I have a very comfy and full-featured home-office set-up, but still try to get out at least once a week to (ostensibly) work among other hackers. There are so

I have a very comfy and full-featured home-office set-up, but still try to get out at least once a week to (ostensibly) work among other hackers. There are some business advantages to not being cloistered, not the least being people know you exist and may be available for whatever kind of work you do. And it's good to have be around smart geeks who can answer questions or give you a sanity check on ideas. But the big gain for me is the serendipity. I don't expect to be dreaming up amazing creative thoughts in any sort of communal or committee activity, but the exposure to semi-random ideas and events is important to my own thinking. Left alone (or alone with the Internet) people may tend to only read what they're familiar with, or approve of, or in some way filter out the things that might challenge their beliefs and expectations. That's fairly natural, but it's bad. You need to take deliberate steps to overcome that. If you pick your groups well it can help free you from the prison of self-reinforcing thinking.