Esther Perel has a warning for executives: your workforce is suffering from social atrophy and AI is making it worse 

Esther Perel has spent her career exploring the complexities of human relationships. Her seminal book, Mating in Captivity, examined the tension between love and desire.  

Now, the psychotherapist is shifting her attention to the workplace, where AI, hybrid working, and declining engagement are reshaping how colleagues connect. 

Europe has the lowest employee engagement of any region in the world at 12%, according to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. This compares with the global average of 20% that is itself at its lowest point since 2020.  

Perel believes this is a symptom of the slow, invisible erosion of everyday human contact that used to hold organizations together. This is social atrophy and Perel says most leaders don’t yet have a plan for it. 

“I think what’s happening in our personal lives is mirrored in the workplace,” Perel tells Fortune. “We expect something different from a business leader than from a parent or a partner, but the underlying shift is the same: there is a general state of social atrophy creeping up on us and we don’t even notice it. There’s a pervasive sense that we’re living through a period of crisis rather than a period of abundance.” 

Social atrophy in the workplace 

There are several factors contributing to this disconnect, according to Perel. Remote and hybrid work is reducing the physical proximity that scaffolds professional relationships, while distributed global teams are making it more difficult for colleagues to build rapport. 

Blurred Zoom backgrounds are a particular bug bear for Perel. “In the early days of video calls, people were unintentionally visible in each other’s homes, which paradoxically created more intimacy than the polished, decontextualized version we have now,” she says. “You go on Zoom, nobody says hello, everyone’s pretending to do something else while they wait so........

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