There was a thread on Reddit recently asking what leisure time was like for people before radio, TV, and the Internet. Someone mentioned a memoir they'd read from the early 1900s and the part that stuck with them was how social everyone was.
After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.
This is also how I remember my childhood and even early teenage years. My friends would just pop over unannounced and ask me out to play or play sports or something. Also relatives and grandparents would do this occasionally since basically my whole extended family lived in the same village. I also feel like things would have continued the same way if it wasn't for everyone (including me) moving away to study, work, etc. As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.
I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
My teenage years were similar. Cells phones were a thing but relatively rare and texting was limited. Friends in HS would often enough just drop by. Nowadays, if you just stop by a friends house, it feels borderline rude or intruding.
My hypothesis is that given the rise of everyone having always connected cell phones, texting, etc, that subconsciously we've all shifted to viewing our physical homes as our form of privacy. Essentially dropping in takes away the last place we feel we can control our interactions with others.
> As an adult, it's very difficult to reconstruct the same kind of social network once it has been broken.
This describes my parents' situation perfectly. We are a family of migrants, my parents were very social and had a big network of friends back in their home country. Even since we moved here, they became insular, and never made many long term friends. In fact, they are pretty much alone and not very happy in their older age.
>I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
This reminds me of a joke from comic Sebastian Maniscalco called Doorbell (it's on YouTube) about how people reacted to having someone ring their doorbell today vs 20 years ago. He talks about how 20 years ago we'd be excited by an unexpected guess ringing our doorbell versus today we'd be more incline to being upset. Really recommended giving the joke a gander for a good laugh.
I'd love to get completely unexpected visits, but it happens so so so rarely. I can only remember it happening once in the past 5 years or so. Sometimes, a friend calls me on the phone because they're nearby and then we meet up, which is the next best thing I guess.
I mean I am only 31 so I can't speak to 20 years ago, but I moved out of home at 16 and I always fucking hated unannounced doorbell rings, depending on who it was it could lead to a pretty massive disruption to what I had planned for the day
Not even just the neighbors and friends - people used to live in large family units with 10+ people per household. This meant a much broader support network if, for example, you got ill and couldn't take care of your kid for awhile.
3 more family members are about to move into my house. No matter how much I tell myself that having a larger household and more social time will be "good for me", and of course having help with childcare will be hugely convenient, I'm really starting to dread the loss of privacy.
It also means you need to help others and sometime take time off work from it. People in age range 16-55 were actually people doing more help then receiving it.
On HN it always sounds like you are only receiving, but actual deal ia you provide until you are really old or sick.
But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
I just happened to see a YouTube video yesterday about how difficult life was as a baker in England in Victorian times. An average baker was not expected to live past age forty five, iirc from the video [0]. These people were working long hours so I don't know how much leisure they got.
Your comment reminded me of this video about how life for a baker used to be much better before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution didn't do much good for bakers. I can only hope our future generations will get to live so much of a better life than us so they can look back at us and try to feel empathy for us.
That doesn't mean everybody else had it easy. In fact, at some point, it seems like one in four(?) babies didn't survive beyond age five[1]?
[1] There is a common misunderstanding about life expectancy, as though it is the age at which most adults could expect to die.
In fact, the mean length of life can be heavily skewed by infant mortality. For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.
I don't know, plenty of alienation in 19th century literature where everyone was living in everyone else's pocket. A lot has changed in that time, including our openness to expression of our internal suffering.
I grew up in a similar way, my overwhelming memory was that it felt utterly stifling! I couldn't wait to move away and be anonymous.
I have noticed in social circles that skew heavily Western that a large majority of small talk revolves around media consumption, whether it's recounting TV episodes, quoting movies, meme-ing Spongebob, etc.
There's a lot of factors to blame for our feelings of isolation. I tend to look toward the fortress-ing of private homes and the sprawl of suburban developments, which encourage seeking enjoyment through pseudo-socialization with the characters on your screen.
Parasocial relationships were a thing long before Twitch and OnlyFans, only people were attaching to fictional characters so the effect wasn't quite as pronounced until actual humans became the objects of consumption (see: Disney adults, MCU ultrafans, etc.). This probably has to do with isolation from social groups as you describe, particularly as people in general lost community centers such as churches due to the sprawl and pace of modern life.
Seeing parasocial relationships infect the internet like regular celebrities in the past is really a bummer and not what I had hoped for the technology. Real life interactions are the way to go more often than not.
> many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is
Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.
>And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work.
Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections? I just don't think your reasoning covers the causes well, especially in the suburbanite 40 hour week type that travel by car for an hour+ a day to a single family home.
Media consumption exists because technology has allowed media to show up everywhere at all times very rapidly and we have not had a society wide inoculation to its negative effects.
People don’t have the energy to spend time with people because everyone is guarded now. Back in the day everyone usually knew the worst parts/weaknesses/fears of everyone else you spent time with. This made spending time with those people very comfortable.
Few things struck me on this topic in the last year:
- both me and my in laws are buying estate and I found it curious how to both of us (and most friends too), cameras and alarms were priorities
- leaving my old flat me and my SO realized we knew no one in the building
- went back to where my grandma lived in Poland. Classic but beautiful (really) soviet style neighborhood with parks, swings, etc. In the 90s it was so alive, children playing anywhere, women and men speaking on benches, there was a terrific super safe community. Going there it was just sad: no one around, most of the benches and trees taken down for endless waves of cars "progress" brought.
As a reminder, you can still do those things. Have a weekly hangout day with friends with no firm plans. Spend time at hobbyist shops on the regular. Play board games with strangers.
It's theoretically possible, but not really if you're honest.
People have gotten used to the isolation, so they're not gonna enjoy it if you randomly invite yourself literally every day of the week.
You'll need like-minded friends and that's not something you can really "just decided" to change.
That's a really interesting anecdote about that memoir. It immediately reminds me of a lot of fantasy type novels I've read.
For example, I'm a big fan of the Wandering Inn series. Essentially, one of the main characters is a young woman transported to a fantasy-style world who takes over an abandoned inn outside a major city. A large part of her story is about interacting with the locals, just wandering around shops and visiting friends she makes along the way, etc. Very reminiscent of the book you mention.
When I look at a lot of other similar books, they often rely on the same style of small community interactions among the characters.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason such stories are so popular is because we're missing so much of that in our everyday lives.
One thing I like about living in SF is that despite its problems, a lot of the city is based around neighborhoods and being walkable. I see the same folks at the local restaurants and hang out with friends and associates at the local pub each week. So I still get some amount of that traditional daily interaction, and unfortunately some of the drama that comes with it.
I mean look at the success of Stardew Valley, a game whose entire premise is that you move to a small rural town to start a farm and forge relationships with the locals. Its a well designed game to be sure but I really think some of the popularity stems from scratching that itch of communal living that so many folks feel they lack.
profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is
This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her.
You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.
All of that os possible only if you work 8 or less hours a day and then go home close to work. It is not possible with current "if you work less then 60 hours a week you are not passionate" frequent ideology. Nor with long commute actually.
What you praise here is called being lazy. And also it relied on kids being unsupervised which was ok at the time.
One thing I like about my apartment complex is we have a hot tub outside. The weather is almost always nice here, so it’s a nice place to be, so I go out most nights, and often hang out with regulars.
Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.
This is the good thing about shared facilities like this: the cost per-unit is really low because there's so many units to share the cost of just a few things like this (or an exercise room, a game room, etc.), and so much space is saved by sharing these things among hundreds of units. But most residents don't use them most of the time, so for the occasional users, they have it available for the 2x a year they want it, and the regular users don't usually feel crowded.
I grew up in the midwest and I remember a lot of non-commercial social events like potlucks that were commonplace. Some based around churches, others family groups, and others friend/community based. Talking to my family that still lives there, the number of these events over the decades has dropped dramatically. In general these types of events were low cost and had high socialization. It is thought by some that the commercialization of leisure [1] in advertising culture gives too much time and importance to high expense low socialization gatherings and focuses on convincing the consumer to consume more media thereby increasing advertising. Many social media outlets are thought to worsen this situation by optimizing to keep clicking an app (anger clicking, parasocial relationships, etc) rather than focusing on closer in person relationships.
So I would say yes, a lot less people meet in person [2]
There were idiots in the 50's crowing about how some day we wouldn't have to eat at all. I really wonder about the diet and favorite dishes are like for someone who thinks never eating is progress. And that's without even getting into the communal aspects of eating with a group.
You can enjoy eating, meal preparation, and the like and _also_ recognize how very, very, very money, time, and resource consuming it all is.
If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.
I finished my thesis thanks to a group of people scattered over the internet, all agreeing to do pomodoro. In the breaks we'd chat about our day to day lives then get back to work when the bell rang. I'll always be grateful for their presence, getting me through hard times when I'd perhaps have given up if I felt completely alone; or at least not worked so deeply and thoroughly.
It might be a good way to run an office. Define pomodoro blocks in which you cannot interrupt your coworkers. No slacks, texts, phone calls, or conversations until the cycle ends.
Body doubling (or doing something with others around) is an awesome technique to overcome a motivational hurdle for activities. While the term originated in ADHD circles, it is definitely applicable to those outside of the ADHD community as well.
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
Thanks! And for sure - on the top of the Double page we have Double communities you’re able to join right now instead of scheduling a Double for the future.
In college, I lived in a 17 bedroom house (2 quads, 4 triples, 6 doubles, and 4 singles) with 35 fraternity brothers. It was glorious!
Of course we had schedules but there was very little "planning". Everyone was just there almost all of the time. Anything you wanted to do, someone like-minded was just there. We played cards in the winter, football or frisbee in the shoulder season, ate, hung out, socialized with guests, and of course, studied together. It just worked.
I can still think of a hundred things I regularly did in those days that I haven't done since.
Now I'm an empty nester, tired of pandemic living and tired of working so hard to recreate what came so naturally back then.
Nice to see someone trying to use the technology that displaced so many of us to bring us back together. Best wishes. I think you'll need it.
I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.
Seems like a pretty coarse level of analysis asking if “in-person” is better. What’s more productive for a manager will be different, maybe the exact opposite of what’s productive for a programmer. Some people get paid to talk, but many of us do not. The talking is paid for by our sacrifice of personal time, time spent with kids, or exercising or whatever. Managers, being decision makers, will push us back to offices because they benefit from it, because they are paid to talk. Something to be sensitive to, if you’re not already.
I agree with you that productivity for managers versus programmers is different, but my view is that the majority of workers do more work in person and people actually really enjoy being productive! The “body doubling” that goes on in offices is IMHO an underestimated phenomenon, especially for new employees coming into the workforce. For remote work to be a permanent choice, I think we need to be a bit more honest about the benefits of being in-office. Giving employees the choice is very important to me, just trying to give my perspective.
Surely it’ll depend on many factors: employees’ own preferences, level and sincerity of support-in-principle from leadership, actual working environments, relative distribution of remote vs in-person, level and burden of effort to accommodate mixed teams.
I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.
For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).
For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).
As someone else with ADHD, I've found that one of the downfalls of "body doubling" is that it works both ways. Productivity can lead to more productivity because the body double can help me overcome the urge to research woodgas vehicles or the history of bread in Mesoamerica. But the double's lack of focus (e.g. being social, or forced meetings) destroys all focus because it's already enough of a task to manage my own executive functioning in a good environment.
The best balance I've found is remote work (so I am my only distraction), maybe with occasional in-person focused work sessions (à la hackathon), and occasional remote "body doubling" sessions with a friend or internet stranger.
TLDR:
Solo remote work is better than attempting body doubling in an office environment, but remote "body doubling" is also occasionally helpful.
I actually do this more effectively working from home with my wife. For people who like the aesthetics and atmosphere of an office for some reason, I think a coworking space would as productive or moreso than the company office. (Is this Body Doubling website coworking industry guerrilla marketing?)
I was dragged back into the office for a couple months in 2021. I was stupefied by how pointless it all was. From the time and resources wasted driving to and fro to the office every day to the meetings which were still largely done online (since we were a distributed team.)
I had to go 5 days a week. The company bled people. Most the people who were sticking around as I was leaving confided to me that they weren't happy about it. The company struggled to hire new workers. That's probably all abated to some extent since then. With a flexible hybrid schedule, I think they could have found a sweet spot.
If anything, remote work actually supports my social needs much more thoroughly than working from an office environment.
At home, I am within a few seconds from my wife (since she is working from home too), which allows for a significantly more rich social environment for myself and her, than having to be in the extended physical proximity of those in distant social tiers (e.g., loose ties, or "work friends").
I value the time I have been able to spend at home so much more than any social connections I may have made at the office; in fact, I focus on getting my stuff done even more quickly precisely so I can return to the quality time that I have to focus on those who truly matter to me.
I am no longer at the age where I care to go for a drink afterwards with work friends. For those of us who have richer social home lives than work lives, remote work is a godsend.
“Many people with ADHD find it easier to stay focused on housework, homework, bill paying, and other tasks when someone else is around to keep them company.”
Not true for me!
If anything the reverse is true!
With my ADHD I also get a form of rejection sensitivity dysphoria, so worry I’m being judged or watched.
Not with everything. Just somethings, and mostly my desk based work.
I like silent rooms away from people.
Any distractions at all with detail me for possibly hours!
Same here, in fact I'm rather surprised to learn that this isn't the norm for people with ADHD, apparently.
On a related note, my office is currently doing a sort of ad-hoc, informal hybrid work schedule, so some days of the week there's very few people in the office. On those days, I find I'm so much more productive just due to the fact that there's less commotion and fewer people talking. WFH was great for my productivity as well, of course. Anyone else notice the same?
In many ways the pandemic was the best thing that happened for me!
I got to work from home, and then transitioned to running my own consultancy from my home office!
I’m fortunate and have a nice home and work well with my wife.
At an office I used to find an empty meeting room and work on my own, and this was seen as anti social…
And I was like, so which is it?
Shut up and do you work, or chit chat in the office?
Apparently it all depends and the unspoken unwritten rules of social conduct in offices prove that companies are not families and culture is about who the majority like and nothing to do with do embracing diversity.
I found that am super productive when travel by air, just sitting and working at the gate or mid flight. Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I am like that too. I discovered one reason for this was that I was super hydrated - drinking up all my water before going through security had a noticeable effect on my ability to concentrate.
> Now I wonder if that's the effect of all the people around.
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
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After work, people would go to friends houses, putter around town and catch up with neighbors, visit shops where they knew everyone, etc.
I can't but think that so many of the malaises that people suffer today, which we ascribe as individual psychological problems, are really just a result of how profoundly lonely and isolating media consumption is. (The irony of posting this on the Internet is not lost on me.)
We are a tribal species. We need the company of others in our physical environment in order to feel safe and at home. Obviously, some amount of solitude is important too, but for a communal species like Homo sapiens, being alone or around strangers most of the day is the environmental equivalent of being in a desert with no shade.
I think it helps to think of our social environment as some kind of ecosystem that has evolved to fulfill various needs and shouldn't be messed with. The results will be similar to if you take a few species from biological ecosystems and just randomly put them together - the result is not going to look very pretty.
My hypothesis is that given the rise of everyone having always connected cell phones, texting, etc, that subconsciously we've all shifted to viewing our physical homes as our form of privacy. Essentially dropping in takes away the last place we feel we can control our interactions with others.
This describes my parents' situation perfectly. We are a family of migrants, my parents were very social and had a big network of friends back in their home country. Even since we moved here, they became insular, and never made many long term friends. In fact, they are pretty much alone and not very happy in their older age.
This is just a real gem of an analogy.
On HN it always sounds like you are only receiving, but actual deal ia you provide until you are really old or sick.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23758087
But life in New Jersey was not working out for Yarima. It wasn't the weather, food or modern technology but the absence of close human relations. The Yanomami day begins and ends in the shapono, open to relatives, friends, neighbours and enemies. But Yarima's day in the US began and ended in a closed box, cut off from society.
I thought about her too reading the comment.
Your comment reminded me of this video about how life for a baker used to be much better before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution didn't do much good for bakers. I can only hope our future generations will get to live so much of a better life than us so they can look back at us and try to feel empathy for us.
That doesn't mean everybody else had it easy. In fact, at some point, it seems like one in four(?) babies didn't survive beyond age five[1]?
[0] https://www.fostersbakery.co.uk/victorian-bakers
[1] There is a common misunderstanding about life expectancy, as though it is the age at which most adults could expect to die.
In fact, the mean length of life can be heavily skewed by infant mortality. For example, in 1850 in England and Wales life expectancy at birth was 42, but over 25% of children died before the age of five. For those who survived, life expectancy rose to 57. Moreover, 10% of people born in 1850 lived to over 80.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/aug/18/misunderstan...
There's a lot of factors to blame for our feelings of isolation. I tend to look toward the fortress-ing of private homes and the sprawl of suburban developments, which encourage seeking enjoyment through pseudo-socialization with the characters on your screen.
Parasocial relationships were a thing long before Twitch and OnlyFans, only people were attaching to fictional characters so the effect wasn't quite as pronounced until actual humans became the objects of consumption (see: Disney adults, MCU ultrafans, etc.). This probably has to do with isolation from social groups as you describe, particularly as people in general lost community centers such as churches due to the sprawl and pace of modern life.
Media consumption is just a replacement for social interaction. And it exists only because people dont have time and energy left for socialization and other activities after work. Our society is geared towards extracting maximum profits from people. It does not permit them to have any excess energy left at the end of the workday.
Did people not socialize in the days before worker protections demanded worker protections? I just don't think your reasoning covers the causes well, especially in the suburbanite 40 hour week type that travel by car for an hour+ a day to a single family home.
Media consumption exists because technology has allowed media to show up everywhere at all times very rapidly and we have not had a society wide inoculation to its negative effects.
- both me and my in laws are buying estate and I found it curious how to both of us (and most friends too), cameras and alarms were priorities
- leaving my old flat me and my SO realized we knew no one in the building
- went back to where my grandma lived in Poland. Classic but beautiful (really) soviet style neighborhood with parks, swings, etc. In the 90s it was so alive, children playing anywhere, women and men speaking on benches, there was a terrific super safe community. Going there it was just sad: no one around, most of the benches and trees taken down for endless waves of cars "progress" brought.
People have gotten used to the isolation, so they're not gonna enjoy it if you randomly invite yourself literally every day of the week. You'll need like-minded friends and that's not something you can really "just decided" to change.
For example, I'm a big fan of the Wandering Inn series. Essentially, one of the main characters is a young woman transported to a fantasy-style world who takes over an abandoned inn outside a major city. A large part of her story is about interacting with the locals, just wandering around shops and visiting friends she makes along the way, etc. Very reminiscent of the book you mention.
When I look at a lot of other similar books, they often rely on the same style of small community interactions among the characters.
Makes me wonder if part of the reason such stories are so popular is because we're missing so much of that in our everyday lives.
One thing I like about living in SF is that despite its problems, a lot of the city is based around neighborhoods and being walkable. I see the same folks at the local restaurants and hang out with friends and associates at the local pub each week. So I still get some amount of that traditional daily interaction, and unfortunately some of the drama that comes with it.
I'm born late 1980s and I've never seen so many people out in the streets just chatting outside of parties and village fairs.
This is the main problem in my marriage, we don't consume the same media - we've tried to find something in common to watch, but mostly spend it on our phones watching our own media streams, edu-tainment YouTubers for me and Netflix/Disney/Facebook watch for her.
You can't make cultural references or have inside jokes if you don't consume the same media.
What you praise here is called being lazy. And also it relied on kids being unsupervised which was ok at the time.
It's basically the only place I can muster the energy learning new programming-related things (not an IC anymore).
Even though it’s super nice (basically resort-quality), there’s probably only a half dozen regulars, while there’s hundreds (200?) apartment units here.
So I would say yes, a lot less people meet in person [2]
[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almana...
[2] https://theconversation.com/teens-have-less-face-time-with-t...
And yes, I strongly agree! Just hanging out was the thing people did.
Kind of miss that. Time to maybe fix it some.
If you could replace a typical home-cooked meal which cost $3->5 in materials and at _least_ half an hour in personal labor with a pill that costs $0.03->0.05 and can be produced in the thousands per hour, that's a significant win. And if you can build those pills from the byproducts of vats of cheap-ass microbes (rather than through ordinary (or -worse- factory) farming), then that's a massive win for both the environment and animal welfare.
We're actually building something just for this ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) and it can be for any sort of activity - cooking, running, working, studying, etc.
Of course we had schedules but there was very little "planning". Everyone was just there almost all of the time. Anything you wanted to do, someone like-minded was just there. We played cards in the winter, football or frisbee in the shoulder season, ate, hung out, socialized with guests, and of course, studied together. It just worked.
I can still think of a hundred things I regularly did in those days that I haven't done since.
Now I'm an empty nester, tired of pandemic living and tired of working so hard to recreate what came so naturally back then.
Nice to see someone trying to use the technology that displaced so many of us to bring us back together. Best wishes. I think you'll need it.
I also prefer remote (and have been remote probably 75% of my career). I’m also ADHD, and while I’d never even heard of ”body doubling” by name it’s something I’ve found helpful sometimes, under some circumstances.
For the minority of my career spent in office, it’s ranged from wildly productive (great team fit, good balance in favor of focus time) to hilariously counterproductive (excessive meetings and process ceremony, continuous interruptions whether ostensibly work-related or social, unbearably noisy).
For the times I’ve worked on mixed remote/office, I’ve generally felt my own and my teams’ productivity is great except when leadership found the arrangement objectionable (self-fulfilling prophecy I guess), or when team communications became challenging at scale (eg we found it hard to do “standups” with ~15 people in office and ~10 people on a screen; but realistically we shouldn’t have had that many people in any meetings).
As someone else with ADHD, I've found that one of the downfalls of "body doubling" is that it works both ways. Productivity can lead to more productivity because the body double can help me overcome the urge to research woodgas vehicles or the history of bread in Mesoamerica. But the double's lack of focus (e.g. being social, or forced meetings) destroys all focus because it's already enough of a task to manage my own executive functioning in a good environment.
The best balance I've found is remote work (so I am my only distraction), maybe with occasional in-person focused work sessions (à la hackathon), and occasional remote "body doubling" sessions with a friend or internet stranger.
TLDR: Solo remote work is better than attempting body doubling in an office environment, but remote "body doubling" is also occasionally helpful.
I was dragged back into the office for a couple months in 2021. I was stupefied by how pointless it all was. From the time and resources wasted driving to and fro to the office every day to the meetings which were still largely done online (since we were a distributed team.)
I had to go 5 days a week. The company bled people. Most the people who were sticking around as I was leaving confided to me that they weren't happy about it. The company struggled to hire new workers. That's probably all abated to some extent since then. With a flexible hybrid schedule, I think they could have found a sweet spot.
At home, I am within a few seconds from my wife (since she is working from home too), which allows for a significantly more rich social environment for myself and her, than having to be in the extended physical proximity of those in distant social tiers (e.g., loose ties, or "work friends").
I value the time I have been able to spend at home so much more than any social connections I may have made at the office; in fact, I focus on getting my stuff done even more quickly precisely so I can return to the quality time that I have to focus on those who truly matter to me.
I am no longer at the age where I care to go for a drink afterwards with work friends. For those of us who have richer social home lives than work lives, remote work is a godsend.
Not true for me!
If anything the reverse is true!
With my ADHD I also get a form of rejection sensitivity dysphoria, so worry I’m being judged or watched.
Not with everything. Just somethings, and mostly my desk based work.
I like silent rooms away from people.
Any distractions at all with detail me for possibly hours!
On a related note, my office is currently doing a sort of ad-hoc, informal hybrid work schedule, so some days of the week there's very few people in the office. On those days, I find I'm so much more productive just due to the fact that there's less commotion and fewer people talking. WFH was great for my productivity as well, of course. Anyone else notice the same?
In many ways the pandemic was the best thing that happened for me!
I got to work from home, and then transitioned to running my own consultancy from my home office!
I’m fortunate and have a nice home and work well with my wife.
At an office I used to find an empty meeting room and work on my own, and this was seen as anti social…
And I was like, so which is it?
Shut up and do you work, or chit chat in the office?
Apparently it all depends and the unspoken unwritten rules of social conduct in offices prove that companies are not families and culture is about who the majority like and nothing to do with do embracing diversity.
Anyway….
"Distraction-free productivity Focusmate virtual coworking helps you get things done."
I used to study at the student center on campus (Rutgers New Brunswick) for this reason. I tried the library a few times, but it felt off to me for some reason; too quiet, perhaps.
FWIW, this helps sometimes: https://coffitivity.com