Ask HN: How do you deal with social isolation while working from home?

We use Jitsi at work and have rooms that sort of emulate our shared office rooms. Sometimes there will be pair programming via screenshare, other times people just hang out in there and occasionally ask a question or talk about interesting and funny things they stumble across while working. Maybe you could suggest something like this to your coworkers?

Hot take from someone who has worked remotely for the past few years:

It’s not healthy.

    But many people have most of their human interaction
    through work and associated activity (commute, lunches,
    dinner after work, etc.)

    As an introvert with a medical condition, a wife and 
    three kids at home, remote working is the best thing 
    that's ever happened in my career,

By forming friendships with neighbors.

Re: The social distancing, not seeing anyone, working from home situation. My brother told me: "I've been training for this my whole life!"

My partner works from home too. Our dog hangs out in our office with us while we work. I alternate working and exercising. My current job is big on autonomy and letting people work. Days go by without meetings. It's been great. I don't feel all that isolated to be honest.

I used to enjoy taking/debating/joking around with my co-workers while I worked in the office. We used to spend hours talking about football or politics or stock market.

Now that I am home, I found other things to do. Like staring out of the window, reading reddit/HN, taking a quick nap or cook something to eat.

It's not so bad. I don't miss people, I don't miss co-workers.

I don't. Isolation simply doesn't bother me very much.

Playing video games with friends, online, after work. That worked pretty well for me for the last 3 months.

Hey, I’ve felt the same about missing social aspect of office during these wfh days. One thing that has worked for me is, I do virtual coffee chats with couple folks in my team and other friends at work every week and we talk about stuff of mutual interest work or non-work related.

Find times outside of work to socialize IRL with humans.

For my workflow, being at home worked well until momentum from before was lost. Initating new things, knowing who to contact and getting flow going, just doesn't always pan out that well virtually. When everybody knows what to do, it's smooth sailing WFH. However, most of my job is ahead of that curve, and with constant reorg and active internal sabotage (no less accurate word for it when people know what they're doing), nothing works better than than accidentally bumping into somebody in the hallway, or at lunch.

Also, meetings seems to be most efficient and comfortable when it's all or nothing = either everyone is virtual, or they're all physical.

I use Twitter, to sort of "hang out" with a much bigger circle of colleagues/friends/weirdos.

I have been remote for years and still have those small interactions. Slack, video, even texting. Adapt your communication techniques.

In some ways, it is even beter this way. We never could riff on our leaders all hands meetings in person the way we can over slack while watching their zoom call.

I don’t look at my coworkers for social satisfaction. It can happen and that’s nice. I find the question almost inconceivable.

I’m also on conference calls half the day. Quiet is nice.

I started my working life in a University, where I had colleagues but more or less worked on my own even when I was in an office.

At some point I quit, went through some other jobn searches, and started working from home doing software dev work.

SO I've been working on my own for 20 years, and 10 of those have been doing remote dev work.

Two things have been helpful:

- I had a family for most of that time, - I have activities outside of work (playing music and rock climbing) that I need to interact with other folks to do.

For the first six weeks or so of the pandemic quarantine I curtailed those activities.

At this point, I now have a small group of 10 or so people across two bands and a couple of dudes I climb with, and so I am back into having some socialization. If I get exposed (or anyone in my groups is exposed), it's a small enough set of people I can contract trace.

So, with the exception of the 75-person buddist group I was going to and playing music in bars, I am more or less back to the amount of socialization I was getting before the pandemic.

That's what keeps me from feeling isolated.

You will get over it. A certain degree of social dependence and external validation is fine. But if the lack of it makes you unhappy I'll take it as a hint that you have deep caverns in you mind, filled with extraordinary treasure, that you have never ventured into. Read more, try out hard things and make them easy. People and friends are nice, but don't depend on them for purpose and connection.

Why not take up botany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y

At work I have scheduled meetings with no agenda. If we have nothing to talk, it's a short meeting. But it turns out that there's almost always something worth discussing. Without such scheduled meetings people might not think it's worth initiating a call or sending an IM and potentially interrupting someone's flow.

At home we FaceTime people we normally drink beer together and do it remotely. Two or three families in a videochat. We even attended an all-remote wedding.

Video games in the evenings with friends, with voice chat.

Because I'm used to it. I've been working from home and socially isolated for years, lol.

Dogs.

Nobody else here seems to have any children. Sometimes I would like to have more social isolation, because, believe it or not, two teenage boys at home can be rather annoying from time to time.

the supposed need for social interaction is a socialist construct preying on insecurities.

sounds like you've already found a like minded coworker who doesn't mind being taking a break from work to hang out with you. Don't wear him/her out :) It is rare to find someone who isn't a slave to sprint goals.

We use a small slack bot I developed called the watercooler [1]. It pairs us up two and two for short non-work related chats. Helps break the monotony and isolation of the home office

1: https://watercooler.site

So, I consider myself very fortunate because we have three little kids and it’s been a built-in social dynamic (if exhausting at times).

That said, the garden has been one of the most calming, literally grounding things since this began. We’ve all gotten a lot out of it. Something about taking care of a living thing. The scale could range from a tiny bonsai tree in a container, to a row of vegetables if you have space for it.

Edit: I realize this doesn’t answer the question directly, but it’s been soothing so figured I’d share it anyway.

Online gameroom for coworkers would be great.