There are still in-office jobs out there, where you can have lunch with humans, and maybe even make friends with your coworkers. I have one. It's not a popular opinion on this site, but it's OK to admit that being isolated home alone for 40+ hours a week is not healthy for your personality type.
I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?
It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.
It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.
Remote doesn't need to be isolating. You can make friends with remote coworkers, but it requires a culture where jumping on a call to work things out is normalized.
I've found most work communication apps not to be very condusive to it, but Discord is pretty good.
Yea, you have to be proactive. I have friends with non-traditional work schedules to spend time with during the working hours when I take breaks from work. I go to coffee shops and make friends with the workers there. And I make sure to engage in social activities like group cycling. I love WFH but would never make it so I am sitting in front of my computer alone at home 40 hours a week.
You still sit at home, alone, in front of a screen to talk to these people. It's still really depressing.
I sincerely miss working in an office, but with my current job it would've been impossible anyway (everyone is remote in different countries). I've only once met some of my coworkers irl a few years ago when we went to a conference together.
Discord's killer feature is the "hangout" room.
You can see if people are in there and actively talking before you join and that alone encourages spontaneous drop ins.