My wife and I use it as an excuse to clean up. We try to keep an active social life, as-is, so the place is generally clean-ish. But during especially busy weeks (or minor sickness, or random bouts of laziness and existential despair), the place can really fall apart.

So one of us will look around in disgust, invite someone over for dinner or drinks or something, and then politely pop in on the other, like "hey honey... I just invited [so-an-so], and they'll be here in an hour".

Suddenly, within 20-30 minutes, the place is spotless.

Hah... this is awful but so true. We go through the exact same thing. We just had overnight houseguests, the place hasn't been this spotless in years. I even had the carpets steamed!

Haha. My wife makes me cancel the invitation.

Back in college, the rule in the dorms was if your door was open, you were welcoming anyone who wanted to drop in and hang out.

40 years later, I still miss that.

The recapturing of some of this is one of the best things about my job, not because my job is anything really special in that regard, but because I'd spent so much time contracting (alone in a room by myself) or in grad school (same.)

Having an office, and a culture where people would 'drop by' sometimes, either for real work reasons, tenuous work reasons, or purely social, has been a godsend.

Now I'm thinking about how to consciously engineer this given our environmental constraints...

I miss this as well! Stanford still has this and calls it the open door policy

I really hope something like Campus Housing works out. They had a great idea but didnt execute. With the right group of people I'd be super down to live in something like a dorm again.

The 'cleaning the house' especially. At some point adulthood seems to inculcate this notion of formality to visits. It's been universally to my social detriment.