I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal and valid. Remote work is essentially accepting that the primary way you'll engage with your colleagues and labor is through a screen, and that is an uncomfortable feeling (to some people at least)
My coworkers are my colleagues. I don’t mind sharing a beer with them once in a while, but apart from “work” we have different interests, values, and experiences. That doesn’t lead to community, it leads to having acquaintances. And if you doubt that, ask yourself how many of your “work friends” from a job you’ve had more than a year ago do you still interact with?
The pandemic has been a joy for me because it’s let me separate my parasocial interactions from my true friends.
I still interact a lot with people I was on a team with >1 yr ago – the ones I met before we went remote. Can't say the same about the ones I was never in the office with, even though they seem like equally good people.
> but apart from “work” we have different interests, values, and experiences. That doesn’t lead to community, it leads to having acquaintances.
It has not been my experience that "community" arises particularly from this kind of homogeneity.
I'm also kind of curious what you mean by "parasocial" outside of the context of media.
I actually went back and forth on using it - even considering a hedge with a "quasi-" prefix. But it felt apt: plenty of my past "work friends" exist as little beyond a persona that I interact with via LinkedIn. I give a thumbs-up for their job change, we exchange polite offers to get a coffee that we both know neither will accept, and we go on.
I would say that the majority of my friends and close Social Circle are people who I met and worked with an office at one point. Sure it started with cooler chat and beers after work, but it evolve to going to weddings, backpacking trips, and our partners becoming close with friendships of their own.
I do like workplace community, even if I'm only close with a subset of my colleagues. I find it vastly more fulfilling to work with friends that I enjoy. I don't like turning off my personality and become a faceless COG working with other cogs for 8 hours a day and find it depressing
Been on my own and remote since 2000. I am remote with my clients save for occasional face to face meeting when possible and I am remote with my subcontractors. It feels "extremely normal" to me and the last thing I've ever want is my friends and people I hang out with being supplied by my workplace. Does not mean that I've never made friends when I did "normal work" long time ago but it was just extra.
I do think that this discussion is often people who disagree not bothering to disagree, which probably explains why I read your comment wrong.
It makes sense—wherever you spend the most time around others is where you’re most likely to make friends and feel a sense of belonging.
Remote work upends that. It’s great if you already have an established social circle, but bad for people who want to develop one.
There’s no reason why work has to be the main thing that satisfies these needs, but it’s fulfilled that role for so long that it has sucked up most of the oxygen from alternatives.
I hope that as remote work continues to take off, we’ll see a new wave of third places that can take over this function. There’s a huge opportunity here for anyone who can help socially struggling remote workers feel more connected.
The argument would be a lot stronger if most office work wasn't perpetually online to begin with.