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Comment by fartcannon | Hacker News Reader

I did the same and it was as unbelievably worthless as I recalled from before the pandemic. You know what really stands out in the office? How sad it all is. The frowns on the subway, the fake smiles in the office, the pretending, the posturing. Bleh. I'm resigning.

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I miss in-person activities, especially going to lunch with coworkers, trying a new restaurant, or one of our old favorites. Remote has become pretty old.

What stops you from doing that now? You still get lunch breaks when WFH.

People whose common ground in life is that they both liked the weather or got good deals on big houses - at least this is how I understand geographical community in a remote-first world - would seem unlikely to produce nearly as engaging of lunch conversation as coworkers. And coworkers at lunch were not famously engaging to begin with.

Nothing, but it's more than exception than the rule now.

the opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.

How are you going to build more meaningful relationships with a collection of people that’s essentially random (neighbors) vs. one with a lot of built in common ground (coworkers)?

it used to be incredibly common, in fact normal, to be friendly with your neighbors… dine with them, hang out with them… this has changed dramatically in the last 30 years

yup — I’m a bit old school and keep trying to do this. It’s very “hard,” you can face rejection, but it’s way more interesting than living in a bubble of your work place.

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