We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months.
If not the office, workers are better off using some social working space, but unfortunately WFH is so tempting and easy most will resort to that.
Psychologically it's not ideal.
Yes the office can be a pain, commute and what not, but loneliness could be worse.
We are social creatures, there is something quite unnatural only interacting with your wife/kid or worse - with no one else at all, for weeks and months.
Offices are significantly less 'natural' than spending time with a small group of people. If you go back a thousand years or so many people lived their entire life within a mile or two of where they were born - they grew up, worked, got married, lived and died in a single village. In lots of more isolated cases people would have only met a couple of hundred people in their entire lifetime.
It's definitely unusual to lead such a limited life today, but psychologically it's not that bad. People survived pretty well, and they continue to now.
That "small" group would consist of something like 100 people, not 5. If you want to appeal to nature, it's less natural for your family to be your entire social circle, than for it to include casual workplace acquaintances.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, this is the truth. We are much closer to a pack of chimps than anything else, definitely not 2-3 family members (and even 2-3 members is optimistic considering divorce rate and plummeting child bearing)
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We lived in groups of a few dozens of members for hundreds of thousands of years.
Working remotely from home is also a very different lifestyle, so I'm not sure what the argument is. Living as if it's the 1000 BC is not in the cards.
> If not the office, workers are better off using some social working space, but unfortunately WFH is so tempting and easy most will resort to that. Psychologically it's not ideal.
I would caution against the presumption that people will do things that are "bad" for them because they're convenient and you have to force them to do things that are "good" for them instead.
In these comments you can see examples of people who are going to co-working spaces. Obviously they feel they need it and I support them. Personally I have no interest in going to a co-working space. I love my WFH solitude and autonomy, and 2021 was the most productive year of my life work-wise.
Is this psychologically bad for me, regardless of my own perceptions and experience? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think some random boss with the power to fire me unless I come into the office is a better judge of that than I am.
Random boss is not enlightened by virtue of being a boss. Surely anyone who has nodded their head to a Dilbert comic knows that by now. Random boss will do what's good for himself, not what's good for me.
Paternalistic, collectivist authoritarianism has dominated human thought for most of our history. It's only recently that individual autonomy and freedom have become more influential. I think that's a very good thing and I'm not going back.
I never said you have to force them, that's a philosophical question with no clear answer, I'm just stating a problem - which is called loneliness and solitude and which affects most people.
Its very possible in your individual case 100% remote work is what's good for you, but it's not likely that its good for most people most of the time because it goes against everything we know about our nature and genes. Now if a person is 100% remote worker but he invests heavily in socializing then there shouldn't be a problem. The trouble is I don't think most people will do this, at least not enough.
Many people lack discipline and have very weak will power; so many of us find it extremely hard to do the things which we know are good for mental well being - such as exercising, eating right and socializing with friends and family. We find it extremely easy and even addictive to do things which aren't great (or even bad) for mental well being such as Netflix binging, reading Twitter and eating junk food and not leaving the house for lengthy periods.
The easy thing to do is just WFH and not bother with seeing anyone, because calling up friends is hard work. Sure, people will still see friends but not more than they did before they went WFH. It's mostly just gonna be people working from home, alone, or with a spouse if you're lucky.
This is why I'm not incredibly optimistic.
