Ask HN: What problems do you have with WFH?

I’m definitely more productive in office. I can look at the work I produced before and after WFH and there is a stark difference.

I'm lonely. Really, really lonely. To be clear, I'm an introvert. I enjoy my alone time. But three years is way, way too much.

My wife goes to her office every day, and I work from my guest bedroom. I sit in the same four walls all day, every day, with no 3D in-person interactions with anyone. I'm in meetings all day, but there's something different about 2D faces on a screen and being in person.

I miss small talk. I miss spontaneous conversations.

My brain is so dead, because my house is the safest place there is. There are no threats, there are no dynamic changes, there is nothing to possibly make it perk up.

When I hang out with a friend, my brain is firing on all cylinders. At a coffee shop, it perks up when people walk by. I feel more alive.

But at home? I'm lonely and tired and brain dead.

My next job will almost certainly be some sort of hybrid. I don't think I can do 100% WFH for much longer without heading into some sort of major depression.

Have you tried volunteering somewhere? It's a pretty easy way to get social interaction without having to go through a bunch of rigamarole.

I've been work from home longer than most, 22 years. I've tried it all, I've gotten up showered, put on work-ish clothing and sat in my office, I've lumbered to my chair in the livingroom bleary eyed in my underware, popped on the TV at 8:00am sharp and fired up the laptop, I even tried to work at a coffee shop. In the end I settled on working in my livingroom unless I have to work with a customer then I go into my office/lab. My biggest gripe is I feel totally removed from my group. I do something group adjacent so while a member of the team I work solo and have for over a decade. Since I work solo I have nobody to talk to about what I do and when the group does get together (virtually) the conversation has little to nothing to do about what I do. We used to do in person training, so once or twice a year we'd get together and learn something new. It was a lot of fun, you got to hang out with your co-workers in a semi-social setting do a lot of knowledge swap and bitch about the company -all that is gone, training now is online and being in training means you have to juggle trying to learn with all your other duties. As others have said I miss having people to chat with, short bullshit conversations make the day go quicker. I miss taking a long lunch every now and then. I miss cutting out of work an hour early to go have beers with the boss. I'm older now and at a very different point in my career than I was when I went into the office and I'd like to give a little more back, when I was starting out in my 20's I got "adopted" by an older group of ex-IBM guys, they found me entertaining and I learned a lot about consulting from them just by hanging out. I'd love to provide some of the same direction to the younger guys but it seems very forced, the guys who mentored me just invited me to lunch for a few years and I don't see how this kind of relationship can be forged via zoom.

I guess to sum it all up, I love working from home, I truly miss the social aspect to work and I think companies could do a lot more to address this without dragging everyone into the office three days a week. Virtual is not a substitute for in person but it will do. My company has been pretty clear we're not coming back to the office but they have tried before so we'll see what happens in the next 5-10 years.

I've been going into an office once a week, and I've made more an effort to reach out to friends and try and schedule time to hang out. I've also gone to coffee shops once or twice a week to just work for an hour or two and allow my brain to be distracted by people watching and conversations around me. It's making a big difference in my mental health.

I am terribly shy, so volunteering with strangers sounds terrifying to me. :)