I honestly find these people to simply be trolls. The views espoused make no sense.
Imagine if I suggested that they just video call their children from the office as a replacement for watching them grow up.
You want A, I want B. We can have both, it ain't even hard.
I hope it's not coming off as me trolling. I'm genuinely attempting to see what the other side of this discussion is. One side seems to represent remote work as a way to decentralize the industry allowing us all to move to lower cost of living areas, reduce the time "working" by not needing commutes, spend more time with family and children, and improve the amount of focus time you have.
As for the work-from-office side of things: I don't actually know why people want to return. As from what I can gather: people miss commuting and miss seeing other people. It seems fairly straight forward to me how this could be replicated in a WFH environment.
1. If you miss commuting adding a fake commute (home -> subway -> coffee shop -> subay -> home) into your day can help.
2. If you miss seeing people working from a shared office space like WeWork or attending meetups with other people in your field seems like a good substitute. You can talk shop with people who are actually your friends (changing jobs doesn't change your social group).
I see these as being very direct substitutes for what I see people bring up and I don't understand why these are not the same. Maybe because other people you are working with are not also doing these? Maybe it's that if the commute or socialization aren't part of the job it feels sort of "pointless"? I don't understand this though.
> Imagine if I suggested that they just video call their children from the office as a replacement for watching them grow up.
Funnily enough this is one of the reasons people like WFH. They can spend time with their kids instead of commuting.
> You want A, I want B. We can have both, it ain't even hard.
Actually, it is sort of difficult. In a world where we assume all workplaces allow WFH then yes, we can do both. Coworkers who want to work in an office can self organize into rented office space but the default of remote workers will change things: conference rooms need to allow people to dial in, people need to document discussions/decisions that are randomly made in office, etc. In a world where work-from-office is the assumed norm it is much harder to join a company as WFH since many processes are just not there.