The obvious response to this is that for many people, remote work is not isolating, in fact they get to have much more of a social life based around home and co

The obvious response to this is that for many people, remote work is not isolating, in fact they get to have much more of a social life based around home and community. If you can’t envisage having this without an office, it sounds like you might need to work on that. Very many people want nothing to do with your “normal”, including many in Australia such as myself. In fact to a lot of us it looks like a very cynical ploy by office-building owners and city-centre retailers to try to buoy up their failing businesses, backed up by the local politicians they have in their pockets. Australians were (net) moving out of the capital cities anyway, pre-covid, and the latest figures I’ve seen show that continuing.