When offices emptied during the pandemic, many economists predicted a permanent shift: workers freed from the commute would relocate to cheaper towns and never return. Yet three years of data complicate that forecast. Surveys show that while a majority of knowledge workers now spend at least part of the week at home, relatively few have moved far from their former offices. The reason appears less financial than social. Respondents repeatedly cited not salary or rent but the loosening of workplace friendships as the cost they felt most acutely. Casual encounters at the coffee machine, it turns out, had quietly sustained a web of weak ties—acquaintances who shared job leads, professional gossip, and a sense of belonging. Video calls preserved formal collaboration but not these incidental bonds. Some firms have responded by scheduling occasional in-person days explicitly for unstructured socializing rather than meetings, a reversal of the efficiency logic that once governed office design. The lesson researchers draw is that the workplace was never only a place to work.