Yep, I really enjoy my job too and I even work with some really good people but I keep my personal life… personal. It’s not like I hide my personality and life from my colleagues but I’ve got enough friends that I don’t feel like I need to add any more to my inner circle.
I don’t mean to say that the place can’t be nice but I would hope your home is of greater comfort than your workplace in most cases.
Obviously some different life circumstances influence your options of making new friends as an adult. I can certainly understand your perspective there but perhaps it’s hard for me to relate since my significant other and I have no children nor do our friend and none of us desire to ever have them either.
I’m sure they consume a great deal of time and energy that probably drives a person to crave social experiences away from them. If work is the only place they can get away from them I can understand that too but hobbies can still be an option.
World feels overcrowded as it is. Getting a shit deal because so many others choose to have kids and then want to force people to spend time trapped in a box with them… It’s like a whole population of people having their cake and eating it too… Or whatever expression fits best here for an unfair, double-dipping advantage…
And actually now that I think of it, two of our friend group did have kids and we all drifted apart because they were no longer able to commit time and weekends like we did to each other.
They used to often say “we should all hang out again!” and such but then either we’re never available or had to leave early or host events at their place which required interacting with their kids and I gotta say toddlers are not skillful conversationalists.
I don’t have a solution for people with kids trying to find friends at work. I can understand why it might seem appealing to them but speaking from the other side, it feels like a burden I shouldn’t have to carry.
I’m sure you have friends outside of work right?
That’s the part I never understand about people who connect working in office and with the fun of seeing others is person.
Why are you so willing to put up with commuting, office quality furniture, public restroom facilities, sick people who realllllly should have leverage optional work from home days or just regular old sick time… When you could just have more time for friends outside of the workplace.
I see my friends on weekends or they come over and we have game nights spending quality time with each other rather than infrequent unplanned interactions when we both should be doing something else.
My personal life friends are the people I “jump” for. Not coworkers. Having to “jump” for a coworker is and should be an inconvenience in the workplace because it means a failure of planning occurred somewhere. You can still have friendly camaraderie in the face of inconvenient circumstances but I don’t think you need to have some deep relationship to help out a colleague. That comes with the job to some extent.
When I’ve become friends with people from work, I invite them into my entirely separate personal life and in fact that is the case for one of my closest friends.
I just feel like If you wanna hang out with people from the office invite them to something outside of the office. The whole captive audience thing is such a demoralizing foundation to start a friendship with.
I too have ADHD and my in office days are so full of interruptions I just don’t plan productive work during that time anymore and instead just book them full of pointless meetings.
Working at home I get interrupted exactly once a day by my girlfriend while she plays with our cat on her lunch break since she had a permanent work from home position even before covid.
A single quiet Thursday or Friday let’s me out pace all my peers books of work. The company just wastes their money when they make me show up in person. I don’t even by lunch or snacks out there or anything so it doesn’t even support local economy. Just wasting time and money for people who can’t keep their home organized enough to effectively work from.
It’s the kind of short sighted strategy you always see from upper level corporate execs. They make impulse decisions on limited data and justify it with predictions based on old data.
You know, the only kind of data it’s possible for them to have at the time of their decision because they refuse to pay for external analysis or external data when they can use their own people and records!
So some jackass sets up a slicer on an excel file assigning an arbitrary value to the asset based on headcount capacity and woudknt you know it? The numbers go down when there are less people there.
Well that answers everything you need to know. Keep people in office, property retains value. Simple stuff really but they will say in their speeches and presentations that they have gone over the numbers and this is the way to go.
Never having considered that they could leverage the square footage in other equitable ways than they already do because, well, that data simply wasn’t available.
And it’s all bs anyways because real estate value is speculative and determined by the buyer. So when larger business embrace the hybrid or work from home model they give themselves a market advantage and can purchase or lease smaller office space at lower costs than they would have previously so really the only way this grift works is if all they big players keep overpaying for property.
Sooner or later it gets solved by the market whether that want it to be or not. The genie of work from home is already out of the bottle it’s just a bunch of “boomer” businesses death gripping and smoking copium as much as they can until they are forced to adapt
So why not hang out with them outside of the workplace?