Take the same approach as home schooling. Community comes from engaging in other activities.
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.
This was me until I realized I didn’t have a child and that I lived in the first floor.
Where was I going? What giggled as I tossed it into the air?
The ability to work from home has given me innumerable benefits, but I must admit that as a very introverted guy who’s been going through some shit, and who’s go-to move during times of anxiety and depression is to distance themselves from everyone… yeah, sometimes I do miss my coworkers. A lot of them are pretty great people. Doesn’t mean I’d rather spend 3 hours a day sitting in traffic to see them, just means I low-key miss someone to bitch with.
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.
I want to kick your city in the nuts. How could you gut parks and libraries.
Itt: cognitive disonannce.
The study isn’t bs. Lemmy users just won’t accept that they don’t even come close to representing the average individual.
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.
It’s something I’ve noticed in general.
I had an amazing boss who was single and lived alone, and really love her staff. We had unecessarily long staff meetings every week. When I started I was annoyed by them until someone pointed out that the time we spent with everyone getting distracted and going off-topic and padding out the meeting while we ate our lunch around the conference room table was, for her, the weekly family meal.
I still don’t like unnecessary meetings, but it gave me a different perspective on why some people like them.
As a childless man, they will have to pry my work from home out of my cold, lots of free time having hands.
As a childless woman, SAMEEEEEE. My dog is a fantastic coworker.
I work in a bar, and I love seeing most of my coworkers. I obviously can’t speak on the WFH aspect, as it’d be impossible for me, but enjoying the company of the people you work with isn’t a foreign concept, especially in the service industry
I’m a childless man and I don’t miss the sense of community one bit.
I’m a dad and I do. Our anecdotal stories have been registered!
I have more time to spend with the community that isn’t tied to my income.
Also a father, so double benefits!
As a childless man, fuck no I don’t.
For me WFH has helped me have a community. The office was never a real community, and the fact that we all worked together got in the way of being actual friends. Instead with the added time from WFH I was able to prioritize my social life and go to more events and meet people I actually have stuff in common with. Additionally my in-office job forced me to live in a dead suburb, WFH allowed me to move to a city with a lot more social opportunities.
Of course probably not everyone prioritized that. The office might be good for some people, but for people like me who don’t necessarily socialize at the office very easily WFH is much better for community.
Mmmm I am a childless man, and I live by myself, and I am 100% cool with that, and feel fine. But to be fair, I’ve got a pretty good circle of friends, and a really strong core friend group.
This childless man loves his peace, quiet, and alone time.
But maybe I don’t qualify as I have dogs, friends, and kickass neighbors.
My oldest has no children and works fully remote.
When the pandemic started, his company decided to have everyone work from home. They very quickly discovered that they were just as productive, and the owner decided it made sense to dump their office space.
A group of employees decided to go on vacation together, while still working. Since they are all remote, they didn’t actually have to work from home. They got an Airbnb with good Internet, worked during the day, and saw the sites and had fun together after work.
If you’re remote and you miss that sense of community, reach out to your coworkers and ask them if they want to hang out after work. It’s possible they don’t and you’ll be disappointed. It’s also possible that they feel the same way but didn’t know they could do something about it.
Either you’ll be the hero that saved everyone from their solitary existence, or you’ll have to accept that they don’t want to hang out with you.
To me this highlights that many single men have problems with loneliness.
Remote work is a step in the right direction at least. In my case, I’m generally just too exhausted to bother going anywhere other than home and work, which definitely limits any socializing. Work culture isn’t entirely to blame of course, but it sure isn’t helping.
I would claim it’s only a step in the right direction for someone if they will actually start doing something social. It’s not enough that there is more opportunity to if you never actually do it…
Would they equally write ‘mothers’ vs. ‘childless women’ in another article about remote work, I wonder.
It’d be married and single women, most likely. (Edit: they prefer to classify us by our relationships with men.)
