[mcmcdtx]

I had a hand-full of friends and coworkers who felt this way. Talking to them about it broke them into three broad categories:

Enthusiastic extroverts who needed face to face interaction to stay happy. The pandemic limited their social options and they longed for the amount of in person interactions they had when working from the office.

Easily distractable people unable to set up a distraction free environment at home who got stressed because their productivity suffered. I thought I was going to be one of these people because I had a pre-school aged child who was also stuck at home but it didn't end up being that much of a problem for me thanks to my wife being very proactive and able to juggle her school schedule to when I was available to parent. Some of my co-workers privately admitted that they couldn't focus on work when their hobbies and house-chores were so close at hand.

Those who had issues in their home environment that caused them grief and they relied on the office as an escape rather than fixing their problem. These were the people who got divorced or broke leases at the beginning of the pandemic as they were unable to live 24/7 with the people they had been able to deal with as long as they had 40+ hours of break from them every week previously.

[mcmcdtx]

I forgot to add, I was suspicious at first that people were larping their jobs or it was managers who were trying to psyche everyone up to come back but at least in my experience it didn't go that way. They did make us come back when numbers were dropping (but before the vaccine was available to the general public) although the actual date they picked ended up being a major spike in my state related to a holiday weekend and they didn't back down from it. In the next month 80% of the office got Covid and they sent us back, I've been working from home since then. Like this article suggests, I would look for another job if they mandated return at this point. My math says it would be affectively a 10% pay cut to start commuting again, I'll never consider the commute as outside of work time again, it is either unpaid work or I'm considering it part of the time covered by my salary.