If your primary reason for wanting to be in office is fly on the wall lurking and not wanting to feel rejected then those aren't very good reasons. Ask to be apart of solutions, groups, teams, emergency responses and projects. You'll learn 10x as much working with those co-workers to solve the problem than you would by listening to some coworkers doing it.

> So, you might not be willing to drive to an office for my feelings. But if you're not willing to drive to an office for the majority of your team's feelings, you might just be an asshole?

I work in a group of 10 developers and 0 out of 10 want to be in office, but hey, I don't mind if you want to take shots at me. I'm not against working in an office, I just want to have real reasons why it's needed.

Or

Can we chat about a problem I’m having with the dev server?

Or

When do you think you’ll have free time?

Those questions are all direct and to the point. They didn’t start out with “hey, see the raiders game last night, it was crazy. My dog was so excited from all the yelling she jumped on the table and started eating the chips.”

To be clear. We were talking about reaching out to coworkers.