People at work don't care about your feelings

You look on Linkedin, a day doesn’t go by without someone having a public moment of vulnerability, sharing a struggle of some sort, and usually being covered in support in the comments.?

I like that. Be kind whenever you can, it’s best. We’ve all got struggles and a little bit of understanding goes a long way.?

But I think you’d be mistaken if you looked at these things and started thinking that people at work actually care about your feelings, beyond common courtesy.?

At work, we are service providers. Colleagues, people in our team, bosses, clients, whoever, they come to us for our services. They come to us to benefit from what we do.?

They look at you, maybe they see you’ve had a hard day, and it’s not like they don’t care, they wish you well, but most of them are not going to bring it up, they got their own stuff to deal with. They don’t need your sorrows in their life. They just want you to give them what they need so you can both go home.?

And we’re the same.?

If I go buy a bread from the baker, I’m going to polite to the baker, we may exchange a few pleasantries, if they’re having a bad day, I may offer a few encouraging words, and I will mean them. But if the baker starts to dump it all on me, bro, I’m not here for that, I just want the bread.?

We’re all bakers to each other, in the professional world, in one way or another.?

Stop believing the HR marketing and this new age hippie management thingy which is making it sound like your workplace could be a substitute for friendship, family and your therapist.

It’s not, and you don’t want it to be. Your support network is not at work.?

I’m not saying this out of cynicism, I don’t think people are “bad”, I just think that sometimes we’re trying to make the workplace something that isn’t, can’t be, and shouldn’t be.

And I’m not saying you can’t have deep, meaningful professional relationships, and I’m not saying you can’t make friends at work, but generally speaking, in my “guesstimation”, 80%+ of the people who think their colleagues or managers really “care” about them, are mistaken.?

They care about you in the sense that they’re nice, sure, engaging in drive by empathy, but if you stop delivering, if you ain’t got that bread, you’re going to find their caring run dry very quickly.?

And that’s exactly how it should be. This is work. It’s not family, it’s not friendship, it’s work.?

We should be decent about it, we should be kind, and professional relationships can be very meaningful and rewarding, but it’s all based on our ability to deliver good, fresh, bread :)