Many People Would Have No Human Interaction Without Work

Work is not family , and has never been family, and should not be confused with family, but unfortunately it often is. Why is that? In the simplest possible terms, the social bonds of yesteryear have largely been eroded by Netflix and fence lines — trite argument, I know, but still a real one — and people don’t have a standard community as much anymore, what with the decline of religion, the decline of standard dating for online, people moving wherever for work, the different ages that people enter BabyLand , etc. Or, as Ed Z. puts it in this newsletter:

The crucial thing is that these articles are giving the office way more credit than it deserves, but they are also assuming that the office should be where we grow socially. Work has continued to encroach on our personal time through a default acceptance that our colleagues are always our friends, and our work is our life, and that if we fail to do something at work it’s a personal failing rather than a professional. If we let down the company, we let down the family — and if we leave the company, we’re abandoning them versus leaving a bad situation or going into a better one.

We are expected to be “loyal” to a company, but that loyalty usually doesn’t go both ways, and is mostly judged by how willing we are to be mistreated without compensation. We, as workers, are expected to build our lives at work — to be close to work, to work at work “when we’re needed” with no expectation in most cases of overtime, to ‘get on with our coworkers’ and attend “non-mandatory” happy hours that we’ll absolutely be judged for not attending. In return, the boss may give us free food, or a computer (only for work), or a water cooler, or a coffee machine, but rarely if ever the sort of loyalty that we’re expected to give the company.

I’m not big on right-wing nutjobs, but Matt Walsh has a recent episode about “the God-sized hole” at the center of America:

His basic argument is that God, or at least organized religion, used to be the thing people centered themselves around — but with the decline of that, now people are seeking purpose in all corners of the human experience, be that drugs, alcohol, weightlifting, performative Instagram, dieting, critical race theory, Peloton, or whatever else. A lot — and I mean A LOT — of people look to work for purpose, community, and connection. For many people, often men, the process of building wealth and the trappings of success at a job is legitimately the closest thing they have to fun in their lives , so they invest deeply in this notion of work as a community, even if they barely ever emerge from their sales call cadence.

That’s part of the problem with every discussion about remote and hybrid work — it terrifies some people, because the only human interaction and community they really have is work, and they fear that cannot be replicated on Zoom and Skype screens alone. They might be somewhat right, yes, but the other reality is that work should never have been your central source of connection and community to begin with. Work is fleeting and transactional for millions of people; we can be laid off in 10 minutes, and we wouldn’t show up if they didn’t pay us. How is that the bedrock for community?

The best way to look at “The Great Resignation” is actually as a “Great Reconsideration,” i.e. people realizing that work isn’t life, and in fact there’s a lot more to life than simply work. Connections come from relationships and people and experiences, not deliverables and spreadsheets.

Takes?