We haven’t seen this issue getting much attention lately, but things have changed since the lockdowns. It was a time when isolation became the New Normal, with people working from home; at least the concept of the metaverse rising in the patois; and like Google, Zoom became a verb.

Did the younger generations, especially those who were coming of age during the time of isolation, withdraw into the metaverse? There’s no doubt that the space is alive and well and growing and expected to reach 1.4 billion users in just seven years, with gaming and ecommerce being the most popular sectors to date.

As for it becoming the new workplace, hold on there, baba louie.

Humans are social creatures and while many companies currently still use an office/home hybrid model, interestingly enough, one of our clients, Milimatch, a human capital and risk optimization platform, was approached by a Fortune 200 to gauge employee sentiment on returning to the office, or at least a hybrid model. For the record, MiliMatch is a platform that measures workplace behavior through five simple questions responded to in free text, without AI. There are no yes/no questions, or scale-of-one-to-ten rating systems.

It was the younger of their multigenerational employees who, yea, even after the years of isolation, preferred to work remotely and were found to be more productive under those circumstances.

Work/life balance done and done? Did the lockdowns spawn the normalization of isolation and a change in basic human behavior?

Hardly. Just because this generation preferred to work remotely, didn’t necessarily mean that they wanted to spend their lives remotely or in some metaverse.

While WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s bid to buy back the coworking space essentially ended last week, he did launch Flow not too long ago, a co-living company which he said would “elevate” the experience of renting an apartment by rebranding residences, increasing amenities, and adding new building management tech, so it’s co-living, co-working and retail rolled into one bubble. In other words, community-driven rentals, or a WeWork for renters, as The Guardian noted.

Is co-living the new co-working?

As one investor mentioned to us, “large corporations have let go of their long-term leases which are typically 5+ years since the cost to keep them exceeded utility during and post-pandemic. Remote and hybrid work is now more the norm.”

This investor, who rents a co-working space, told us that her office manager mentioned that the office building across the street was undergoing the conversion to a co-living space.

“Even though WFH (work from home) sounds good, I’ve read that Millennials want to be in the office since work is part of their social life and they like to meet people live. NO ONE enjoys Zoom anymore…. young people want to mix and mingle.”

Well, in the office maybe not so much. Enter co-living or work/life balance 2.0?

While the Zoom generation who spent years in physical isolation might not want to return to the office, nor do they relish living in their parents’ basement. They still crave community.

“Communal living spaces of all types are offering them both a place to work remotely and the ability to make friends,” reported Konrad Putzier for The Wall Street Journal. “If co-living spaces largely attracted millennials looking to save money before the pandemic, they’re now attracting those who have enough money to uproot their lives. Many of the millennials Putzier spoke with previously lived in apartments by themselves before turning to co-living spaces. For them, roommates are a choice, not a necessity,” said Business Insider.

“Co-living spaces used to be for broke millennials, but they’re attracting a whole new crowd during the pandemic,” Business Insider reported back in 2021 and the trend doesn’t seem to have changed. This generation has no interest in owning a home or buying/renting apartments – nor can they afford it. Some missed dorm life completely or had an abbreviated version of it and seemingly enjoy being in a community of peers, who share their visions, views and politics.

Which may well foster – or extend – socialization in an echo chamber.

And which doesn’t always work out in the workplace, as we witnessed when Google recently “terminated 28 employees, according to an internal memo viewed by CNBC, after a series of protests.”

“They took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers,” wrote (Chris Rackow, Google’s vice president of global security) in the memo obtained by The Post. “…Behavior like this has no place in our workplace and we will not tolerate it. It clearly violates multiple policies that all employees must adhere to — including our code of conduct and policy on harassment, discrimination, retaliation, standards of conduct, and workplace concerns.”

Work/life balance is all well and good, but the boss is still the boss, we’re not at the point where the rank and file dictates or decides company policy and there are certain behaviors one needs to check at the door, proverbial or not, when it comes to the workplace.

It seems a number of workers must have missed that memo.

The work/life balance lines seemed to have gotten somewhat blurred, the Google terminations being a case in point. Working for the man often means working for a nice sized paycheck, and although working for, say, a dot org, may be more in line with the value systems and passions of a certain segment of the population, it doesn’t necessarily bring the same largesse. Nor is it an obvious path to becoming a dot com billionaire. And let’s face it, some ambitions never change, no matter where you hang your hat. Onward and forward.