When the office went dark, so did the employees: Here's the silent unraveling of America's hybrid work culture

On a late March morning in 2020, millions of office buildings across the world went dark, not with a bang, but with a quiet flick of a switch. For a brief moment, it felt like liberation: The daily commute erased, the cubicle dissolved, and the meeting room replaced by a pixelated grid of faces. Managers declared victory, scholars hailed a workforce revolution, and employees embraced the sweet illusion that human collaboration could be compressed into the frame of a laptop. But as the years passed, an eerie truth settled in. Something vital had gone missing, something no VPN, workflow tool, or meticulously timed Zoom meeting could resurrect. Organizations began to discover the cost of an office that had vanished: the unraveling of the social fabric that once held teams, relationships, a