I tend to think its a good thing for people to have a bit more distance from work, but if we don't figure out ways to fill in that social need, societally, people will find themselves feeling even more isolated than they have been.
I think this has much more to do with "we are in a global pandemic" than "you can't meet people doing remote work." Certainly, there were a number of larger groups that I used to hang out with consistently pre-pandemic, but now have totally abandoned. I'm not interested in maintaining an online relationship with those groups; their value to me was in the face-to-face moments.
But that's just not a thing right now.
I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to expose my family to people who may or may not even believe in vaccinating themselves.
That said, I think there are pandemic-adjacent reasons people might be doing less socialising. Maybe people you might socialise with have moved away and not been replaced in the last two years. Maybe the people who would organise events you would go to skew more towards the cautious end. Maybe people are less interested in social things due to other upheavals in their lives. Maybe people have forgotten how to socialise. Maybe they are focusing on the relationships they had before more than anything new. Maybe we just forget how hard things were before and look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles.
- the local Gaming Society closed for 2 years (meeting for the first time after 2 years in November),
- the local game stores stopped doing in-person events for 2 years (still no news on Magic: the Gathering in-person pre-releases, not authorized for Latin America despite my country being basically covid-free),
- I started playing D&D (with coworkers, so the OP has a point), had one in-person session and then we moved to Roll20 (slowly coming back to in-person).
I do think people were socializing outside more before the pandemic.
(I don't mean takeaway food - though it's certainly 'normal' among certain demographics.. - just groceries, Amazon, etc.)
In large sections of the US, I am guessing like 90% of the country it is almost impossible to survive without a car, like you literally will end up homeless without an automobile and I am not exaggerating.
But I suppose same would stand to compare picking up a takeaway in person vs. having it delivered. (i.e. if that's what I ate, I would almost certainly have it delivered.)
Really? Maybe I forgot because here in France it feels like we've kinda gone back to business as usual, as long as one can show proof of vaccination (necessary if you want to go to the restaurants, cinemas and museums).
This is the key point. If we had widespread implementation of similar restrictions we'd be around the same. Unfortunately here we have not just a lot of people but a lot of lawmakers, mayors, and governors who think not being able to spread a virus is an attack on their personal freedoms.
With that said, i think many are still a bit cautious after being bombarded with warnings of the Coronavirus for 12 months straight.
To me though I'm back to normality and slowly but surely everyone else.
In a fire be the person who gets a bucket of water not the person who keeps explaining why they cannot (or worse: the person who tries to convince others they cannot). Don't be the person who has to be forced by the rest of the village to help putting out the fire (or help preventing it's spread). If you have a valid reason (e.g. no hands to carry buckets) everybody will understand, but "I can't be bothered to do something for the collective, because I am a free individual" is not a valid reason IMO. Not during an emergency. "Oh but it is my gasoline tank on my property so I got to decide what happens with it" — not during a fire. A fire doesn't care about property.
There are many people like me who have high level of antibodies, don't really need a vaccine this way (AFAIK there already is enough evidence supporting this) and don't want to get vaccinated with the fastest-baked (least tested) vaccine in history despite being passionately pro-vac when it's about other diseases and better-tested vaccines.
I don't want the damn vaccine. I want the damn immunity which I have (and test for every ~3 months) and the damn government to recognize it.
I also doubt there are many unvaccinated people who still have no antibodies. How could they possibly be so successful in avoiding the virus for so long?
But....why. Every single study shows that it's safe. Hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated so far without issues. And reading up on the method of delivery makes me very confident in having it.
Just because it's the fastest developed vaccine in history(which is not true btw, but whatever, let's roll with that argument if you wish)? Why would that be an argument against it rather than the actual data that shows whether its safe or not?
Sure, there is a number of arguments.
> indeed there are countries where proof of having been through Covid recently( <6 months) is just as good as having been vaccinated, you can participate in all activities.
And this is what makes me angry as I can see even less logic in this. Why should I prove I had covid, let alone in any specific moment of time? I obviously had it because I have the antibodies. I test for the antibodies every some months and they don't decrease (for a year already). Of course I have no other proof - I just had some slightly running nose (which was even supposed to be an anti-symptom) a day a year ago, tested for antibodies about 2 month after and found out I have them. And I still have them and have been feeling great all the time except one day in spring when I had high temperature but tested negative a number of times that days and next days.
E.g. Austria doesn't require you to prove you have been sick - they just look at the actual antibodies and this seems the only logical objective measure to me.
Well, or a vaccine. As to why a specific moment in time - because the immunity wanes in time. I fully expect that the vaccine proof won't be accepted any more if it's older than X months either, but we simply haven't reached that step yet.
>>tested for antibodies 2 month after and found out I have them. And I still have them.
Cool, and maybe that should be proof enough that you're safe to be out in a public space or private businesses. It's sad that in some countries that's meaningless, but the vaccine is the next best thing - it's easy enough to prove that you've had it, the systems built around it are straightforward and robust.
>>E.g. Austria doesn't require you to prove you have been sick - they just look at the actual antibodies and this seems the only logical objective measure to me.
Sounds like a great plan, I can support that.
As to why should you.....well, that's a harder one to answer in a simple fashion. I think it's similar to how in order to get a visa to certain places you have to be vaccinated against yellow fever - it's not a matter of personal choice whether you want to or not, it's a hard requirement to keep everyone safe. If we lived in a reasonable society where you could expect everyone to be reasonable and safe things like covid passports wouldn't be necessary, but because we live surrounded by selfish idiots who don't care about anything past their own nose we have to have documents which prove things like vaccination status. Kids don't get admitted to preschool without all their vaccinations for a reason too. Sorry if the comparisons are a little bit on the nose, but I do think that at least right now this is a necessary step. Maybe in a year or two this will change and we'll treat it like the flu vaccine - if you want it then have it.
The virus will mutate and continue to do so. Eventually your immunity will weaken - will you get the vaccine then? Doubt it. You’ll make up another excuse then instead.
And let’s not pretend you are any more informed about this vaccine than you are any other “highly tested” one. You have no scientific or educated reasoning here and you’re just letting your ego get in the way of things. It’s ok. I do that too. But the quicker you realize you’re caught up in FUD mostly planted by morons and Russian and Chinese state-sponsored democracy dividers the better your life will be.
And I have no rational reason to, except artificial reasons created by most of governments.
> The virus will mutate and continue to do so. Eventually your immunity will weaken - will you get the vaccine then?
My immune system seems doing great job defending me from all the mutations which already took place. So I don't want to interfere, teaching it how to do the job it seems doing so great and targeting it against specific mutations the vaccine is supposed to help with.
I trust my immune system more than I trust whatever the vaccine does. I'm afraid the latter may actually weaken my immunity against the mutations to come. This, together with being pushed to vaccinate, are why I don't want to.
I never ever resisted any vaccine before and was always willing to get vaccinated against everything.
> You have no scientific or educated reasoning here and you’re just letting your ego get in the way of things. It’s ok. I do that too.
I always reasoned the naturally acquired immunity is better than that given by the vaccine and AFAIK this has been scientifically proven already.
> But the quicker you realize you’re caught up in FUD mostly planted by morons and Russian and Chinese state-sponsored democracy dividers
But I've never been interested in what do they say. Only in what humble amount of science I know + my own experience + logical reasoning/speculation. Plus the natural instinct to resist whenever pushed.
And there it is..you are still an adolescent who never fully matured emotionally. Glad we could get to the root of it.
Uhh…this is what a vaccine does. It shows your immune system what a disease looks like, lets it do it’s thing to discover a solution…so that it has a hashmap to a solution ready to go rather than than needing to iterate over the entire database and apply iterative mutations to the best solutions in order to find a successful match.
What in the world do you think a vaccine is? It’s letting your immune system do it’s thing. It’s trusting your immune system to know what to do!
What in the world do you think a vaccine is? Vaccine-based immunity is natural immunity.
But it knows! Why should I now train it on a picture if there are live viruses of all the mutations all over around which I have already encountered countless times and keep encountering every day?
I would certainly vaccinate if I were going to an infected place from a place where there is no such virus. Or if the disease was widespread somewhere else and coming to my place while there already was a vaccine.
But I have been living emerged deep in the infection intensively for over 2 years already! I have never even decreased (even increased actually, meeting many new people every day, and nobody wears masks in business) my social interactions, just tested regularly and wore a mask in public transport. I even drank from the same cup with an sick and positive girl once, then self-isolated for some days, tested regularly (incl. in-lab PCR) - all negative, no sickness. And even lab tests objectively show I have been maintaining high level of antibodies for already a year (which suggests they are renewing given regular contact). How can we possibly suspect my immune system still has not enough clue and an instruction can be better than what it already knows?
> apply iterative mutations to the best solutions in order to find a successful match.
But I apparently applied very successful matches to every mutation!
> What in the world do you think a vaccine is? Vaccine-based immunity is natural immunity.
To something specific, more precisely - a specific model (not even a real object) isn't it?
Ok so when are you going to get a booster shot or your first COVID shot? Or are you planning on getting the disease again and letting it run its course?
Any why would you treat this vaccine any different than the flu vaccine or w/e? It makes absolutely no sense. If you don't understand the science, how are you making informed decisions?
> nobody wears masks in business
False? Who cares? I'm in business and wear a mask all the time when meeting with clients if we even meet on-site.
> which suggests they are renewing given regular contact
Which also suggests you are getting the virus again and giving it to people you interact with who may now be getting COVID-19 for the first time. You're literally perpetuating the disease! But hey screw everybody else right? Those who might not be able to get the vaccine, like, oh idk, my nephew? Or maybe kids who BTW aren't immune from getting sick.
Your mentality around this is selfish and bizarre.
> How can we possibly suspect my immune system still has not enough clue and an instruction can be better than what it already knows?
The person you are replying to was discussing your complete misunderstanding of how vaccines work. Not commenting on naturally acquired immunity, which BTW doesn't mean you're 100% immune because that's now how things work.
I consider every interaction with the virus a booster shot. So I guess every day.
> False? Who cares? I'm in business and wear a mask
Perhaps the right question would be where. I personally insist on masks every time I feel even slightly imperfect (which mostly is because I didn't sleep enough) even if the other people feel too confident. In fact I believe masks make the most sense out of all the measures deployed and allowing people use public transport and supermarkets without masks once most of them are vaccinated is going to be a huge mistake.
> Which also suggests you are getting the virus again
How is this getting it with natural immunity proven by a lab antibody test worse than getting it being vaccinated?
> But hey screw everybody else right?
Nobody experienced any symptoms after contacting me. Everybody I talked to still feels fine. I test. I wear FFP2. I use hand sanitizers. I avoid meeting anyone without a necessity (as I always did). And by the way I have also heard a rumor (though I don't rely on it as I never cared to check) getting an infection from a light/asymptomatic-symptomatic person means higher chances to overcome it without light symptoms too.
> Your mentality around this is selfish and bizarre.
No, I just the question above. I do everything I see logical reason in but I don't understand how is a vaccine better than immunity I have already developed naturally. Why is it supposed to protect the people around me better than the antibodies I already have?
> The person you are replying to was discussing your complete misunderstanding of how vaccines work. Not commenting on naturally acquired immunity, which BTW doesn't mean you're 100% immune because that's now how things work.
Ok. Would you be so kind to tell me how is a vaccine supposed to be better than contacting all the mutations of the actual live virus besides the fact the latter gives you less chances to survive unharmed and enjoy the immunity?
> Nobody experienced any symptoms after contacting me.
Sure except you know people can transmit diseases without showing signs of symptoms. It's called being asymptomatic.
> Ok. Would you be so kind to tell me how is a vaccine supposed to be better than contacting all the mutations of the actual live virus besides the fact the latter gives you less chances to survive unharmed and enjoy the immunity?
You're familiar with the concept of a straw man right?
Nobody is arguing this point. What we are arguing is your misunderstanding of "whatever is in a vaccine" from your original post.
Here's what you said:
> I trust my immune system more than I trust whatever the vaccine does
It's clear from the start that you don't even know what a vaccine does. The vaccine does the exact same thing as obtaining the virus "naturally". It's a living virus, put into you, to train your immune system. It's the same thing. Trying to separate that out into a "natural" immunity versus an "artificial" immunity is not only incorrect scientifically but pretty comparable to believing the earth is flat or something.
Here's another thing you said:
> I never ever resisted any vaccine before and was always willing to get vaccinated against everything.
So again, why is COVID-19 different? Explain the exact scientific and logical reasoning for resisting this vaccine and not others.
> Why is it supposed to protect the people around me better than the antibodies I already have?
So your plan is to just get COVID-19 + variants every year instead of getting a vaccine? Why? Why get yourself sick when a vaccine will do the exact same job? Doesn't seem very logical to me. Do you not get flu shots either? Do you realize that even if you didn't get extremely sick from your first interaction with COVID that it doesn't mean the next time you get a variant you won't be in a coffin? I don't understand at all the point of taking an unnecessary risk here.
No. Just only get vaccinated if I understand why I should (I mean why I should, not why everybody should). Avoid everything if I don't understand why it is going to help me or anyone around me in my particular case. "Let's just apply the measure to everyone to get a better total result" approach doesn't convince me, I'm a strong proponent of individual approach in everything.
> The vaccine does the exact same thing as obtaining the virus "naturally". It's a living virus, put into you, to train your immune system. It's the same thing.
It's not THE virus. And not even a virus, it's an mRNA which tells the cells to produce something modeled by something they caught in a lab somewhere far away more than a year ago. I actually prefer the real viruses in the circulation given I've been lucky enough to resist any harm they could do. I know "natural" and "artificial" immunity work the same way, but the former is against the real viruses and the latter is against a model.
>> I never ever resisted any vaccine before and was always willing to get vaccinated against everything.
> So again, why is COVID-19 different? Explain the exact scientific and logical reasoning for resisting this vaccine and not others.
Okay, not everything, only the diseases I'm not already immune to. I have chickenpox antibodies (because I had chickenpox when I was a child) so I don't feel like vaccinating against it. I have covid antibodies (because I had light covid obviously, how else could I get them? but the government doesn't believe I had it despite the antibody test, they only accept positive PCR tests taken during the sickness, to me this seems absurd) so I don't feel like vaccinating against covid. The moment when I probably caught it the vaccines were just invented and not available in my country. But I wouldn't hurry even if they were because not tested enough. I really want a vaccine against Lime's disease but am not going to hurry with it as soon as it gets approved, I'll wait some years anyway. Perhaps my logic is imperfect but can you really see no logic in this?
> So your plan is to just get COVID-19 + variants every year instead of getting a vaccine?
So again you believe a vaccine developed against some of the first variants is better than whatever immunity I already have (after surviving waves of all the known strains and having antibodies on a level higher than people I know got after serious sicknesses and vaccines)? I still don't understand why.
> Why get yourself sick when a vaccine will do the exact same job?
I don't get sick. Just slightly sick once long ago and still reliably high level of the antibodies.
> Do you not get flu shots either?
Flu isn't around me all year round. I never tried but I probably wouldn't find particularly high level of flu antibodies if I tested in summer. I don't think I would get the shot if I actually tested and found a reasonable amount of the antibodies. Or maybe I would because flu is more sophisticated AFAIK - there are more diverse varieties. Covid is always around and I think contacting it regularly works like booster shots.
> it doesn't mean the next time ... you won't be in a coffin
Nothing does.
> I don't understand at all the point of taking an unnecessary risk here.
I agree my understanding of the immune system and the vaccines is futile but again I'm not sure tuning it against an old strain can decrease my risk as compared to leaving it as it is after it has successfully tuned it against all the live strains in circulation.
If you’re worried about mRNA for absolutely no scientific or educated reason whatsoever then why not get JnJ?
Even if you somehow know that you got a “newer” strain eventually there will be even more new strains. Are you just planning on getting yourself sick forever? What about when we are able to predict the strains that will become prevalent and we can just send out boosters shots for those? Are you going to sit it out and try and get sick instead?
By that logic you should go get Lyme Disease and not the vaccine before it. Build up your immunity.
> But I wouldn't hurry even if they were because not tested enough.
Describe exactly the scientific reasoning that explains what is “tested enough” and your educated and scientific basis for this. Every physician and scientist says that if there are troubles with a vaccine they appear shortly after (a month or maybe slightly longer) the vaccine goes into the population. Please explain the exact scientific details explaining why the mRNA vaccines or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine would not follow this pattern.
Because the immunity still works. Both empirically and according to the antibody tests. Despite (or thanks to, if this actually works like booster shots) regular contact with many new people and all strain waves declared. If by some miracle all my immunity comes from the first contact and has nothing to do with anything newer then Ok, cool, but this doesn't mean the vaccine based on the same or older strain is better. Given the antibodies level I don't think need to boost it or have higher chances of infecting anybody than vaccinated people do.
> What about when
Perhaps I will get a shot once an updated vaccine gets released and about a year passes.
> By that logic you should go get Lyme Disease and not the vaccine before it. Build up your immunity.
AFAIK with the Lyme disease the chances it will work out this way - without harm and with reliable immunity as the result are very low if any. With coronaviruses the chance is well above 50% when you are young and fit. Nevertheless I still recommend everyone who doesn't have much antibodies yet go and get the shot already.
> Describe exactly the scientific reasoning that explains what is “tested enough”
Not exactly scientific, just intuitive: it has been deployed to large diverse population in diverse set of places, some reasonable time passed, it helped a lot, no bugs found.
You write a lot (for what I want thank you, and I would feel very grateful if you managed to change my mind, I really value input which can correct or expand my understanding), mostly reasonable, but seemingly ignore (or excuse me if I missed a clear answer) the key question of mine: what's the reason (strictly scientific or speculative, I don't insist) to believe the vaccines will get me better antibodies than those I already have? As for my worry it can actually weaken my immunity I'm perfectly aware it's just a superstition based on nothing else but lack of knowledge + "don't mess with what works" mentality so I don't ask for any counterarguments to this.
And by the way, vaccines are not just a virus/mRNA, there also are adjuvants (a word even the spell checker doesn't know) which contribute a lot to both the intended effect and adverse reactions AFAIK. AFAIK this is why many people (including many of those I know personally) still feel terribly sick the day after a the shot even if they were already immune.
Fun fact: there are places in Europe where you can get vaccinated (legally, with ab approved vaccine) but won't be given the certificate so all the places requiring vaccination will still demand you to get vaccinated again. No matter the antibodies you've gotten in response to the vaccine.
The second is this:
> … to believe the vaccines will get me better antibodies than those I already have
My point isn’t that you need to rush out and get the vaccine right this second - it’s that your immune response is equivalent to having got the vaccine except that in the future, just like those who received the vaccine you will need some sort of re-exposure via contracting the virus from another person or via a vaccine in order to maintain your immune response.
You’re suggesting you won’t get a vaccine as this occurs - instead of obtaining a booster shot equivalent which would train your immune system without risking severe illness you’d prefer to contract COVID again and roll the dice. No clue when you obtained it, maybe even walking around spreading it asymptotically…
Your strategy works for the short term, but fails in the medium to long term.
> in the future, just like those who received the vaccine you will need some sort of re-exposure via contracting the virus from another person or via a vaccine in order to maintain your immune response.
I just believe I contact it every day (or every week - I don't really know what the percent of infected people around is) and maintain my immune response this way. I use crowded public transport several times a day (wearing a mask of course), also meet many people and they mostly don't wear masks outside public transport and groceries (and even there many people leave their noses uncovered).
And I don't even have to speculate about this as long as I watch the level of the antibodies.
I don't say I am going to avoid the vaccine forever and rather go get infected when my immunity wears off. I just believe I only should go and get the shot once I see the level of the antibodies decreased. E.g. the Austrian government thinks the same.
Am I wrong?
Disappointed who? The anti-vaxxer community? Good.
The overlap between the two groups is so large and the justifications so similar that they may as well be the same. It is not useful for clarity, brevity or comprehension to distinguish the two.
"anti-vaxxer" is too broad of a term. That's like saying anyone who doesn't want to buy a Ford is "anti-car." They're not anti-car, they just don't want a Ford.
Almost all the people you call "anti-vaxxers", in fact very much believe vaccines are modern miracles that have reduced or eradicated serious illnesses. Many of them get a flu shot every single year. That's not the behavior of an "anti-vaxxer." "anti-vaxxer" is inaccurate at best, and intentionally derogatory at worst.
"THEY control us and manipulate everything, bruh! You're just a sheeple."
Baa, baa, baa! (Blowing rings of purple haze at you)
edit: btw. (·) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
well, the only reason I got vaccinated was to be able to go to the restaurant without having to do a covid test beforehand; so maybe the heavyhandeness was warranted?
But beyond that, if I can't trust you to take very basic precaution of vaccinating, can I trust you to take the much more obnoxious precaution of masking up, or the still more inconvenient precaution of social distancing generally? Or quarantining after travel? True, I was using a shorthand heuristic that is almost certainly flawed in the specific. Some people cannot get vaccines.
I haven't done any research on it, so I may be wrong, but I also assume that if you have antibodies to fight off an infectious disease, the disease is statistically more likely to exist in lesser concentrations than in a person who does not have those antibodies, if it exists at all.
Why would I still be doing any of that when I'm vaccinated and no longer required?
I don't know about where you live, but many places in the world have not yet reached levels of vaccination that would make make masking and social distancing redundant.
> Frankly, fuck people who refuse to get vaccinated - they can rot in their own home for all I care (not talking about people with legitimate health risks, obviously).
How do you reconcile your apparent disdain for unvaccinated people with the fact that you do not believe the vaccine to be effective? Alternatively, you’ve determined that the vaccine is effective enough. What level of “immunity” and what level of “likely to happen” does a person have to cross before you stop saying, “fuck you, rot to death in your home” to someone?
I'm not going to defend the choice of words, but nowhere does Valkhyr say that the vaccine isn't effective.
That would be like reading that people still die in car crashes and arrive at the conclusion that seat belts and airbags are useless.
Analogies in the covid context are always bad though. The real question is: for a disease that kills less than 2% of people who test positive for it, most of those being older or already at risk, and in a world with vastly diminished efficacy against continually improving variants (with apparently unknown mortality rates), when does the GP think that we should all not rot in our homes? I’m vaccinated, but apparently I may need a booster. I probably won’t get said booster because playing whack-a-mole with this disease doesn’t seem worth it to me given my risk profile. Do I need to rot at home or am I cool to not fuck off and die because I got the original shot. Am I no better than the other disease ridden pieces of shit who didn’t even get the first shot in GP’s eyes?
This rhetoric surrounding the vaccine is the real thing that needs to rot at home and die.
by saying "effective" you wanted to say "perfect"?
So it's not quite as simple as people with an axe to grind will claim it is, but it is possible for a vaccinated person to briefly have the same viral load as an unvaccinated person. The duration of that dangerous period is much shorter when vaccinated, and of course the risk to the vaccinated person is much, much lower.
False[1][2][3][4][5]. Sweden had 7.7% higher mortality in 2020 than it averaged from 2016-2019.
By comparison, Sweden's closest neighbors (geographically, demographically, and socioeconomically) had far, far lower mortality because of lockdowns, mask mandates, and closing restaurants[3][4].
> "Sweden, with a COVID-19 attributed death rate of 0.54 per 1000 population as of July 5, has a higher death rate compared with its neighbours: 11.5× compared with Norway (0.05 deaths per 1000 population), 5.1× compared with Denmark (0.10 deaths per 1000 population), and 9.1× compared with Finland (0.06 deaths per 1000 population)."[1]
Even more damning: we now know that Sweden intentionally allowed the virus to spread and never believed their own words about people behaving responsibly without mandates[5]. They knew that their lack of action would kill people.
You can argue all you want that some of those deaths are a fair price to pay to eat at restaurants, but you can't argue that they didn't happen or that no one could have prevented them.
1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948209802...
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...
3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9
4. https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surr...
5. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/22/sweden-coronavirus-covi...
This is what it looked like after the first wave. Belgium was the leader worldwide by large numbers. Sweden was 5th.
Fast forward to today:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rate...
Sweden is now ranked at 45. Better than Italy, UK, Spain, France which are better countries to compare Sweden against. Sweden is the hub of Northern Europe and the rate in Finland or Norway doesn't make a great comparison.
Ah yes, the craziest restriction of all, restricting things from being open at night. That way, everyone goes at the same time increasing crowding. But since less people are allowed in, everyone crowds around waiting to get in.
So now a place that would have 1 person an hour over 10 hours, instead has 2 people an hour over 5 hours, eg. Does the virus not spread at night or something? I'd think it would make more sense to mandate businesses open more hours, that way people are dispersed across more time and thus less crowded.
I don't understand, there must be an obvious reason I'm missing though (most likely!)
That was not the case[1]. Even 50-year-olds in Sweden had a spike of deaths in 2020.
Norwegians were locked down and seem to be fine. They're not dead, at least.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-sweden-co...
Also the paper you linked agrees with me, The highest age groups, i.e. ages 80 and above, were most strongly affected by the pandemic.
> it had nothing to do with regular people eating at restaurants and everything to do with the protocol at those specific places
Also if we're going to be pedantic, we should be consistently pedantic:
> 50% of all COVID deaths were in nursing homes
that article actually says under 50% and it's from December 2020.
Still haven't addressed my point about Belgium having more restrictive lockdowns and a higher excess mortality. I guess being pedantic is easier.
Euromomo shows excess mortality for Sweden for both the spring 2020, and the winter 2020-2021:
I think my issue isn't WFH, or virtual socialisation (which I was already doing 2-3 times per week to keep in touch with high school friends). The problem is both. 16 hours a day in front of a computer just didn't feel human.
Given the choice, I will never work from home again. Even at work I have a rule of no more than 4-5 hours in front of a screen.
I also feel people are sticking more to their core friends and family groups, and venturing out to meet new people less. But that’s more of a personal feeling than something I have quantitatively observed.
I didn't go anywhere while masks were still required. It's annoying and, sure, I'm sorry for your small business (a nearby business wrote a sign "come and eat here or we'll starve") but I won't bother covering my face just to buy something I can order online, helping my friend Jeff Bezos in the process.
Same with holidays, I'm not coming to your country to relax if I have to wear a mask.
Now that masks are not required in my country I go out as much as I did before.
We now are going the other direction, state buildings are prohibited from requiring masks and private businesses do so at their peril because people are generally against them.
There’s a reason why social isolation is used as punishment, even in carceral locations. We’re just getting out of it at a societal level.
> Going out unnecessary feels socially unacceptable.
Human beings are social creatures and it's normal that we have a need to see people and connect. The directive to self-isolate has been very detrimental for a lot of people's mental health. I'm privileged enough to have access to a therapist, but I feel like I'm kind of on the edge of depression, very apathetic about life.
I don't want to make this a political discussion, it's hard to balance self-sacrifice vs the greater good, but we've all sacrificed a lot considering this disease has killed about 6.2 people per ten thousand over the last 18 months, whereas about 200 people per ten thousand would have died otherwise. Are we going to keep this up for several more years? What's the impact on our society going to be?
This is silly if you're vaccinated and not in an unusually high risk group.
Yeah, we're total fucked if a real problem hits us.
The pandemic is probably a bigger deal to others than it is to you.
However, I definitely give new people who are übermaskers a bit of a wide berth mostly out of respect for them.
I have expanded through the friends I made at my first job and through my uni friends and I have a few through my hobbies: ceramics, weightlifting, bicycling, soccer.
I suppose it's not exactly a strong set of convictions if you're passively going along with broader social pressures to segregate on race and class, but if we're talking about the health of society (which I think we're implicitly doing), I think segregating on worldview is actually a whole lot healthier.
Churches et al are microcosms of a geographic community, resulting in greater localized diversity of thought. And these groups can either lead or hold back a community along the lines of race- and class-exclusion. The church I grew up with was the very first institution in my life that had an openly homosexual person in a position of power (the rector, in charge of the local church).
Point being, the exclusionary aspect of these institutions is often a reflection of the communities they exist within. Certainly clubs are self-grouping communities, with their own sets of exclusionary rules...and some clubs were and are quite explicit in their exclusions: anything that is pay-to-play is largely going to have an element of class-exclusion, whether you pay at the door or whether you pay with something you can "show" (eg being able to read Latin, being a great classical musician, etc). Certainly many clubs have been race- exclusionary, at times intentionally ("keep those people out!") and other times unintentionally ("wait you don't know about X??").
But just because these groups exhibited these exclusions, I don't think it necessarily follows that segregating by worldview is healthier than segregating by geographic region.
Eventually, the Southern Baptist Convention got around to noticing, and told them that wasn't allowed. They could either fire the pastor, or they'd lose SBC funding.
... to which the church replied that they were founded in 1804, liked their pastor just fine, and that the SBC could go have a talk with the devil, and take their money with them.
:) So yes, it depends on the church.
That said, growing up churches seemed fairly class-integrated (I’m atheist now, maybe this has changed?). But growing up we had everyone from an American Football quarterback on a multi-million dollar contract to working class folks in the same room.
Freemasonry is interesting, in that it actually had a schism in part over exclusionary membership clauses around 1877 (Regular vs Continental). Although apparently, masonry itself forbids discussion of religion or politics during its meetings.
But much of the early lodge structure and exclusion has since been rewritten and broadened, as the majority of them were founded in the 1870s - 1910s, when prevailing social attitudes were themselves much more sexist and racist.
(Interesting, a majority were operated for the purpose of effectively providing their membership a social safety net and insurance, both of which were lacking in government terms at the time!)
Racism doesn't really figure into regular Freemasonry either, as it was founded as a universalist enlightenment society. When you look at who has historically made a point of suppressing them, it's worth asking who the good guys really were. They're a reliable canary for civil liberty. Prince Hall masonry, founded by and for African American men is still going strong in the US, and it is in concordance with most north american grand lodges. The main thing is you can't be an atheist in regular masonry, which is analogous to having a policy against racism in that atheism is traditionally also viewed as an obtuse and unnecessarily irreconcilable belief that can call someones moral judgment into question. The continental/european stuff is different, and much of it isn't connected to the mainstream anglosphere masonic culture.
Why must this be male only to be private?
There are several countries, (including Scotland where golf was born), where golf clubs are on average very affordable and most golf courses, including some of the best and most famous ones, are public courses (you can go and walk your dog or do whatever, there is no fence)[1] Scotland is not the only country where public courses are popular[2], but it's the most talked about example, due to golf being born there.
Even in countries where golf is usually associated with "social status", like the USA, things are slowly changing, there are golf courses that aim to integrate with the local communities [3][8] and golfers that promote a more inclusive way of practicing the sport[4][5][6].
On a separate note, there are also efforts to make golf courses more environmentally sustainable. Again, Scotland leads the way with their courses that are not irrigated, and intentionally left to brown-out during summer[1][7], but there are also similar efforts in other countries including the USA[9].
[1] Scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icSVHHG8vnE&list=PL5vefWGHKL...
[2] In Australia many golf courses have no full time staff, and you pay using the "honesty box", those courses also usually have unlimited public access (non golfers can walk in any time) https://australianseniorgolfer.com.au/26181/honesty-box-golf...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-JIYgZrnrc
[4] https://randomgolfclub.com/
[6] https://good-good.fireside.fm/
[8] https://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/content/what-the-futu...
The closest thing to an exception was a group that existed a decade then happened to get a Meetup for convenience, and they closed within a year of getting on (for unrelated reasons)
Kind of shitty too because you can't really kill a Meetup group as long as someone is willing to pay for it. I stepped down as admin and some speed dating thing swooped in and started paying for it, so now the page is still up but there's only speed dating events on it now.
I think Meetup has almost doubled in price in the past 5 years, and it's gotten some major competition from Facebook's groups and events, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's on the decline. I don't think I'd bother to create a Meetup group nowadays, just create a Facebook group.
I do still use it to find some online events to attend periodically, though. Still haven't done any events with random people in person yet, just friends I know are vaccinated.
My backpacking group is on meetup. I joined in 2016. Not sure when it was started, but it was a few years before that. Admittedly, the group existed in some form before Meetup did, but it has grown to over 2000 members on Meetup. There's a core group of about 50 or so who are very regularly active.
There's also a local hiking group, a python user group, a biking club, and a climbing club. Quite a few of these existed before meetup and will probably exist after meetup.
In Kansas City there is a dog club (your dog is the member), but it features a bar, workspace, food, events: barkdogbar.com. You drop off your dog to play with the others and can socialize with others, work, etc.
In Chicago - there is guild row (guild row.co) (disclosure: my cousin is a cofounder). This social club is centered around making things.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commu...
the absence of “irl” community is something i have thought a lot about over the years.
seems nowadays most people hang out with either: 1. existing friends/family 2. coworkers 3. go online
with wfh, you lose #2. if you are a transplant, or never had #1, that doesn’t leave you with any options.
it seems inevitable that the future of socialization will be online and niche. and there will be a small minority that reject that trend and go “off the grid” to connect with nature.
i’m interested to research these topics/themes more thoroughly, if anyone can recommend further reading.
I always thought of myself as an introvert before, but I just kept attending these things, and being present a bunch, not being too irritating of a person (I don't claim to be full of social graces, but overly irritating people did tend to be filtered out over time), and having activities to focus on instead of just talking at a lot of these (board games, scavenger hunts, movies, etc) helped me make those friendships over time.
Since the pandemic I've regressed quite a bit and haven't maintained a lot of the weaker friendships, but I still do things with those two main friend circles, mostly board game nights at their houses. Helps that everyone that attends is vaccinated, otherwise I'd feel less comfortable about it.
Anyway, it's possible if you make an effort, or at least it was before the pandemic (it probably still is possible, I'm just personally more cautious now).
- Writing Meetup (talk about what you're writing right now, or share a passage and get feedback)
- Virtual Tour Meetup (a tour guide gives a presentation about a travel destination, past presentations are still up on their website): https://www.girltraveltours.com/
- Improv meetup - practice Improv with others online (now in person so online stopped and I don't live close enough to go to it)
- Game meetups - the local library and another group have regular Jackbox, Among Us, Gartic Phone, and BoardGameArena online game nights
- Book Club meetups - attended one discussing 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' by Bill Gates recently, but I've been to others as well
- History meetups - attended a few lectures about past events in history, like Shackleton's disaster of an exploration attempt in Antarctica (pretty crazy story), one on the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior, one on HH Holmes, etc.
- Virtual hack night or coding presentation events - Talking about something related to code, sometimes getting online to talk about and work on our own projects and keep each other accountable, etc.
Its not a great example for a model that would work now as a huge part was how exclusionary it was - white/male/believe in god/not a commie etc. - society has moved on somewhat from that era.
Still there’s a sort of sense of place that you get when actually involved in a community that is in a local area - I hope we can start to figure out how to do things more locally again.
Depending upon age and interests, at least larger cities have options and, as you get involved, more options get opened up.
That acts as my digital water cooler since I'm remote forever.
>The few new meetings that did take place tended to be with others who were like themselves: the consultants talked to consultants, and the bankers talked to bankers. In terms of both new conversations and diverse connections, the most successful networker at the event turned out to be the bartender. https://hbr.org/2018/05/go-ahead-skip-that-networking-event
Similar to the biases related to the fact that the majority of psychological studies were run on predominantly rich, predominantly white students at well-funded universities?
Internet forums like HN will always overrepresent preferences for remote work because they're biased toward people who enjoy socializing over the internet. Most people don't go online and engage in random discussions. They do it in person, and they like it that way. A random sampling of active HN commenters is going to be much more enthusiastic about remote work than, say, your average junior who relies heavily on organic interactions to grow in an organization.
As the default, we all have a little experience in it.
There is a need to defend it though. I've already seen several businesses claim that remote work is "the future". Personally, I feel that remote work has been very detrimental to my mental health and I hate it. I don't want that future. It feels very unhealthy.
Is it possible that these two circumstances are overlapping in your case?
Do you miss the commute and sitting in an office (on-location work) or do you miss speaking with people (socialization)?
I mis-conversations being unscheduled
And I miss socialize "with coworkers". We're working on the same project. That socializing helps know what's going one, what each other is doing, what problems we are running into. It gives up empathy for each other tasks etc. Reading about it in various forms of online databases doesn't come close.
I miss having lunch with coworkers the most. There's some natural bonding and trust building that happened over lunch, talking about random things, both work and not work related. This is very hard and possibly impossible to replicate with remote work.
With remote work, meetings are scheduled for a reason. Meeting just to "hang out" feels weird. Multi-user meetings with more than a few people also feel off because everyone is interrupting each other, you can't have multiple threads of conversation. Talking on slack, you usually can't tell how the person is feeling. The tone is lost. I've found communication is generally much poorer.
No thanks for offices.
I'm back to the office most days of the week although I don't have to. Big difference being that there are no longer implicit or explicit expectations what hours of the day one is there, I can just stay at home to work on something or wait for a delivery, due to only a part of staff being there any given day it is more spacious and pretty much as quiet as at home, etc.
I actually have a separate room in my apartment I could convert into an office, but I don't want to, since I would have zero use for it outside work hours and prefer to use it for things I actually want to do at home. Sure I could move out of the big, expensive city into a more spacious home, but then I wouldn't live where I want to live.
I don't think there needs or should be a default, and I don't want to go back. Companies should just choose whatever model of working they prefer and see what talent they can attract. Maybe in person work becomes niche. That's fine for me. But i'm honestly getting a bit tired of the "why would you want to socialize with co-workers, don't you have real friends?", you now often get if you mention you personally favor a hybrid model.
Collectively we should work on this first before jumping the conclusion "all juniors lose out on remote" or smt. Remote gives you a lot more freedom and telling juniors that it isnt for them is kind of gatekeeping.
You can have all the human contact and "it's 6pm - want to go for a beer?" easy socializing that you get from being in a busy office, but simultaneously keep almost all the flexibility and the lack-of-constraints of working from home (...almost - there's usually an expectation that you wear clothes).
In many ways it's even better than office social contact: it decouples that socializing from your job. Want to change company, but keep hanging out with the same people every day? Want to switch offices and meet a whole new social circle without changing jobs? Want to go out from the office for a drink after work with your 'colleagues' with no need to avoid personal topics or keep things professional with your boss?
It does require leaving the house, but for almost everybody there is a coworking space that's significantly quicker to get to you than your current office would be. If you're in a major urban center, you probably have 10s or 100s to choose from. For me, it's a dramatic improvement on both the alternatives.
The one time it has worked was when friends who worked in the same niche sector would sometimes all cowork at a cafe for a day. Maybe once a month. That was incredible. We were expected to be in our offices most of the time though.
It's not cheap but I do love it. Nicest offices I've ever worked in, never obliged to talk to anyone.
Given enough time, people would start developing routines and habits around diffused WFH, invest and fine-tune in facilities and services to cater for such a customer base.
Right now we have a lot of stakeholders that just held their breath hoping for a quick return to “normality”.
Indeed, a different organization of our urban spaces would drastic reduce CO2 emissions and land consumption. We should think of it in terms of a sudden opportunity to overcome a local minimum we were stuck in, and search for a new optimum.
Furthermore, not everyone has a 1h+ commute to the office and lives in an expensive area - I know plenty of people with short commutes.
In the end, it's not 'all remote' or 'all office', we're different people in different conditions. There has to be room for everyone.
Maybe it's an age/cultural thing, but I'm going to spend quite a bit of time working, so I'd rather do it with people I like. Inevitably, because we like each other, we're happy to see each other, hence the office is a good place to go to. And if I don't know them yet, there's no reason why I shouldn't meet anyone interesting at the office.
I also enjoy talking about my work with like minded people : not my friends, but co-workers. The best conversations happen over beers, coffees, meals, etc which require physical interactions.
I'll add that I enjoy moving people from 'sitting next to me' to 'known', and given that there are not that many people sitting next to me, and I have a fixed office plan (always the same people next to me), it works for me. I would not enjoy going to the office if I wasn't around the same people/there wasn't at least a bit of stability. We didn't mention this : if your company has a flexible floor plan, indeed, then you won't know your co-workers!
It probably depends on the kind of job you do as well : a significant portion of my job is spent talking to people anyway, and I'd rather make it as pleasant as possible. If it means getting to know people, then I'm quite happy to do so.
Also, the dating app Bumble has an option for friendships, and in a pinch tinder itself works if you're super clear about your goals
I really miss the ‘low effort’ social interactions that in-office work provides. “Want to get lunch?” is one of those.
Question: does this app already exist? Can I facilitate this in my life without building the app (easy part) and building a significant user base (hard part)?
I see many people try and combine these, saying that the current state sucks, therefore WFH sucks.
I’m not saying WFH wouldn’t otherwise suck for you/others, but it’s really hard to separate these two to figure out how different WFH would be without COVID, unless in your particular area, they’ve gone back to business as usual (which I don’t think anywhere truly has, yet).
But in a world where more companies are WFH, and COVID has much less of an impact on everyday life, I think WFH will look a lot different.
Again, my point isn’t that WFH is the greatest thing for everyone and every company, just saying that people that are just now WFH due to COVID should wait until COVID is mostly uneventful before declaring WFH a failure.
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-...
It's simply meant to give people a chance to meet other like minded people. Especially in this era of working-from-home it is too easy to end up feeling isolated, so hosting a regular party like this is, I think, a non-stressful way for people to connect.
I mentioned this 78 days ago and 6 people from Hacker News have been attending the most recent 3 parties:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952414
You can text me at 434 825 7694
As for the invitation, unfortunately not in New York (or the States), but if I'm ever around I'd probably love to join.
In 20 years I've never had a problem.
If you ever visit NYC, please reach out.
There's a big difference between 'remote work' and 'forced to work from home due to a global pandemic'.
It was great. So quiet, open, well lit, great and comfortable desk and chair, ..
Obviously, I could improve my home office, but in reality my home office is taking space that I otherwise was using before 2/20 and now there's a whole space in my home that is allocated to being a work station instead of what it was before.
A few other people came in, and it was great to talk in person in front of a giant whiteboard.
There’s a reason that “stop working at the kitchen counter” is, like, its own cottage industry of online writing. People mostly have really bad wfh setups, even people in tech.
Main point: there's a marked (mental, emotional) difference between "this is a temporary emergency" and "this is the way I work (forever)".
I'm convinced, though, that when the pandemic fades away, we'll see a bifurcation of working styles. The office offers in-person relationships, high-bandwidth communication, and a well-understood management paradigm, at the cost of forcing everybody to live near the office and spend a lot of time commuting. Full-remote offers the ability to live anywhere and no commutes, but shallower relationships and not-very-well understood modes of communication and collaboration. Hybrid offers... not much, as far as I can tell. It's the downsides of in-office and remote. The best you can say about it is that you get to see people in person sometimes and can avoid commuting sometimes. :-/
So we'll see a grand sorting where people that want to be remote find the companies that will let them do that, and the people that want things to go back to normal find the companies that also want that. Then the remote companies spend the next 50 years learning how to really do distributed work, rather than just "like an office, but on Slack and Zoom".
The all-company meet ups were the best part about the job(other than the pay I guess).
I actually took a job back with my prior employer with the hopes I could return to an office in some capacity, but we are all remote now. Boo!
To each his own, but all-company meetups are the most god-awful type of event there is. The feigned enthusiasm about company stuff, self-promotions, office politics, elevator pitches, people patting their own backs, etc etc etc. All in all, a colosal waste of time and resources.
EDIT: I suppose the lack of collaboration could’ve also been company culture. Be cautious when the sample size is small.
It's easy to believe the people you work with are friends to socialize with, but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers as soon as they change job, especially early in your career when you're hopping from one job to another every few years. Those people are temporary friends at best.
I recommend doing everything you can to cultivate friendships outside of work.
I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced.
It assumes that something as complicated as personal relationships can be can be distilled down into some sort of "average" or "normal" protocol and that if your experience doesn't align, then you are an outlier, not-average, not-normal.
I don't think the concept of "average" or "normal" is particularly useful for something as multi-dimensional as establishing personal relationships.
Some of my longest and best friends are people I met in my first job after college.
It's my own experience, and the experience of literally everyone I've ever talked to about it, and something many people have written about in articles about the difficulties of making friends as an adult. No doubt there are people who maintain friendships with people they've worked with long after leaving a job but I don't believe it's very common. If your experience is different then I think you are an outlier. There's nothing wrong with that. You're better off than the rest of us.
Here is an interesting article that discusses the misunderstanding of what "average" means in a multi-dimensional context: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
You may actually be right, in the sense that most people don't form long lasting friendships from co-workers, but you can't conclude that just from your personal experience. It was your elevation of your personal experience to universal truth that I was pushing back on. Basically don't use anecdata as evidence of some larger truth.
GP is spot on, though, and there is absolutely no way around it.
Relationships with most coworkers is motivated and defined by work circumstances. The only reason you found yourselves sharing a space and a schedule and experiences is the fact that someone pays you to be there, but otherwise you would be doing something else somewhere else with someone else. More importantly, if any of you switches jobs, your time and focus and sometimes even city or country will change. Even though professional relationships can flourish into personal relationships, the vast majority and the norm is that the only reason you're even aware you exist is that you want that paycheck and consequently you have to deal with each other.
* assuming that the distribution of experiences is oriented towards a single "cluster" (probably a better statistical term for this)
* assuming that your personal experience just happens to be aligned with that cluster so as to be representativeMore than half of all my friends outside the office started out as coworkers in the past. And the remainder are almost exclusively people that I met as a result of social activities with these 'original' friends.
Let's put it this way: how many current and past coworkers do you include in your current social, non-professional group?
Turns out, coworkers are humans and can have the same outside work interest as me. Be that music, board games, cooking, reading, hiking, etc.
Sure, most people from previous work I don't have any contact with. Same is true for most people I met outside work. Friends can come from everywhere, I don't see a reason to pre-filter.
I just visited Europe this fall and people hang out together practically all the time. Every evening. Families with kids get together and effortlessly spend time while the kids entertain each other. This is the norm.
The sense that I don't get enough socialization via work is a serious symptom that I need to nurture real friendships and communities in life.
This is precisely the take I get from all the comments on how WFH supposedly causes social isolation. WFH causes nothing of the sort: people simply seem to be socially isolated by default but relied on work and office life to fill in their personal socialization void.
I've noticed the same thing regarding health and sedentarism: if you rely on your commute to the office to do any form of physical exercise then you already have a major problem, and what your blaming WFH for is just a problem that was already there to begin with.
People have personal needs, and it's simply not healthy to fool ourselves into believing that office life is the solution to meeting each and all of those personal needs.
WFH is still incredibly isolating for me. I feel disconnected from my work and from my peers. I was remote once before the pandemic and felt exactly the same way.
I think most people would describe me as highly extroverted. I just don't get enough/diverse enough person to person contact to be happy when I'm at home working all day.
I don't dislike WFH and I think it has a place. I work on embedded devices and now I'm working at Apple on phone stuff. That place is not my job, I don't think WFH is any good for the teams I'm at and for the stuff I do. Even if I just go to the office once per week, that usually involves moving multiple devices and cables and tearing down/setting up my development setup somewhere else or having to maintain duplicate setups. Don't get me started on if I forget or don't think I'll need X measuring device or Y adapter cable or tool and then I have to hunt for a second one in the office or buy one for home.
It’s been rough. Don’t have any real advice, but at least know you’re not alone.
Edit: I think it’s important to focus on where we go from here. And at least to me that actually means more remote. I would rather be able to work remotely from amongst my existing support network than attempt to roll back the clock to a pre-COVID style of office work.
To each their own.
I find almost all arguments against remote working seem to based on bad experiences in the last year that are potentially conflating remote work with the pandemic. Sure, some people may truly hate remote work. However, I have quite a few friends who despised it and now that we're back to normal (in the UK) have actually decided they don't want to go back to the office. The commute time + cost of commute is just not worth it. It's equivalent to a sudden pay cut to have to commute again and a pretty significant one at that. Getting your regular social life back makes a huge difference to quality of life when remote working. For most places this hasn't happened yet.
As another anecdotal example there were a loud minority crying out for us to get back to the office at my company. They wanted to be allowed in before all the equipment was back they were so desperate. One person is back full time. About 2-5 others come in once a week on the day the company has started buying lunch. I think a lot of people did want to come back but as the office opened up with the rest of society they've found they don't actually need it for a social life. I bet that in 12 months the company moves to buying a hot desk in a co-working space for the 1-5 people who want to come in and I would bet that within 24 months there's a greater than 50% chance nobody is coming in anymore because the social life they wanted through the office is gone.
If all the local bars/clubs/libraries/whatever you like to do were open, wouldn't that solve the problem?
A response I can offer you is this, And it’s loaded with empathy because I def get that people derived real fun from it.
A lot of people attended those after-hour drinks as the semi-mandatory things they are, either for career survival or career acceleration reasons. This was always a large background narrative, and the death of it as of now is a nice thing. I’d take quarterly team dinners and an 30 min zoom with beers any time.
7am-5pm, and the 5-7pm additions to work life on a often weekly basis demands a lot out of people went to them just to manage their career.
What frustrates a lot of people, and generates the tone on HN perhaps, is that this aspect isn’t acknowledged in exchange for “but it was my social life!” Your social life cut into my real non-work social life (or so the comment would go).
But, I personally enjoyed people being forced to socialize with me ;)
You might not like it, but after work drinking is one of the areas where a lot of the meat of innovation and progression in the company happens.
I think a lot of people who double down on full remote are going to be surprised when they wake up in 5 years and realize they're pretty stagnant and have just become cogs to do the boring work. Which they might be fine with but I'm sure I'll be reading comments from them complaining about how their pay matches that too.
Referring to their death literally because the bars are closed for the last year and a half, despite the hit to innovation and progression that causes.
And I'll go to them once they're back, see "career progression reasons." The light ire my last comment contains is directed at the people that view these as lightweight friend happy hours, which these events have never been.
Golden rule - if my boss is remote, I'm still ok with remote. That said, your theory takes a hit with a full remote company at the eng and exec level, which many Series B/C/D startups are turning into.
I'll stop trying to help you and stop giving you cheat codes at this point. In 5 years we'll know who was correct.
Honestly, I think we mostly spent our time shit-talking people that weren't there, which isn't super healthy.
Honestly, I often feel like that shit-talking helps to keep people bonded over what can be pretty awful situations. I know that in my current job (to which I've given notice), I'd have loved to have a bunch of people from the office to talk to about it, and it might have lead to me staying longer.
Hard to know for sure though.
I never want to fall into a 5 times a week schedule again, but I miss the background discussions; commute; and energy that is involved in getting ready for work.
As it stands - I live for 2-3 hours on Sundays if the weather is good because everything is closed and will be closed for another 6 fucking months. It's fucking horrific. I have to spend the rest of my week grinding away at meaningless drivel.
Imagine actually spending 40+ hours/week around people and enjoying a significant amount of your interactions.
I disagree. If anything, WFH optimizes away unhealthy work/life imbalances that force people to become mindless company drones whose personal life is eaten away by a corporation.
Our life is not the long commute, the social order imposed by a company hierarchy, the petty office politics, the optional-in-name-only-but-actually-mandatory professional events which maskerade as company social get-togethers, etc etc. That's something people are forced to endure because they are imposed by the circumstances of office life.
If anything, WFH forces a healthy separation and distancing from inane and outright unhealthy aspects of office life, and it's sad to see how the amount of life and personal time and the opportunity to pursuit your own interests that it eats away is somehow being depicted as a negative tradeoff.
You are your own person, not a mindless company drone. Your life is not dictated by the context of your professional life. Mixing both is terribly unhealthy. Much like alcoholism, just because people use it as an excuse to fill in voids in their life that does not make it any healthier or even desirable.
Seems like my simple suggestion struck a nerve. The idea that while WFH can be beneficial to global society, but still represent a decrease in human socialization isn't really groundbreaking or controversial.
Right now, we have the highest rates of WFH in history and also historical levels of loneliness and depression. All three of these trends were happening pre-COVID. We don't have to make sweeping comparisons to completely unrelated illnesses (alcoholism) to see that people are generally not replacing the socialization found in the office with socialization at home.
When I was in the office socializing with my co-workers/friends, I didn't consider it being a "mindless company drone", I thought of it as being a human with historically human social interactions. You clearly don't (or didn't) like those interactions, but you aren't everyone. One size doesn't fit all.
It's a bit of a straw man I'm making, but a lot of people seem to say "I do fantastic work, my company doesn't need to control me, just recognise the fantastic work I do! Let me just work from home and keep up my fantastic work!"
It's already well discussed in the "theory of the firm" in economics. Why do firms hire employees, rather than just contractors? Why do workers not want to all be freelancers?
A lot of the arguments about "presenteeism" seem to veer into acting like their company wants to essentially have all the overhead of managing freelancers, and to have employees jump through all the hoops freelancing involves, which is obviously not what (most) people want in the first place.
My commute to the office is 10 minutes. We have actual offices with doors. So the whole experience is civilized and low stress.
My theory is what wrong with offices today has everything to do with managers need to exert power and feel in control. And things being run for the convenience of upper managers. They all live close to work, have offices with doors. None of this actually considers the companies bottom line. Seriously you pay an code monkey a shitload of money then have him work under the worst work environment short of running heavy machinery next to them.
I'm not surprised, because not only offices "died", but everything else did too.
Many people used to work remotely before that. But we always could jump out for a lunch with our friends in a restaurant. Or take a break and go to the gym. Or meet in board games cafe after work, go to the cinema, a swimming pool or wine tasting.
Now, corona made it all go away. It was never about the office itself but the whole life as we knew it.
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.
I've made many, many friends at work, and this near-paranoia level of "you might be pissing off someone else" - so what? I don't need, or want, to be friends with everyone, and I'm quite fine if some people don't like me.
I used to be the "no fun allowed" type, and I wasn't really getting a lot out of it. Now I go to all the "fun" non-work events and have a great time. To each, their own, I guess.
>so what so they talk behind your back, and that's not good for a work environment. so if any of them are in management, they will impede your career. so eventually when one of those guys you pissed off has a couple of beers too many at a company outing, he is going to talk office-inappropriate crap, and despite what you might think that is bad not just for him, but for you as well.
>I'm quite fine if some people don't like me they're not "some people." they are coworkers, and by adding a personal relationship, you are impeding the work you're there to do. if you're not there for work, why not be at a baseball game, and why bother negotiating for a salary? you know who is not fine if some people at the office don't like you, because of a reason You provided to them? everyone above you in your org chart.
But some of us just want to be normal devs for most of our careers, so I don't care if I piss some % of my coworkers with some political stance, even if that means hindering my chances to get "promotions". I don't even _want_ to get any promotions.
And it's also very hard for me to make friends outside of work, which I guess it's true for almost everyone who is 30+ in the western world
Nowadays, jobs in tech rarely last more than 4 years and the worst that can happen is that you get a salary increase and change job.
I wouldn't skip on work socialisation just out of fear.
It's a nice perk to have.
right. the worst that can happen if I take a nice fat dump into my dinner plate is I'll have to get a new dinner plate.
it's not fear. it's being at work to do work and get paid being the number one reason to even bother working. and if you're not there to work, why not be at a rock concert instead. with some friends.
When you work remotely you have to be very deliberate with socialization as well, since you don't get that for free when you're not in the office.
I've been remote for 10+ years and I can assure you that this side of things is harder and you have to take deliberate steps to build socialization into your schedule. I do this with tech meetups, board games and cycling specifically using Meetup to attend events.
But I've been working remotely 4 years now and there's no way I will ever be going back into the office. As a matter of fact, I plan to buy a condo near the beach maybe end of this year or start of next year. This condo will eventually be my office, but now it will just be for holidays. It will have a nice olympic size swimming pool and a nice assortment of restaurants next to a beach road. The beach road will be nice to walk daily one or two times (at night seeing the sun go down into the sea). The swimming pool will be nice for a little break and exercise in the afternoon. For me this setup will be perfect.
My current setup is not perfect since I work from home and still have distractions from my girlfriend (e.g. cleaning the room, calling out for food and small shopping chores, etc...).
I thrive when I am in a space with zero distractions and I hope to have this space in the future in the form of my very own condo office :)
I'm sorry you're having a tough time with it. That sounds really unpleasant.
> My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same.
Ignoring the pandemic, it sounds like the people at your company just don't agree that in-person work is necessary for them to get what they need out of their employment. The issue is either side attempting to force its preferred working conditions on the other. aka the solution isn't to make all of those people that don't want to be in an office come in again, but instead for you to find companies/circles that have people with similar interests as you. Being around people that don't want to be around you is unpleasant for both sides.
Wfh is great for some people, but I also find it monotonous and reduces daily variety amongst a number of other not great attributes more work related. My ideal is a 2-3 day in the office. Different options work better for different people.
I've been coming to office to run into more ppl but alas, no one comes. So just as you, it's very lonely here and it's hard to get attached to work when you haven't met anyone face to face.
commuting is horrendous for some, workplace social life can be too
but for some it's fine and needed
I think it can lead to a rebalancing effect.
I agree, and it’s awesome.
The point of remote work is to make your work hours very efficient so you have more time away from work to live your actual life.
I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven months before the pandemic began and everything was shut down. I was making many friends both inside and outside the office before that time, but during and since the lockdowns I just feel like socializing has become so much harder and my days are just blurred together computer screens. I guess at this point I’m an extroverted introvert, whereas most of HN is very introverted or has pre-existing families/friends to socialize with.
My company is hybrid at the moment and I’m actually writing this from the very empty office. Things just aren’t the same.