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Comment by dd82 | Hacker News Reader

>Working remote is lonely and erodes a foundational element of sociability. You spend a good portion of your waking hours at work. Your coworkers are your friends.

Thats where you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap. You could also make the argument that commuting 90 minutes a day is a regular time suck for you that could be spent doing other productive things.

>Also, there is no doubt in my mind that people take longer HN and Reddit breaks while at home than they would at the office with their coworkers having a view on their screens.

oh, so smoker breaks lol. as long as they're getting the work done, why do you give a shit?

>As a broad social trend we need to fight against the retreat from actual human interactions.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work, but you need to be more mindful about doing it

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> you do need to explicitly make effort outside of work to fill that gap

On the one hand, I don’t disagree. On the other, I think this is something that is easy to say, and really hard to implement in practice.

The workplace has been a critical part of the social fabric for a very long time. And the opportunities for finding social connection outside of work are very unevenly distributed, and for the tech industry in particular, we tend to be less likely to have the personalities/skills to create a healthy social life on our own.

Does this need to change? Yeah, probably. I know I’ve personally had to work hard to cultivate social connections. But we should not underestimate the impact of just removing one of the largest social building blocks wholesale. Even if people can adjust, that doesn’t happen magically/automatically.

> There's nothing stopping you from doing that outside of work

There are many things that stop people. If you work a stressful job and/or have kids, your energy may be gone. If you’re a socially anxious person, your anxiety tells you it’s better to stay home. If you live in an area that doesn’t provide many social opportunities, you have that to contend with.

The reality is that society has been trending towards more and more isolation, and while I agree that we can each individually try to do something about that, I don’t think we should underestimate the challenge or assume that it’s just as easy as being “more mindful”.

Some of these issues are systemic, and in the same way you can’t tell a depressed person to just “look on the bright side”, we need to be discussing the deeper issues that are exacerbated by fully remote environments. I’m not saying blind RTO mandates are the solution either, but neither should we discount the challenge people face as the social fabric goes through these massive changes.

This is how I understand your position:

At core, it is about prioritization of strategies to facilitate mental health. In office work makes it easy to not explicitly or skip prioritizing socialization because its already there, for the most part. Without that prioritization, it can be easy to become undisciplined in maintaining those strategies for mental health

Been there a few times. For me, I love biking and trail riding. Its two wheel therapy for me, particularly on trails because you do need to pay attention. If your mind starts wandering, you'll be ejected over the bars real quick.

And there's hobbies that you can do outside of work, if its a priority for you. But like physical fitness, that's self-driven, and really easy to slack off and lose gains if you don't keep up with it.

But if you take into account the implied requirements for in-office work, that means time lost in commute, and needing to sync travel plans, vehicles, etc. that's the problem I have with blind mandates, they often are benefiting the person making those decisions, regardless of the people who need to implement and execute projects and goals.

> At core, it is about prioritization of strategies to facilitate mental health.

I don’t think I’d simplify it to this. I think the workplace is one way people have been filling a mental health need.

In another comment [0], I described some of the other reasons I think time in the office is valuable. More broadly, my position is that there are numerous aspects of time in the office that need to be explored and understood, and that a better argument against blind mandates is to identify and work towards suitable alternatives.

> In office work makes it easy to not explicitly or skip prioritizing socialization because its already there, for the most part. Without that prioritization, it can be easy to become undisciplined in maintaining those strategies for mental health

I think it goes beyond this, and I’d reframe it slightly. I don’t think it’s so much about becoming undisciplined, but about the erosion/collapse of long standing social structures without obvious replacements.

The end result may indeed be that we each have to start being disciplined about getting social time. But for a fundamentally social species that launched society to today’s technological heights on a foundation of social systems undermined by that progress, we’re now flailing about in the clouds unsure what to do about it because we’ve largely forgotten how to build IRL communities at a time when we need them most.

I agree that blind RTO mandates are no good. I agree that there are tradeoffs involved like commuting. I’m mostly advocating for a position that doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater while society catches up to our new reality. Realistically, this probably involves some hybrid model. Blind mandates are no good, but I think there’s a failure mode at the opposite end of the spectrum as well.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39875309

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