Here's the thing though: you should not socialize with anyone at the office. The healthiest thing anyone can do for their career is to not mix work and friends. Once you're friends, you're sharing political opinions, life stories, and religious views. People pick up on that, and while you might be pleasing one guy, you're pissing off someone else. No matter your stance on something, you're going to be pissing off someone.

Work is for work - not a social life. Yes, it's easy to make friends at work because like in middle school, you're forced together and don't need to break the ice. Very tempting - very bad for the career.

What is good for both the career and getting friends is maintaining contact with compatible people from the office once you're out of there, and becoming friends with those people. That works.

Now, as far as missing simple human contact while you're at the office - I fully understand that. The problem is, you're forced into that human contact. That's probably healthy, but here's what I do: take a trip for groceries every other day and buy things fresh. Walk around, look for deals, take a full hour. Believe it or not, that alone is enough, as long as you keep doing it. The best part of being remote is you can do that smack in the middle of the day, take a little break from work and break that day up into two smaller parts - not when you're tired after a workday.

I do live with my wife though, so maybe don't need as much human contact. But using work for socializing in the office - ugh.