much for us old timers. We have years of past insights to follow up on, and usually a file drawer of unpublished studies just waiting for us to have 'a few spare days'. But it matters hugely to people at the start of their research careers. 6/

Which is why I'm returning to @MPI_NL, at least for a couple of days a week. To start trying to re-build the intellectually stimulating, creative, exciting atmosphere MPI is famous for. Or, at least, giving it a jolly good try. 7/7.