Comment by skeeter2020 2 days ago
>> a great many time consuming pleasantries.
It makes me sad that pleasantries are viewed by some as a time-consuming chore. You can recognize that person who really cares about how you are doing or what you did on the weekend, and it makes you warm inside. You don't need to shoot the shit for 30 minutes, but human interaction is what builds community, and most of us like that; all of us need it.
It’s a mixture for sure. My time is divided between a WfH desk and a (shared with one coworker) private office at a Co-working space. I love my coworker dearly. I also have made a handful of friends in the space that, like you say, they truly care about how I’m found and that feeling is reciprocal and definitely makes me warm and fuzzy.
And sometimes I just really need to be able to walk over to the coffee maker and refill my cup while processing a complex problem in my head. Unfortunately due to my brain wiring, having even that 5 minute conversation makes a ton of that problem solving context evaporate and it’s exceptionally frustrating when that happens.
I’m fortunate that I can plan where I’m going to be working based on the probability of working on hard problems on a given day. The pleasantries are deeply pleasing for me, except when they’re not.
Community is built through third places, neighbourship, inter-family ties, and other deep and lasting connections between people. That a workplace is a place for community is an unfortunate belief that arose in the USA in recent Bowling Alone decades just because Americans largely don’t perceive any other time and place for community.
Yes, but they didn’t need workplace pleasantries in order to feel community like the OP suggested.
For some people, “pleasantries” are mentally taxing, and while you can force yourself to feign interest in someone’s random weekend activity, you can’t force yourself to actually find it interesting if in reality you find it dull. The “chore” isn’t that it consumes time, it’s that not everyone finds it a pleasant thing to do with any random person.