> I started going to cafes and co-working spaces to work, or just do things on my laptop there, even for 1-2 hours, and that has helped a lot. I so much feel better, I can decisively do more than at home.

This is the ideal way too imo. Remote has many advantages but I also understand the disadvantages that it has and an approach like this feels like the right balance/tradeoff to me.

We are also not animals built out for isolation. Work still plays a significant role in our meaning to life given that we do it for such long streches of time and isolation within work can have some detrimental effects.

There might be some more logic to it as well. For how long work has ever been done, it was done in the frequents of 1-2 hours, break, 1-2 hours and so on. This is a really good video relating to how work got streched from this to a monotonous 8 hour time or even more.

I think that within pure office, you are unable to really toggle your brain off from work. It is a single strech of long period of time that you are at work. Because if you could tune out then you would've preferred to move back to home and relax. It is very hard to relax within the hours of job and our human body is strictly not built for such levels of stress and endurance at a prolonged period. We need a lot more breaks which most work offices don't give as they see it as a method to "optimize" their employees productivity.

Remote does offer some pushback against it but suffers from the isolation aspect of it.

Hybrid as is your case, can help in providing the balance of work and some form of connection while at it.

I also feel sometimes that this is true but for libraries when studying as perhaps the same principle applies. Though, there is still some laziness exerted in going to the library, I feel as if over the long term, the benefits of going to library might outweigh the costs and that over a long term, it might induce me more net stress not going to library.

Glad that you have found the proper approach to things and I agree with the last paragraph that the employer should be accomodating to all because even from a capitalist perspective, it can allow their employees to actually be on the path to their maximum value and a more happy workforce can be a good thing in general which pays a lot of dividends over a long term.

[0]: https://hackertube.org/watch/hvk_XylEmLo

> We are also not animals built out for isolation.

We probably shouldn't be getting all our socialization at work either. People with healthy active social lives outside of work will probably handle work from home a lot better. There are certain situations where working with others in person is actually better for productivity and that's fine, but when someone's needs as a social animal aren't being met unless they have to go into an office there's likely already something pretty unhealthy going on. It might be too many hours spent working, or a job that's too stressful or demanding, or soul crushing, but I'd be looking for a solution that isn't "lock me in a cage for 8-10 hours a day with a bunch of other trapped workers" first.