[JohnFen]

If it's voluntary then there is no problem.

"Voluntary" means that there will be no adverse effect on your employment if you decline to participate. Your characterization of the activity strongly implies that not participating will come with consequences to your job.

[Brusco_RF]

The opposite. Participating benefits your career.

Curious what you think about this: Say there's no company sponsorship or involvement. You get invited to happy hour or a round of golf with the higher-ups completely on your own dime. Its obviously beneficial to pal around with your superiors. Is that a problem?

[ath3nd]

> Participating benefits your career.

That means NOT participating hurts your career, or at least doesn't further it, which is the same thing. Career outlook should be dependent only on your performance at work, and requiring to do extra unpaid stuff after work is simply a form of silent exploitation, favoring young people (mostly men, as women getting wasted with their superiors might be considered unprofessional) with no dependents (e.g children).

Push that to the extreme, and you have an extremely bro-hierarchical culture like Japan, where guys are expected to spend their (unpaid) time with their superiors at karaoke bars at late parts of the night, while not doing so puts their career prospects at risk.

All kinds of these silent expectations (but not demands) achieve is form a power imbalance where the ones not wanting to participate (in senseless drinking, or idiotic child games of team building) are pushed to the fringe and not considered "team players". This, naturally, creates a culture of fear that you might miss some of those unspoken rules of the workplace, and also a form of competition of who will simp more to their boss by letting them win at laser tag. Grown up people have families to be with, old parents to take care of, hobbies to do, errands to run, so in a culture of drinking/hanging out after office hours, they often have to choose between possible career prospects or family, and that's always a hard choice.