I was and am in a situation where WFM became voluntary because we outgrew the space while everyone was at home.

We have no limit of volunteers to work in the office, we have multiple people who never left the office, they continued to commute and went in every day.

So my anecdotal experience is the exact opposite of yours, which is why we don't put a ton of stock in them and look at aggregates in studies. Making sense?

childless men miss sense of community

Myself and everyone I know works remote. We're all childless/childfree and not a single one of us miss any community, we all feel there are zero downsides to it. This just comes across like propaganda to stop people working remote and return to office.

I'm single and childless and I personally like being hybrid. Full work from home fucks my mental health up pretty bad. I'm definitely in the minority among my peers though. I also wouldn't ever ask that anyone else be forced to come back to the office just because it isn't for me.

Best thing about working from home is stepping away from my desk, popping upstairs, and tossing my little baby boy up in the air a few times while he giggles and smiles.

In theory, we have the Third Space for that kind of socializing. Parks, plazas, union halls, club spaces and dance halls, churches, community centers, libraries...

In practice, they've been gradually privatized and monetized until everything is The Mall. If you don't have $10 to spend for the hour, there's nowhere you can legally so much as sit down. Hard to socialize on these terms.

My city decided to take its $7B budget and close a $330M shortfall by gutting parks, libraries, and other public amenities. Meanwhile, the police and fire departments are seeing a budget surge of over $100M.

The study isn’t bs.

There's a lot of "I'm childless and proud and how dare you suggest living in isolation and screaming at my computer screen all day has had any negative impact on my mental health. You're just trying to trick me into breeding! A thing I became intensely averse to just recently, after spending 16 hours a day on incel forums full of reactionary influencers."

So much of the knee-jerk ingrained responses online are indicative of people who have utterly lost the ability to think for themselves and are only capable of lashing out in defense of their latest favorite social media trend. Add in the artificial interactions created by bot accounts and people spamming content for self-promotion, and you've got a real recipe for mass psychosis.

Yeah, every sense of community I've ever felt with a job was also ruined by that same job. I don't remotely miss it, and I'm firmly child-free.

I agree that forcing return to office is either stupid or harmful. But I do like the people I work with, and not seeing them anymore would be saddening

The solution is obvious though, simply allow choice

I go in office when I want to, a few hours a day or a few times a week for a couple hours. But full work from home had me talking to myself… way too much.

I like to think I would less judgmental about people attepting to communicate with me in the only language I know. Maybe approach like that is the reason work is the only place where people spent time with you

Your comment was unintelligible, sorry. I can hear you whining now, very clearly, and trying to insult me personally. So I guess you can communicate successfully when you try.

I work remote (Going on 9 years now) and I miss a sense of community. Do I want to stop working remotely? Hell no, screw that. But two things can be true the same time, I can enjoy and encourage them at work, dnd I can also miss a sense of community.

I think it's okay to hold this opinion because it's individual to everyone.

This just comes across as propaganda

Being dismissive and pulling the rhetoric that this is propaganda is toxic as fuck.

I'm glad you understood me know, thank you. I adapted your approach to learning languages - speaking slow and laudly. It worked like a charm.

Lol my old boss hated remote work because he had to spend time with his family.

"I gotta get to the office mates!"

It may be both a factor of who you live with (the ones itching to get back to the office either lived alone or with people they didn't really gel with), and could have also been the length of time we were in lockdown (we had one of the strongest in the world - for the first 6 weeks or so even McDonald's wasn't allowed to open). After a couple of months of not being allowed to leave the house and having no face to face contact with friends or family, I can understand the desire to get back to the office. The people I have in mind mostly lived close to the office, too.

One other factor may have been that our remote working infrastructure was in no way ready for the entire organisation to work from home with a couple of day's notice. Video calls were just not possible for the first stretch as the work computers were all VPNed through a potato.

The truth often is somewhere in the middle

me with my dog

True, but we were full time in the office before lockdown and at least half the staff is from before lockdown. Also our job listings are for hybrid positions since there is a rarely enforced office mandate.

I have friends and live with friends and I still feel lonely when working remotely. I like hybrid the most because sometimes i need to just go into work and talk about the things im working on with people who actually understand (not work related talks just for fun)

I want to kick your city in the nuts. How could you gut parks and libraries.