Comment by bart_spoon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bart_spoon | Hacker News Reader

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Sounds like the office has become a substitute for social interaction everywhere else in life. That may not be a bad thing for you, but it is a negative in the sense that it forces everyone to make it a part of their social lives. If you are looking for making new friends, a sense of belonging, sports and games, drinking buddies, meeting potential dates, and group lunches, you can in theory find outlets for all of those things outside of work.

But everyone working in an office means that if you aren't interested in those things, (you already have friends, a family, hobby groups, etc), you are forced to spend time away from them to participate in the in-office culture. It seems extremely backwards to me.

Its like if people who make church their social group, which is very common, required people who aren't interested in church to attend to enable their social lives.

I don't know how or why a large number of us have made work a substitute for our social lives, but it has been a major problem for the rest of us who haven't.

I feel like this mindset is actually responsible for a lot of modern-day unhappiness. Why are 1st world countries somehow more lonely?

Something I've noticed while talking to my older relatives outside of the US is that their social life often are the people that they meet in their (first) job in the location they ended up staying in. It feels straightforward that the people that you spend 8+ hours a day with are going to be the people that you feel like you know and can trust.

It seems like some odd modern/corporate idea that work is just for work. Imagine if we had the same mindset for school, and tried to make things "productive" by eliminating all breaks and the assumption that students should get to know each other during class/free time.

I think we need to accept the idea that work is really going to be much of your social life when you move, work friends are not your best buds, and only later on can you have a social life that doesn't deeply involve people at work.

Look up "third place", it's a really fascinating concept which I've been obsessed with for a long time and I really want to solve it, at least for me. I feel my long-term sanity depends on it.

The gist is people used to have at least three social circles they'd hang out daily: family, work, friends outside of work. Note that I don't mean "participate in activities" with any of them, just be among these people, even without any goal.

We've lost the third place. It's only family, work and hanging out with friends sometimes, usually to _do_ something. I've noticed this big disconnect looking at older people in Southern Europe which spend their afternoon at a bar playing cards, or in the recent ages men hanging out in clubs and women in sewing/book/gossip clubs or when I visited family in central Africa where it's common to just hang out in the porch after dinner and chat with passers-by and just be there and _socialise_, without any goal in particular. I had the luck of experiencing something like that for a few years and it was incredibly nourishing and I miss it dearly.

Until we restore this third place, and find a way to make it work in the modern world, the loneliness and unhappiness epidemic can only grow, is my opinion.

I don't take issue with people making friends with people they work with. I do the same. I take issue when society or individuals make work their sole social outlet. On the contrary, I think people who make work their social outlet are more likely to be lonely. What happens when your coworkers leave? Or you get a new job? Or you are fired?

Having multiple outlets for socializing, and making work a smaller, secondary one, makes for a much more resilient social life in my opinion. Which is obviously a major part of why some have found the last year of remote work hellish, and others, just fine, or even quite freeing.

This feels like a heavy-handed response to me. Socializing in the office doesn't need to be a substitute, but can be one many missing pieces in a well-rounded social life. Many of the ways people found a social life outside of work are either still not available or not the same. I used to love working from the coffee shop down my block. There were often around 50 people working in there at any given time of day, but the chairs and tables are still stacked against the wall, and people come inside only to get their coffee and go back home. Even finding conversation in a crowded bar can seem more difficult as people are still keep physical distance from people they do not know.

What about meeting people through volunteering or by even joining an open source project?

I guess it's just more efficient to try and make friends with people that you already have to hang out with 40 hours a week. People are lazy and making friends as an adult is difficult

That's fine, except it goes back to the original point that you are essentially forcing a culture of in-person work unnecessarily on everyone, because a portion of people are either too lazy or otherwise incapable of socializing with anyone outside of work.

That's because grabbing coffee from a cafe isn't an activity focused on actually socializing. Work forces you to do so because You can't seriously expect to get coffee, sit down and work on a laptop and expect to meet people. Socializing requires some amount of effort, and means going to a place or activity where you can actually meet someone.

* Volunteer as part of a local organization

* Find a meetup based on a personal interest (foreign language, programming, art, gaming)

* Join an athletic group (biking, running, hiking, martial arts)

* Go to an activity sponsored by your library (my library has everything from workshops on things like gardening and meditation, to a maker-space, to a Hamilton-sing along choir. Lots of libraries have activities like this).

* Find an open source project to contribute to

* Religious (or even slightly spiritual)? Find a local church you enjoy

You are definitely right about the cafe/bar/club being a terrible place for meeting people. But there's lots of places in most communities where you can still socialize that aren't work.

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