I commented elsewhere, but I've been working remotely for 2 years and have never been happier in my entire career, even though it's nowhere near the most interesting job I've had.

I have yet to miss the office. My dev team has a 1 hr meeting each week just to hang out and talk shop, things learned, discuss ideas, etc. And there are impromptu Slack/Skype session throughout the week, as needed. That has been more than enough for me.

But if it wasn't, there are lots of mitigations if I need them: I can go to a coffee shop, meetups, hop on Skype calls with the team, etc.

I'd much rather the impetus be on me to stay mentally healthy than be on some HR person who doesn't have a clue about what introverts really need in a work environment.

Not to mention... no commute... I'm out walking my dog or cooking with my wife while most of the world is stuck sitting in traffic.

The cross section of introverts and people who are able to work remotely (by nature of their job) is much smaller in an economy than you imagine. Can you list at least a dozen jobs that don't require physical presence?

To put it bluntly - your use case is a very small minority, and proving otherwise to people in charge of office space is an uphill battle to say the least.

People had social lives before there was large-scale use of offices. There are several ways in which a home office allows for a richer social life:

- You're not stuck on your commute for several hours a day. That time can be spent much more beneficially, for example for having social interactions.

- Working remotely actually requires you to communicate more and better than when everyone's sitting in the same office.

- Remote work has the potential to do away with the "contiguous 8 hours, preferably from 9 to 5" notion of work.

If you don't have to sit around in an office all day in order to pretend you're "working" anymore only the results count not the hours that went into those results. So, pervasive remote work could lead to a general reduction in working time but at the very least it allows you to do other things throughout the day (and get back to work later).

I'm not saying that all of this will happen but working remotely has the potential to shake up preconceived notions of what work should be like.

> - You're not stuck on your commute for several hours a day. That time can be spent much more beneficially, for example for having social interactions.

My commute is 20 minutes. I can barely read my newspaper, so I'd not mind a longer commute, actually (as long as I can use public transit).

> - Working remotely actually requires you to communicate more and better than when everyone's sitting in the same office.

I have to do that anyway. My team is spread across multiple cities.

> - Remote work has the potential to do away with the "contiguous 8 hours, preferably from 9 to 5" notion of work.

But why? That's the killer feature of an office for me. When I leave, I leave the job behind and focus on my personal life until next morning.

Of course that's just personal taste. It shall just be noted that some people genuinely prefer working in an office.

> My commute is 20 minutes.

Wow! Good for you, but you're truly a minority then.

> When I leave, I leave the job behind

Also good for you! As a software developer I find it quite hard at times not to think about how to solve a work related problem.

True, I do that, too. But I consciously don't act on it.

Gathering large number of humans in the same place (factories then offices), well away from their homes, is a relatively new thing. For hundreds and thousands of years, they have been working in (craftsmen) or around their homes (farmers), seeing mostly family and close neighbours.