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Comment by temende | Hacker News Reader

> But some people need to be around other people more or less all the time to be happy.

That's fine, but no one is obligated to spend time with them. They need to be more convincing or charismatic then to get people to spend more time with them. "If you don't endure a commute to spend time with me, I won't be happy" won't cut it.

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This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.

Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.

Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.

Remote advocates by and large aren't arguing for abolition of offices. Only a choice.

And remote work can also be done from co-working spaces. Or with occasional all-hands IRL.

This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.

Are they perhaps subcontractors, or none of your management etc are remote too?

When there is a good mixture of everyone remote, I've found it not to be an issue.

My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.

How cold this world is to cut out communal spaces and force us to spend 40h/w in solitude.

How cold the world is to make the primary form of communal spaces be working in the rigid hierarchy, abuse, and discomfort of the modern American workplace.

I don’t live in America. How cold the world is that you lot resign yourselves to the expectation that you’ll resent your coworkers and employer.

I recommend the 1999 American film “Office Space” or the 2003 British television series “The Office” if you somehow think this is a novel sentiment. Or “Bartelby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville from 1856.

Not everyone is a single tech employee who lives alone. Some (in fact, many) people have a social life outside the office where not going to an office doesn't result in eternal solitude.

I don't believe you.

do i need to add the /s

> "do i need to add the /s"

Sadly, probably yes. This is the "age of outrage" after all.

If you scroll to the top of the thread, it's a person mentioning their wife finds remote work isolating.

This weird grandstanding about having a social life every time remote works comes up on HN is sad.

It's not grandstanding, I only brought up social life because someone mentioned social isolation from remote work. That is a real problem and I can empathize with it, but the solution isn't forcing RTO on co-workers to force them to hang out with you.

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