Definitely should be a balance between individualism and collectivism. Covid drove us all the way to one extreme, and now some people seem to crave the opposite.
But it is also interesting to see that there seems to be a wide spectrum in office cultures post Covid. Some jobs still feel like they are in the thick of it, while others are back to 5 days (or even more if you work for one of Elon's companies)
toomuchtodo|1 year ago
https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/jul/12/workin...
https://www.hrotoday.com/news/only-5-of-employees-prefer-wor...
https://www.population.fyi/p/singapores-fertility-crisis-cou...
https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/11/27/are-remote-workers-mor...
The whole remote vs in office in somewhat a tired argument, so lets move a level up to power structures: old folks in power, both government and corporate. ~2M people in the US 55+ die every year, ~5k per day. ~4M people turn 18. ~4.1M Boomers are retiring per year, ~11k per day. This demographic transition is the opportunity to move the zeitgeist around social interaction to improve outcomes for the human at scale (imho). Like bankruptcy, change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden.
Work must get done, but re-evaluating what work looks like in the service of the human (because why are we even living if it is just to work) should be a priority if loneliness is killing us (and more time at work is not the solution imho). It's just a job, you are just a replaceable cog, most people just need a check, and coworkers are not your friends (in most cases). Collectivism is coming together as a community, not for a meaningless job and org.
(n=1, I structured my life so I can take only remote jobs, so I can be close geographically to the people who matter to me, enrich my life, and I want to spend time with, but this does not scale [or rather, we should figure out how to make it scale: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html])