> get to see people > move around more > feels different from being at work
I'm not sure why one couldn't do this working remotely? Maybe these people can only socialise through work? Being passive about getting out of the house? Unable to create boundaries between work and personal life?
Working "remote" doesn't mean one has to stay at home all the time. We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
People are right, you should just get hobbies.
I think this WFH epidemic was an opportunity to enlighten a lot of people. There are many, many people (myself included), who were husks of human beings. Alive, technically, but not living.
We work, we eat, we sleep. We had money, but at the end of the day we were losers. I knew this to be the case when I realized what I looked forward to what dinner. Eating a meal was the highlight of my day, and the highlight of every day. And then the weekends I stayed in, exhausted from work.
When people lost the office, it was an opportunity for them to realize they had absolutely no life. No friends, no socialization, no passions, no desires. Some realized that and took control of their life, and others took offense to that realization and demanded the office back.
It was very much a matrix red pill versus blue pill situation. Live in lalaland on autopilot? It's tempting.
>People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.
Not even close. Hobbies are done in groups, which can be stood up in your local area. This shit was figured out in the 1700s FFS, with no internet, with no online message boards to coordinate preferences, with no real choice in WHO they interacted with.
We invented "third places" like coffee shops, where average people could show up, buy a coffee, and chat with literal strangers, where you would often get into discussions about philosophy, politics, this newfangled "science" stuff, and all sorts of topics, usually involving people guessing about things they didn't even have a right answer to. But that didn't matter because the point was to interact with strangers.
The scientific method was literally a bunch of wealthy people exploring a brand new hobby by finding each other in "journals" (basically hobby magazines), sending each other snail mail, and chatting about their different experiments.
Companies have decided they can just stop supporting an open environment, and charge you for the right to exist, and now we don't have a third place in the US, because nobody has the time or money or energy to socialize after work, because work takes so goddamned much out of us.
So no, please do not force me, who has a perfectly functional social life and several great friend groups for life, just because you don't know any other way to meet people. That's not my problem and forcing me into the office so you can take advantage of the requirement that I am there to socialize with me is not an okay solution.
Work doesn't pay me to be your friend.
> We all have laptops and can go any where to work.
Well, anywhere I can be sure no external person can see what I'm doing on screen. So a cafe will work if I can sit in a corner with my back to a wall. And even then, I'm giving up my tooling to make work easier on myself and more productive, like a nice, large monitor. Coworking spaces let me alleviate the second part, but the first problem is even more pressing there: now, everyone around me must be expected to understand what I'm doing, and thus is a bigger danger to my companies data security.
I certainly understand your restrictions, but not all companies or jobs require policies that are this strict. I had jobs where that kind of over the shoulder snooping wasn't a concern at all. When you're coding something that doesn't process personal data, I don't see why anyone should care that much. A casual observer can't realistically figure out what you're working on, let alone any "secret sauce" from glancing over your shoulder occasionally. Listening in on a meeting would be far more enlightening.
That is true, and don't get me wrong, I'm happy if that works for you -- people should make use of that possibility far more often.
It's not for possible for everyone, though, and the bar is not "is any IP loss realistic" but rather "what are the policies my employer demands", independent of if they are sensible or not. Make sure you're not getting caught breaking company policy, kids :P
I had the same take when I lived in a large city where each area had a healthy community. People there were friendly, eager to engage in conversation, the city had a lot of recreational sports, clubs, and places where people congregated. It was lovely. I worked from home the last year I was there and I was just as social as I was in the office, just with different people. I even had a rule - I had to see at least one stranger a day, and it was never a problem.
Now I live on the other side of the province, and holy shit is it hard. I've been here for over 6 years and I haven't been able to maintain a single friendship. I could try harder, for sure, but that's my point. It was effortless before, and now it feels like being social takes serious work.
I still work from home, and I've settled into a quieter way of life. It's nice, I enjoy it. That said, I'm not surprised others don't.
While I prefer remote it’s undeniable the vast majority of an adult’s socializing is done at work. Can you do it outside of it? Maybe, but probably not. Most of your friends will also work or they’ll have families and not be able to come out often.
Unless you have dozens of friends already the likelihood is you’ll often be alone after work.
Thankfully I’ve made my friends and have a family but if I was just starting out I don’t think I’d even have met the people that are close to me. My friends are mostly from work or work friends of my college friends.
People often say to that “just get hobbies”. Well, hobbies are often done with friends or are introduced to by friends.