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> Have you made good friends amongst your colleagues in your remote company, during the remote-work era ? Not the OP, but I certainly have. It takes some effo

> Have you made good friends amongst your colleagues in your remote company, during the remote-work era ? Not the OP, but I certainly have. It takes some effort, but it's not particularly difficult if you know and understand how to communicate effectively over a remote medium. It requires an understanding of how communications attenuate over a screen--you need to project!, in-person-normal levels of reservation tends to seem unfriendly. It requires not just strong writing and reading comprehension skills, but reflexively strong capabilities in both of those areas; it needs to be inherent enough that you aren't "turning it on", you're just doing it. And I'm sure some people can't do that. But I've been making friends on the Internet, as well as in person, for about thirty years now, and I've now started two separate jobs since March 2020 and I've met people I'd consider good friends at both of them.

rowanajmarshall 4y ago
> It takes some effort, but it's not particularly difficult if you know and understand how to communicate effectively over a remote medium So I've got zero doubt you _can_ do that, I did over lockdown. But if we make socialising systemically harder across the board, we're basically setting ourselves up to be a lonelier, more isolated society.
- eropple 4y ago
  You aren't wrong, but I don't necessarily think people should be deriving the majority of their social interactions from work in the first place. This probably suggests that we should be working less, generally speaking, and doing more in our communities. I'm not religious, but I do wonder how much of this "be in the office so I can get social interaction" is because the office has replaced the church and the community center. That, to me, is the engine of loneliness; even if you make good friends at work you do lose significant shared context with them when you or they move on.

rowanajmarshall 4y ago

> It takes some effort, but it's not particularly difficult if you know and understand how to communicate effectively over a remote medium So I've got zero doubt you _can_ do that, I did over lockdown. But if we make socialising systemically harder across the board, we're basically setting ourselves up to be a lonelier, more isolated society.

eropple 4y ago
You aren't wrong, but I don't necessarily think people should be deriving the majority of their social interactions from work in the first place. This probably suggests that we should be working less, generally speaking, and doing more in our communities. I'm not religious, but I do wonder how much of this "be in the office so I can get social interaction" is because the office has replaced the church and the community center. That, to me, is the engine of loneliness; even if you make good friends at work you do lose significant shared context with them when you or they move on.