Why does a video call feels empty compared to a handshake? How does physical absence break the social contract? What happens to trust in remote work? For generations, professional trust relied on a simple, physical toolkit. We shook hands. We looked each other in the eye across a table. We shared coffee during breaks. These were not just social niceties. According to decades of research in sociology and communication theory, these physical acts provided a high-bandwidth environment where we could rapidly verify if a person was trustworthy. When the world shifted to remote work, we removed the travel but we lost much more than the commute. We lost the underlying machinery that makes human connection effective. To understand why a day of video calls leaves us feeling isolated rather than connected, we must look at what happens when bodies disappear from the room. The literature identifies three primary deficits. These …
