Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s Carbon Footprint

Re:Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s... by pfannkuchen on Friday September 22, 2023 @04:04PM (#37617046)

This view is too zoomed in. The human organism generally expects other humans to be around. Solitude in nature is a death sentence for humans, so our organism provides inbuilt incentives to avoid solitude. We can’t turn this instinct off, except to partially anesthetize it via fake social interaction like television, podcasts, etc. The anesthesia works better or worse for different people.

Some people have convinced themselves that they don’t like social interaction, but this is probably due to a trained negative association caused by repeated past negative experiences. It seems very unlikely that some humans simply lack the social instinct congenitally.

Society is currently set up in a way that social urges are largely satisfied by work. Is that a good setup? No, it definitely isn’t. Is deleting it without a proven replacement a good idea? Also no.

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Re:Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s... by temende on Friday September 22, 2023 @04:36PM (#37617430)

My point is that there are many other, more fulfilling ways to get human company than forcing your co-workers to commute to the office everyday. Besides, for the many people who live with a family/kids/partner, WFH lets them spend even more time with them. The solution for people whose only source of social interaction is the office is to develop a social life outside of the office, not to force everyone else into RTO.

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Re:Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s... by paulryanrogers on Friday September 22, 2023 @04:27PM (#37617328)

Remote advocates by and large aren't arguing for abolition of offices. Only a choice.

And remote work can also be done from co-working spaces. Or with occasional all-hands IRL.

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Re:Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s... by tmpX7dMeXU on Friday September 22, 2023 @07:51PM (#37619253)

This is simply a non-starter. I have not witnessed a single work environment where long-term remote workers don’t effectively become second-class citizens against in-person workers on the same team, in a way that materially harms productivity.

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Re:Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee’s... by jabradoodle on Saturday September 23, 2023 @09:43AM (#37623148)

Are they perhaps subcontractors, or none of your management etc are remote too?

When there is a good mixture of everyone remote, I've found it not to be an issue.

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