Comment by dd82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dd82 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com