Work is a fake environment where your communication is policed and you need to read books about how to effectively communicate to influence people do the things you want. Normals socialization isn't like that.
When I worked in an office, there was no policing of communication or reading books on effective communication to influence people (??) – people were just normal ass people.
Well, I think there’s some difference between talking to a colleague and taking to your manager (or to your manager’s manager). One cannot talk shit in front of the latter (e.g., “this company sucks”) without fear of being laid off.
To be honest, this kinda just sounds like normal social etiquette. Not discussing politics or personal topics is more like a "don't do this with anyone unless they're your close friends or family", right? And I've talked about my coworkers' health with them plenty over the years, but you don't generally dig into it with your coworkers or with non-coworkers unless they volunteer it, because there's a decent chance their health issue is some kind of weird goop on their balls or post-butthole drip that they're embarrassed about. It's not really particular to the office work environment.
You never had a list of banned words at work? You missed the whole master/main thing? Words prefixed with black/white weren't given alternatives?
I had a manager once go thorough one of my slack conversations and go line by line with how I could rephrase things with softer corporate jargon.
There's books on leadership, books like crucial conversations, books on managing up. The industry is obsessed with staff engineers now and there's on that and the differentiator in that role is getting people to do things.
If you really don't deal with that, let me know where I can send a resume I'd love to work with normal people.
where i am from, such policing is illegal. germany has a different approach to freedom of speech. no institution is allowed to even monitor, let alone censor private conversations (that includes overhearing something). private conversations at work are private and legally protected. the only time when a company can interfere is if the manner of communication (not the content) is disruptive. and getting fired for being disruptive in most cases leads to a lawsuit from the employee against the company, and so courts will decide if there actually was a disruption, and if it was bad enough to warrant dismissal.