Return to office mandates keep getting quietly shelved. What's actually happening?

So I keep seeing this pattern: company announces everyone back in the office, three months of internal chaos, then "oh we're actually hybrid now" in a blog post nobody reads. Rinse, repeat. Meta did it. Amazon's doing it again. The thing that strikes me is how much the framing stays the same even as the policy collapses. "Collaboration." "Culture." "Mentorship of junior staff." These aren't wrong exactly, but they're doing work that the data doesn't really support. You can mentor people remotely. Slack exists. The problem isn't that collaboration is impossible—it's that *some people's* version of work requires proximity and nobody wants to say that out loud. What I think is actually happening: the mandate gets announced because a subset of leadership (usually older, usually already office-based) is genuinely uncomfortable with remote work. It *feels* like people aren't working. Then HR runs the numbers quietly. Attrition's up. Recruiting got harder. People who can leave did. The people left are the ones who can't leave, which isn't a stable workforce. Plus you've got real estate costs you wanted to cut anyway. So the mandate gets quietly walked back, rebranded as "flexibility," and everyone pretends this was the plan all along. The sad part is the whiplash effect on people who actually made decisions based on the first announcement. But that doesn't seem to register much in the cost-benefit analysis.