There are lots of perfectly legitimate things that people do which inconvenience me in various ways. But I don't think I'm within my rights to demand that airlines don't allow young children or obese people in planes for example. If management doesn't feel I have a need to come into the office a couple days a week, I'm not coming in just because some people want the buzz of a busy 2019 office.

And if that makes me selfish, so be it.

Well, for one thing, that means that even if you're working remotely, you still need to be physically located in close proximity to the office. It takes full-remote, with all the fairly obvious benefits it offers, off the table.

For another, it's one person asking many people to sacrifice their own needs to meet his.

For a third, he's presenting it as if having all his coworkers, or at least most of them, in the office is the only reasonable way to meet his social needs, when there are certainly other options.

Overall, what it sounds very much like is "Everything was going just fine for me before the pandemic, and then when other people started finding ways to meet their needs better, and the "default" changed, suddenly I was no longer automatically getting my needs met. The obvious solution to this is that we just need to go back to everyone else giving up what they've gained so I don't have to change my lifestyle in any way!"

If that's not what tallanvor means, then I apologize for misconstruing them; however, I have definitely seen many, many people who clearly feel that way advocating for full return-to-office policies specifically for their own comfort and convenience.

I would be totally OK with doing this if those people who want a more social office atmosphere would be willing to pool together and pay for the gasoline I would have to use to commute 2-3 hours each way to the office. If it cost them real money, would they be willing to pay for those "magical hallway conversations" and "office buzz"?