And they have always been considered weird, even when respected by their local culture, and to number very few. We have a word for such people. We do not actually have a word for people who are not hermits, because that's how normal it is. We have words for being excessively group focused, like "gregarious", but not for "not a hermit".

Slightly less extreme, many cultures have had some sort of monk experience, where the monks do not live alone but often have some sort of highly restrictive vow of silence or something. It is certainly a thing in humanity that is popular enough to at times create social institutions for those who wish the rather different lifestyle, but it has also been a radical minority of people who choose it.

What's my point? Is there anything wrong with those choices? No. The point is that trying to arrange a social order that tries to push the majority of people in that direction isn't going to succeed.

I consider "everything is going to become telecommuting in the future" to be up there with "mobile games are going to completely destroy PC and console gaming". If it was going to happen, we should not still be speculating about it... it should be happening right now, visibly obviously, not something we have to go parse through trends and sort of squint at to see.

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

Do you have any sense of how many people who are forced to head to an office each day would rather not? Probably not. I know I don't. But that's because the majority controls how these people work.

Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit. If you are, your organization has a communication problem. I work remote and am able to get social interaction instantly with anyone in the organization.

"Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit."

Yes, I'd call it much closer to monk-like existence.

It still isn't what the vast majority of humanity is going to prefer.

The proof is that if there was some sort of massive preference for working from home, we should be seeing it now. The tech is here. The Internet is here. The computing power is here. All the preconditions would seem to be here. If what is missing isn't that humans don't generally prefer to be physically together in a group structure, what exactly is it? If the revolution is so inevitable, what's stopping it?

If the answer is "Well we need more VR that makes it feel like they are there", that's a goal post move. May be true, but still a goal post move. If the answer is "because $MANAGEMENT", what's going to change about that in the future, and why aren't the managers also eager to work from home if it's so inevitable? If the answer is "Well Americans (who are uniquely terrible in all the world) have this irrational desire to spend time in their car in gridlock because they love it so much" then I guess that's more inevitable than the move to telecommuting then, huh? I haven't got an alternate explanation for why this isn't already happening that makes any sense, other than, we are not generally psychologically suited to work that way.

> The tech is here.

While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard.

Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help. But working with a group F2F, serendipitous encounters, informal interactions, etc. can be hard to replicate. And, again, I say this as someone who works remotely much of the time and doesn't go out of my way to commute, even though it's not a bad commute.

Thanks to Google Docs and video Hangouts it's gotten a lot better than it used to be when I first joined the industry a decade ago. You're right though, it's still not as good as being physically co-present in a conference room, or sitting side-by-side at a computer. I suspect it will get better with VR. For now, though, I definitely enjoy working in an office with my coworkers the most, with perhaps a very occasional work-from-home day (only 5% of all work days) thrown in as a sort of quasi-vacation.

I love my vive and all, but having to deal with it for every meeting just sounds like a hassle.

That's actually a good point. I hated remote meetings back in the day when you had to call up a number and then enter a meeting ID, and having to put on a VR headset seems like a similar amount of hassle. I also have eye issues readjusting for some time after using one -- that doesn't seem like fun to deal with repeatedly throughout the day.

Maybe we'll have to wait until mind-integration VR becomes a thing.

I'm perplexed that to this day there still aren't physical whiteboards with a screen underneath where you can write on them and see others writing. This, along with seeing the face of whoever is talking would be basically as good as being in person.