Ask HN: How do you keep social life if WFH? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep social life if WFH?

48 pointsreacharavindh25 comments

I moved to the Netherlands during COVID last year. I have a fully remote job and work from home 99% of the time. This combination has wrecked my social life, and I find myself sad and missing social connections and in a new place. I’m generally a social person that enjoys conversations with people, and service energy from being social. But, I feel like I’m stuck in a loop that I can’t even think properly to get myself out of it.

My initial step is to get to my office(1.5 hour train commute one-way) for two days of the week.

I would like to know how others in similar work patterns like myself handle it?

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Those 3 hours you save commuting can be the ticket to a real social life as opposed to an office social surrogate.

The trick is to seek out people whom you enjoy spending time with in social settings. This can be e.g. through a gym, arts&crafts classes, uni courses, volunteer activities, sport clubs, nature clubs, cooking classes board game card chess d&d groups ... whatever your fancy.

Even if you are more introvert you will find these environments very welcoming.

Having a social life without the everpresent undertones of office politics and policies can be very invigorating

The thing is the time saved by not doing the commute ends up going to work because those are 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM and 4 PM to 5:30 PM. On a day that I am working from home, it gets swallowed by helping my kiddo get ready to go to daycare (until 9 AM), and "nothing social is happening at 4 PM on a work day, lets just finish up work...". I realise now the need to consciously compartmentalise work hours and physically be away from the work desk in order to do something else for myself.

I've just had a conversation with my wife about how it is impacting me, and that I need to carve out personal time as well, and not be relied on for assistance with the kid on _all_ days. Every other day, it is my turn and she can get the time to do something as well. Thinking and talking about it already gives me hope that I can make useful changes and feel differently.

It's easy. You need to do regular activity with same group. To be clear the point is not if you are good at the activity it's to meet people: Team sports Improv Acting Running group Meditation group Etc etc

Point is you are seeing them repeatedly so friendships develop.

Especially good are retreats/activity weekends because you will spend concentrated time with people.

Good luck

Thanks. As obvious as it sounds, I couldn’t see it before. I’ll be seeking out events that puts me in regular groups while doing something fun.

At work, we have a permanent channel in Jitsi (a meeting in Teams will work too) that people can join when they have no other meeting going on. It's silent sometimes, but also the place where people ask silly questions that they would normally ask when standing at someone else's desk, or where people share non-work related stuff and discuss random things.

After two years of almost permanently working from home, it's grown to the place where the whole team just hangs when they're working to have someone to talk to when sitting alone at home, but also to ask serious questions, and equally so to talk non-work related banter from time to time.

Since the last few releases of Jitsi, we're also using breakout rooms to discuss some more in-depth things without annoying the rest of the team. Previously, those people would move to another meeting and come back when they're done. Now, they can stay in the one permanent meeting, and the rest can see them sitting in a breakout room, and go in and ask them when something urgent is going on.

I honestly think this approach has kept the whole team sane during 2+ years of full time working from home.

I'm in a position where I can choose to go to the office if I want to or not. Most of the time I much prefer working from home, this has definitely an effect on being able to become friends with my coworkers (which, in any case, almost none of them go to the office anyway).

I have also recently moved to a different country, so in reality, I don't have many friends here to begin with.

Luckily for me, I've never really felt the need as I am pretty active online anyway and never have a moment where I'm not chatting with someone or have someone to chat with. IRL I meet with friends once a week, once every two weeks for some beers and other related activities. It's enough for me.

I think, if you can't get the social interaction you need from work then it might be worth looking into any sort of social clubs and whatnot that you could take on during the weekend. Photography, painting, whatever you fancy there are sure to be clubs in your city :)

My suggestion: Actively work at building a lifestyle that doesn't revolve around the office/work.

Do you have friends outside of the office? Favorite places to eat and talk? Meetups you can go to meet and hang and talk about things you like? A conference "hallway track" to meet like minded technical people? Hell, Bumble even has a bff feature if that works for you. When I moved to a new city, I met some of my current best friends through a date that didn't pan out. It was scary to meet a total stranger when I didn't have friends in the city, but people are generally nicer than you might think.

I hope this helps at least a bit.

1.5 hours is like Eindhoven to Amsterdam, IE: from one end of the country to the other... really not bad (IE: trains are fun, have wifi, etc) but I'm wondering here if part of the problem is that you are far away from where you might have more connections?

Either way, whether you are in some tiny village or the big city, get out of your flat and down the street - to the pub, the gym, the church, etc. Whatever your thing and whoever your people are, they are out there somewhere and it's just a matter of figuring out where to find them. Yes you have to put yourself out there and that can be hard (I'm horribly shy and introverted myself) but that's the cost to connect. I'm wondering - even though Dutch people are wonderfully poly-linguistic, I'm gathering that you might be foreign and I'm wondering if you are concerned about your language skills? Is that feeling like a barrier for you? Best way to improve on that is get out and start interacting.

While I was freelancer I worked almost all of the time from home. I was also looking at getting a desk at some coworking place. What I do is working from neighborhood cafes, libraries, etc.

Now I've switched jobs. I work at company that has hybrid work policy. This was one of the main reasons for the switch - to be among the people again.

I go to office at least once a week.

Talk to your neighbours, go to a park and make small talk with someone who seems lost, take up a sport, etc. Just do things someone with good work-life balance might do, because if your work is the place to socialise for you it is time to accept that you do not.

Thanks. Signed up to my group tennis lessons again. In the past (also living as expat in other countries- USA - and Denmark), I have made a point to attend local Meetup events and ended up building my own social circle after a while. COVID times made that impossible and I didn’t realise the value of what I did by luck in the past.

I feel you, I went through a similar process in the beginning :) It's perfectly natural to be lost sometimes.

Prioritise the social life and do it first.

Unless you're applying yourself to some great quest, work is a secondary task in life. You've got this backwards.

What do you want from life? Start at the top of that list and work downwards.

> Unless you're applying yourself to some great quest, work is a secondary task in life.

But the standard workday at eats majority of your daylight hours. How is that ever going to be secondary.

My point is that you have to prioritise. Calling it a "social life" is weird! It's _life_!

Unless you're creating something, work is the thing that sucks that you do to put food on the table.

So you decide - this is the life I want to lead - and this is the job or income source or life quest or whatever that fits into it. Like, it's a holistic thing, it's not a bolt on.

That doesn't mean you go climbing at 2pm on Tuesday, you and your friends are probably at work. That's a different problem.

I called it "social life" only to indicate the time outside of work where one does not have to be professional and care about priorities of a business. Being social at work and caring about it evidently is not enough. As much as I like what I do for work, and never feel like "work is the thing that sucks that you do to put food on the table", doing it at the confines of my house is how I ended up here.

Finding other people that I'd like to hang out with was way easier when I was single, had plenty of time in my hands, no covid restrictions, and have some colleagues as catalyst for such friend of a friend of a friend networks. Doing it in a new country, while working from home, with restricted times(growing with a 3 year old son), is the challenge that became too much.

Sure, well, like you say - an option is to go into the office, with that 3 hour round trip commute.

You're really far away from it and you don't seem to be getting on with WFH. So can you change the job? Move closer to work? etc etc etc.

Life is holistic, you can't just change one thing, everything has to move to create balance.

I have the same sorts of challenges you have. My way of solving it wasnt to do the complete opposite and go into the office. WFH 99-100% is a blessing. Regarding feeling sad/isolated - whatever - you need to find ways to combat this. The way I did this was starting a meetup group - so on time Im not working I can be running events with others primarily nights/weekends. This has helped me tremendously. I additionally will spend say friday afternoon at a local coffee shop. Hope this helps

I can’t speak for myself but my friends who lived in the tier 1 cities like London, NYC for work have all moved back to our hometown (DC). It’s good to return to where you have family, and friends from a preexisting social network.

So if you moved to the Netherlands just for a good job, then perhaps consider moving back to wherever is “home” and continuing to work from there. It might take a little negotiation but it would be worth it for your health and happiness.

> I’m generally a social person that enjoys conversations with people, and service energy from being social.

Almost any local bar (not a touristy place) can serve the need of "social interaction". The greatest thing is what you actually isn't needed to drink a lot or anything at all.

It's not a universal solution of course but being able to confirm what you are actually can interact with peoplr, even ones you never seen before (or after), greatly helps to scrath the social itch.

I recently moved to Annecy, France (and I'm not French) - my trick is to join expat groups on Facebook and and ask if any techies want to complain about work over drinks

Using Discord w/a lot of close friends + old work colleagues. Add a bunch of channels for topics. Join a local Dungeons & Dragons group, ours meets once a week. Also have been going to the mall quite a bit recently, just walking around and being around people is nice. Buy concert tickets in advance is also a good way to get a group committed.

If you have the time, join some amateur sport or hobby center. And then put in the energy.

Isn't working from a co-working space an option ?

I don't

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