[kiawe_fire]

Not everyone has other social activities they enjoy.

Or the social activities they might enjoy, involve some skill prerequisite they don’t have, or time commitments they can’t keep.

Essentially, if someone was already a social person and had existing social groups for those hobbies that the office commute interfered with, then wfh was a gift.

But for those who enjoy their job, and enjoyed in-office collaboration, there is going to be a lot of effort and several prerequisites required to attempt to replace that outside the office.

[j245]

I’m not arguing that everyone must be WFH.

I’m saying if you choose to WFH or remote you can still enjoy social activities.

The “you’ll always be worse off socially if you WFH” argument isn’t valid.

If your personal situation dictates that it’s impossible for you to social outside a work/office environment and that would hurt your quality of life, you should absolutely WFO.

Just understand that it doesn’t apply universally and WFH and having plenty of social interaction is entirely plausible and within reach for many many people.

My problem was lack of time and energy. The commute and the effort of commuting just killed any desire to seek out social activities after work. Work was not getting in the way of any specific hobby I already had.

Once that constraint was removed, I could actually start figuring out what stuff I was interested in and perusing it.

I was surprised how much stuff is out there once I started looking for things to do.

[ghaff]

The reasonable upthread point is that, for some people, working and collaborating in the office gave them their social fix and they may not have the time or the interest to seek out social activities outside of work hours.

The answer probably has to be either live with that or seek out work environments more to their liking. Note that this isn't even wholly a WFH/COVID situation. For years, I've worked with a very distributed group of people. If I went into the local office pre-COVID, there would be people there but potentially I wouldn't run into anyone I knew and almost certainly no one I directly worked with.