Anyhow. On food in specific, for the last decades I've dreamed of trying to get people trying & exploring new things. But wow, it felt like folks were absurdly attached to their staples.
That said, in my 20's, I was crazy dollar-conscious. I still ate out for lunch a lot, but the thought of paying $2 or $4 more than any of the abundant quality high-value local shops for something more upscale or just more elaborate was super hard to swallow. $13 buffet at Majer House Kabob was like the pinnacle of richness. So I get some of it. But also, it was still disappointing feeling unable to rally for a good exploration.
That shit never happened to me when I worked onsite.
That being said, and to your point, taking oneself out to a restaurant, especially a new one, is worth trying for anyone that hasn’t.
And I’m showing my age. Not like dining alone means things like SMS stop working. Or whatever people use these days. It can be social.
Assuming the word choice was deliberate, which, no reason to not, if it were about coworkers vs not coworkers a more typical phrasing would have been “with friends from outside of work instead,” or even “with other people you know instead.”
It doesn’t have to be an assumption that those are the only two choices. Enumerating all choices wouldn’t be helpful, as there’s more than three.
Replacing group A with group B is less interesting, more obvious, and potentially not an option, or at least not an easy one. If it were, said lamented would likely be eating at a new restaurant with friends rather than lamenting. Or their friends aren’t brave and hate new restaurants, which functionally is the same as not having a group in that case. If they are all at McDonalds because “going to that little place on the side street that looks dingy and smells amazing” is scary, well…
Going out alone is less universally accepted, some find it weird, some find it uncomfortable. But a lot of us enjoy it. (Literally dozens of us). So sharing that idea will likely lead to more interesting conversation.
The unfortunate reality is that the discourse around the remote vs. ass-in-seat style of work must be all or nothing. Some workplaces take a hybrid approach, but they often don't have a mix of 100% in-person and 100% remote employees. You're usually in the office 80% of the time with the allowance of a day at home. So complaints like yours get heard by middle management types and they use them to justify the "welcome back to the office" bullshit. It is worlds easier to live my life when I don't have a two hour commute and when I have the ability to get mundane responsibilities fulfilled on my breaks, and when I don't have to rely on others to take care of my pets and family. When your need to pursue an ephemeral relationship with your coworkers becomes an imposition on my need to nurture the people I love, that's a serious problem and I'm not going to politely respect your "preferences".
Go play ping-pong with your friends.
Making for a good social environment is a deliberate choice. You can do it online or offline. The best interactions at work I’ve had when we instituted brown bag lunches and made the first and last ten minutes of our weeklies into a space just for idling.
At a bar, you are “going to a bar.” “Going to happy hour.” Something along those lines. Drinking and talking about dogs at happy hour is still happy hour. A zoom meeting with no activity beyond drinking is just drinking on the job.
Meeting in person may be difficult, but if the money is still there, someone isn’t thinking of how to use it creatively.
If it isn’t still there, the company is cutting costs by defunding morale. And hoping nobody noticed because “you can’t meet in person anyway.”
I was one of those people, and I declined every invitation to mandatory fun, offsites, and happy hours. I was there to work, to do the job and get paid, and I wasn't getting paid to do extracurriculars. I left that bullshit behind when I graduated from high school.
> Remote is such a massive downgrade in that case.
Speak for yourself. Remote work has been an upgrade for me.
This is what I think remote work advocates miss -- pure remote makes work 100% work, 0% percent anything else. This is probably fine if you work at a horrible finance firm where this was the case anyway, but for people in creative/tech professions where fun stuff / offsites / happy hours were the norm? Remote is such a massive downgrade in that case.