And again, I wouldn't want to force anyone to come to the office. I am merely asking for other people's opinions.
I ask because, right here, you're tying "[caring] about the fun and meaning [of your work hours]" to working in an office. And I honestly just don't see the connection.
Can you say more about that?
My question goes more in the direction of: For me personally, the communal and social aspect of occasionally sitting in the same room with the team I'm building software with has always given me a lot. And I have experienced recently that loads of people will not even take a 20 minute commute once a week to have some few meetings face-to-face because they apparently don't even see the slightest addition in value from that. I can't really wrap my head around it (because I obviously have an orthogonal viewpoint here) and was trying to get more insight into this way of thinking.
Look, I'm a pretty extroverted, social guy, and as a senior manager, the vast majority of the problems I need to solve involve high bandwidth, 1:1 communication because the problems I solve are people problems first and foremost.
So obviously, for me, in my role, face-to-face interactions have a ton of value!
But I absolutely recognize that a lot of other roles are not the same.
When I look back at my days as a developer, I spent a lot of time in the same room with people! And 80% of that time, our headphones were on and we were banging away coding while interacting digitally. Sure, we'd often pop those headphones off to have those high-bandwidth problem solving conversations, but the vast majority of time those conversations were 1:1 discussions, and could have easily been had over virtual meeting tools like Zoom or Teams.
That's the reality for a lot of individual contributors.
Just because you can't wrap your head around that, doesn't mean that experience is invalid.