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> What about constant interruptions, loud neighbours and that white light above you, even though you'd rather have it yellow? All the inconveniences of sharing a place with other people, wouldn't any of this take a toll?

Are you describing working in an office or working from home?

Stole the words out of my... keyboard.

Wait till people who love WFH say "You just need the proper setup".

Yes, I need a proper setup. An office, please.

but it could be a home office with 0 minute commute.

Ah yes, my lonely concrete bunker beneath my house.

I understand the sentiment here. But there are different lifestyles. For some, home is where they spend a majority of their time outside of work. I've optimized my home around my lifestyle.

WFH doesn't require building a sensory deprivation tank.

Since going remote, I work in a swimming pool about 50% of the time. I have a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, a Panasonic toughbook, and a "floating standing desk" (a raft turned upside down). I smoke a cigar, sip a nice whiskey, and crank through my work. Then I go spend time with my family and friends.

It's not quite a concrete bunker beneath my house. But I'm not coming back to an office anytime soon.

brb buying a pool

Depends on which office, and whose home we're talking about.

It's not my goal to shoot your anecdote with my own.

My post above is more about the tendency to focus on WFH as a mental health tragedy, while WFO is never held under this scrutiny. Is it possible that herding millions into offices [of various quality] had no major impact on mental health? Yet it's called an apocalypse when opposite becomes a trend.

One's "mental health apocalypse" is another's relief from pressure. If you often hear one angle maybe it's now becoming a chant rather than rational discourse.

Maybe we can do better than approaching this from that one specific angle, and consider both as valid options. Leave the people with choice, and let them pick whatever is best for them. [1]

[1] My anecdata shows most people given the choice pick their homes or places they like over the office, and offices nowadays are almost empty. But obviously it's anecdata, doesn't mean "everyone" wants it that way (they don't) and YMMV.

Preface: I don't think full WFH will happen after COVID, I think companies will try it and slowly end up reverting back to more of a partial WFH schedule like Microsoft just announced, for a number of reasons.

That being said, I agree with you here. I our current work situation right now is causing a ton of stress and mental health issues, but COVID and our current political climate have a much bigger hand in that than just the WFH part. What WFH looks like right now is not what a 100% WFH lifestyle would look like in a year or two. I've had the ability to WFH when ever I wanted for the past 4 years and I can tell you, my current WFH situation is much more draining that it ever was before.

I think your video game analogy is pretty spot on. There are problems with 100% WFH, but "mass mental health issues" just seems like a boogieman.

The thing mostly talked about is social isolation and it seems pretty straight forward that going from time in the office to the same time at home reduces social contact.

Yeah, for me it's less "working was my only social interaction" and more "with covid, we can't work in person and we also can't go do our own things with friends."

Losing in-person work relationships at the same time as social relationships is rough. Luckily I get along well with the person I live with, but the lack of ad-hoc social interaction is unsettling.

Or, it’s good that people will be forced to build social networks outside of their work, as it was a bad development that citizens began to depend heavily on work for meaning and connection.

Once the pandemic is over, of course.

People have always relied on work for building social lives. Even when I worked in a shop, I'd end up going for drinks with those people and making friends. When I moved to a new city, my entire social fabric stems off of work (even if the majority of friends are now 1 or 2 steps removed, I needed that foundation to bootstrap).

We're already in a loneliness epidemic, WFH will make that 10x worse.

You’ve misread my point, and are arguing against something I didn’t say. I never said that people didn’t have social networks at work before, I said that they didn’t depend so heavily upon them.

People used to also have extensive social networks outside of work through various religious and social institutions, most of which have withered in the past 20 years or so. This is a huge part of this “loneliness epidemic” you mention. We should rebuild those so that people alternating their work structure isn’t a debilitating blow to their social network. This is particularly important since people change jobs much more rapidly now, which disrupts any social network based on work.