Socialising with other people is messy, and hard, and often the payoff is not realised for quite some time. This is why people end up having so many social connections from their work, or other areas where you have frequent forced interactions: it takes time to get over that initial hump and see people as friends.
Unfortunately our tendency as humans is to avoid this unpleasantness, and so we've built technologies and systems that embrace that. Food delivered to our door, dating apps that mean we never have to approach anyone, and embracing remote work where we never see anyone.
Something has to change. Connecting with others is in our DNA, and is going to cause a lot of suffering as we continue down this path.
There is so much value in just being in the same room as other people. There are countless people who I have become close to that I otherwise would have ignored if we didn’t end up in the same space regularly.
I currently work in a company that has an optional office and I can say for sure that I am many orders of magnitude closer to the people who work in office than the remote ones. I quite readily have meaningful personal conversations with the people who come in office while I could hardly tell you a single thing about the remote coworkers.
Except housing has become considerably more dense. It wasn't that long ago that most people lived rurally. Today, nearly everyone lives in an urban area.
Unfortunately our tendency as humans is to avoid this unpleasantness, and so we've built technologies and systems that embrace that. Food delivered to our door, dating apps that mean we never have to approach anyone, and embracing remote work where we never see anyone.
Something has to change. Connecting with others is in our DNA, and is going to cause a lot of suffering as we continue down this path.