childless men miss sense of community
Myself and everyone I know works remote. We’re all childless/childfree and not a single one of us miss any community, we all feel there are zero downsides to it. This just comes across like propaganda to stop people working remote and return to office.
I work remote (Going on 9 years now) and I miss a sense of community. Do I want to stop working remotely? Hell no, screw that. But two things can be true the same time, I can enjoy and encourage them at work, dnd I can also miss a sense of community.
I think it’s okay to hold this opinion because it’s individual to everyone.
This just comes across as propaganda
Being dismissive and pulling the rhetoric that this is propaganda is toxic as fuck.
The truth often is somewhere in the middle
I’m single and childless and I personally like being hybrid. Full work from home fucks my mental health up pretty bad. I’m definitely in the minority among my peers though. I also wouldn’t ever ask that anyone else be forced to come back to the office just because it isn’t for me.
I go in office when I want to, a few hours a day or a few times a week for a couple hours. But full work from home had me talking to myself… way too much.
Yeah, every sense of community I’ve ever felt with a job was also ruined by that same job. I don’t remotely miss it, and I’m firmly child-free.
I agree that forcing return to office is either stupid or harmful. But I do like the people I work with, and not seeing them anymore would be saddening
The solution is obvious though, simply allow choice
I have friends and live with friends and I still feel lonely when working remotely. I like hybrid the most because sometimes i need to just go into work and talk about the things im working on with people who actually understand (not work related talks just for fun)
So you like to go into work in order to waste time talking talking about non work related things? Make sense why you should stay remote.
Its not a waste of time, its very useful. I can see how a robot such as yourself wouldnt understand.
You can spend your 8 hours a day in a cubicle and I will spend it having fun and working along side people I genuinely like.
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Best thing about working from home is stepping away from my desk, popping upstairs, and tossing my little baby boy up in the air a few times while he giggles and smiles.
me with my dog
me with my snake
That‘s one way to call it.
This was me until I realized I didn’t have a child and that I lived in the first floor.
Where was I going? What giggled as I tossed it into the air?
The ability to work from home has given me innumerable benefits, but I must admit that as a very introverted guy who’s been going through some shit, and who’s go-to move during times of anxiety and depression is to distance themselves from everyone… yeah, sometimes I do miss my coworkers. A lot of them are pretty great people. Doesn’t mean I’d rather spend 3 hours a day sitting in traffic to see them, just means I low-key miss someone to bitch with.
In theory, we have the Third Space for that kind of socializing. Parks, plazas, union halls, club spaces and dance halls, churches, community centers, libraries…
In practice, they’ve been gradually privatized and monetized until everything is The Mall. If you don’t have $10 to spend for the hour, there’s nowhere you can legally so much as sit down. Hard to socialize on these terms.
My city decided to take its $7B budget and close a $330M shortfall by gutting parks, libraries, and other public amenities. Meanwhile, the police and fire departments are seeing a budget surge of over $100M.
I want to kick your city in the nuts. How could you gut parks and libraries.
John Witmire is a DINO by every definition of the word. He’s deep in bed with the police, he loves privatization of public services, and he makes common cause with the state’s Republican leadership on a regular basis. Nothing the man loves more than “balancing the budget” on the backs of public workers and low income residents.
But he’s been a Democrat since he took his State Senate seat and squatted in it back in 1983. So the party apparatus loyally and mechanically supported him all through the primary and general elections. The “It’s my turn” candidate is taking his turn.
41 year old male, no kids, no wife or girlfriend, been work from home for 5 years now. I’ve never been happier and more productive.
I get my sense of community from my friends not my coworkers. This study is B.S.
You know there are always outliers because research often looks at populations in general and not the exact experience of a specific person. Unless it’s a case study but that’s different.
Either way that’s a really good thing for you, the modern world makes it difficult to make and keep close to friends.
True, and I was drawing on anecdotal evidence that I didn’t elaborate on in my original comment. While I know there are people who do not do well or enjoy work from home, I have yet to meet those people, all my coworkers and friend group are loving work from home.
So a more accurate statement would have been, based on my personal experience along with with coworkers and my friend circle this study is B.S.
Tbf there’s definitely some confirmation bias in there because a person who didn’t enjoy being remote probably wouldn’t seek that type of job
True, but we were full time in the office before lockdown and at least half the staff is from before lockdown. Also our job listings are for hybrid positions since there is a rarely enforced office mandate.
I was and am in a situation where WFM became voluntary because we outgrew the space while everyone was at home.
We have no limit of volunteers to work in the office, we have multiple people who never left the office, they continued to commute and went in every day.
So my anecdotal experience is the exact opposite of yours, which is why we don’t put a ton of stock in them and look at aggregates in studies. Making sense?
Just because you have anecdotal evidence of the contrary doesn’t mean it can’t be true, quantitatively. I, too, am a childless man - although I do have a wife - and don’t resonate with this, but that doesn’t mean I’ll just cast aside the findings. Many, especially young, men are unhappy in their everyday, partly due to a lack of sense od community in the “modern” world.
Yeah, you gotta have friends that are close by and you can get out with or they can come over. If you don’t… Sometimes it feels lonely. But to be honest, you kinda get used to it.
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Itt: cognitive disonannce.
The study isn’t bs. Lemmy users just won’t accept that they don’t even come close to representing the average individual.
Or if we use less adversarial language, this study is far from universal and its findings should be applied with the understanding that not all people will not match those who were in the study. As with most things, far more research is needed to get a thorough understanding.
The study isn’t bs.
There’s a lot of “I’m childless and proud and how dare you suggest living in isolation and screaming at my computer screen all day has had any negative impact on my mental health. You’re just trying to trick me into breeding! A thing I became intensely averse to just recently, after spending 16 hours a day on incel forums full of reactionary influencers.”
So much of the knee-jerk ingrained responses online are indicative of people who have utterly lost the ability to think for themselves and are only capable of lashing out in defense of their latest favorite social media trend. Add in the artificial interactions created by bot accounts and people spamming content for self-promotion, and you’ve got a real recipe for mass psychosis.
Lol my old boss hated remote work because he had to spend time with his family.
“I gotta get to the office mates!”
As a childless man, they will have to pry my work from home out of my cold, lots of free time having hands.
As a childless woman, SAMEEEEEE. My dog is a fantastic coworker.
I actually don’t like my coworkers very much I definitely wouldn’t hang out with them so not having to be near them all day is a benefit.
It’s not even that they are bad people, it’s just that they are people who I wouldn’t choose to hang out with.
Childless man here, I work mostly remotely.
I don’t miss any sense of community.
Same, but I do have my own community away from work and have always prioritized my friends over co-workers.
Let’s fix this headline:
Remote work benefits all in different ways.
Oh c’mon the headline is clear. Get pregante XOR go home!
What community? Getting whipped along with your work colleagues? I swear these studies are totally sponsored by some business interests.
Same. I’ve always hated office culture and don’t miss it one bit.
Agreed. This article sounds like the kind of BS corporate media’s trying to parrot to gaslight us into giving up WFH.
Same. I came here to make the exact same comment.
Same. What an asanine thing for the article to assert.
No we don’t. Work is work, not fucking community.
I like my coworkers. They’re cool. I just went to acro yoga with one, and go bouldering with another. We show up, talk shit, and get the job done - sometimes it’s a good time. Sometimes we get our asses kicked. But that builds camradrie, too.
I will say, this is blue collar stuff. When I worked as a software dev, I definitely didn’t care about spending much time with my coworkers.
I used to work for a bunch of lawyers. I would happily take a fire axe to every single one of them.
They really didn’t like remote working and tried to put a stop to it and “sense of community” was their excuse as well, but it was really about control.
It would be interesting if they did this study again in an environment like that, where people aren’t really friendly with their co-workers. I imagine they would get a vastly different result.
This study may not be BS in particular, for that one case, but it is BS in general
Yes I do, speak for yourself.
Well, just from reading that I can assure you your coworkers don’t.
I guess it’s a poor choice of words but there’s definite value in workplace camaraderie. Don’t let your jadedness fuel the bosses’ union busting.
Unions aren’t community.
They’re a necessary defence mechanism against capitalism.
Humour is a defence mechanism. Altruism is a defence mechanism. And with those two, camaraderie is a given.
Also it would be a sorry state of affairs if workers under capitalism had their defence mechanisms, but not canalisation workers shovelling literal shit.
Unions haven’t got anything to do with it. Unions are about protecting you from unfair business practises, it’s not a social club, nor do they try to be.
No union without social interaction to found and preserve it. It’s why small businesses are much worse at ganging up on big businesses that exploit them than workers are at ganging up on bosses: Businesses aren’t people, they don’t have social interactions. Workers are and do, thus unions can and do form.
Being childfree is its own reward.
I’m a childless man and I don’t miss the sense of community one bit.
I have more time to spend with the community that isn’t tied to my income.
Also a father, so double benefits!
I’m a dad and I do. Our anecdotal stories have been registered!
Same here, much prefer the peace and quiet as well as avoiding the complication & stress of maintaining a personal relationship that may or may not last. As long as I have my dog with me I’m never lonely.
It’s something I’ve noticed in general.
I had an amazing boss who was single and lived alone, and really love her staff. We had unecessarily long staff meetings every week. When I started I was annoyed by them until someone pointed out that the time we spent with everyone getting distracted and going off-topic and padding out the meeting while we ate our lunch around the conference room table was, for her, the weekly family meal.
I still don’t like unnecessary meetings, but it gave me a different perspective on why some people like them.
I’m a childless man and FUCK that, the office isn’t my social scene. I don’t care to drive in there just to talk to the same people in person. ZERO point in doing that. We have meetings electronically and that’s more than enough.
You mean, you, a presumably young man, don’t come to the office to chat with your 50 year old office mom, or your CEOs and managers, or your coworkers whose interests only overlap yours so far as employment opportunities? How bizarre!
I’m not young
Ah, then maybe you would enjoy talking to the 50 year old office mom!
Assuming those are still a thing, of course. They were a thing when my office’s age averaged ~ 25, but I seem to remember losing the office mom position when the overall office age got higher… but maybe the position went away more generally…
They’re all jerks anyways
Come on, work being the sole source of community is the problem here. What are we even talking about?
A lack of non alcoholic third spaces is what I would like to talk about.
Yes, but it’s also the most logical place. What other activity do you dedicate so much time to? Maybe sleeping but it’s hard to build a community around that.
According to my kids, candies are the most logical place to get most your nutritions from. Where else could you get so many calories?
If most of your time at work is spent socializing, couldn’t you cut your work time and build your community elsewhere?
If most of your time at work you spent on honest hard-work working, how much community are you really building?
Cut you calories. Life doesn’t happen at work.
Eh, I became a stay at home mom over the pandemic, and while I’ve never worked in an office, but on the shop floor, I do miss the shenanigans. But its almost like a trauma bond, where its like, hey, we’re all stuck here, best make the nest of it and try snd have fun while we are here.
I’m fully isolated now, and at this point terrified of crowds, when i never was before.
Not arguing at all people who can work remotely shouldn’t, they should, for a litter or reasons. But I do miss my coworkers from my employee owned factory where culture was held in high standard. Im also not arguing this should be the only place one finds community, I’m only saying, for a person like me, it helped sometimes to joke around on the new guy or collectively bitch about issues at work or hear other folks problems and offer advice or help when I could.
We socialized outside of work too. I can’t get invited to a party, or a wedding, or anything if I literally don’t know anyone. I’ve only ever known how to make friends in structured environments. But that’s wierdo me.
No, I think that’s the fair take. But to me, it’s similar when people say “Studies may teach me a thing, but I’m glad I went there because I met all this people”… Yes, you spent X years there. You’d probably bound with someone over that time if it was a different place as well. It’s perfectly understandable to have a need for structure. I just wish that work isnt that sole source of structure in most people live.
It would be logical to work less and get our own community. A lot of people work hard all their lives and die soon after retirement. That’s not logical.
Quality over quantity.
Great places to socialize are sports-clubs, social-clubs, volunteering, activism, religious communities…
I’d much rather spend five hours a week distributed over two or three occasions with people i share interests with, than with people i share work with. Meanwhile at work i am mostly engaged in small talk, that is quite repetitive as i see the people every day and i have to guard what i can say and what i cannot say more than in other circles.
No one said “sole.” It’s about a sense of community between you and your coworkers, which is a very real and normal thing. It’s spelled out in the article very clearly:
losing that sense of workplace community had a greater impact on childless men
“Workplace community.”
I’m a dad working remote and I love the benefits but I ALSO miss the sense of community with my coworkers which I used to get from lunches together, sharing the train ride home, or just working side by side at our desks.
hmm, so having or not having kids have impact on your sence of workplace community during remote work?
Does it add up to you?
Try reformulating your question in English and I’ll see if I can answer you.
I like to think I would less judgmental about people attepting to communicate with me in the only language I know. Maybe approach like that is the reason work is the only place where people spent time with you ;)
Your comment was unintelligible, sorry. I can hear you whining now, very clearly, and trying to insult me personally. So I guess you can communicate successfully when you try.
I’m glad you understood me know, thank you. I adapted your approach to learning languages - speaking slow and laudly. It worked like a charm.
sense of community between you and your coworkers, which is a very real and normal thing
No it fucking ain’t.
Forcing people together doesn’t create community, it creates stress, and resentment, and burnout, and migraines.
“Workplace community.”
Biggest oxymoron I’ve ever seen since military intelligence.
ALSO miss the sense of community with my coworkers which I used to get from lunches together, sharing the train ride home, or just working side by side at our desks
Oh, you’re one of those fucking extroverts.
I can’t begin to imagine the extent to which your poor coworkers must have despised you while you constantly bothered them while they tried to work, or have a quick decompressing lunch, or disconnect after a long day of work during the train ride home, the poor bastards. As if work wasn’t bad enough by itself.
No it fucking ain’t.
Well, that settles it. Who can argue with this kind of airtight logic?
Your post is unnecessarily hostile and offers nothing, son. I’ve worked at the same place for 8 years now, probably longer than you’ve been out of diapers, and yes, working alongside people does form a bond. If you’ve ever had to cooperate with someone, trust someone, get through difficulties with someone, you’d know all this. But from the way you enjoy flinging obscenities at strangers I doubt you have much experience forming bonds with people, period.
Oh, you’re one of those fucking extroverts.
And here’s the part where I just laugh in your face.
Imagine being this vitriolic in response to someone’s personal anecdote.
The person you responded to said they did find a sense of community like the study describes. Nowhere in there did they argue that anyone should be forced to go back to an office nor even that an office spot be made available to people.
if you hear the shit coworkers talk behind peoples back, you really dont want to interact with them most of the time, its just to save face by being nice, eventhough coworkers might not want to talk to you, someone like op might be annoying to them for whatever reason.
Being back mandatory poker nights!!!
