[aljgz]

This is a recipe for a sad life. It's avoiding friendship for the fear of betrayal. You get a lot of benefits by being good friends with colleagues. There are, however important things to be aware of:

1- "Though shall not" limit their social life to their colleagues (or any single group that can disappear with a divorce, change of jobs, or hobby, maybe because of an incident).

2- "Though shall not" blindly help people with the hope of being helped in return. Help with generosity, but know the limits: don't sacrifice yourself, and certainly, don't count on people returning the favor as your main plan. It's incredible how much happier we can be just by helping people, if we fire and forget, rather than cling onto.

3- Do not define yourself with your job, your success in there, or with your colleagues' approvals. This is extremely hard, yet extremely important. Diversify what defines you. Be able to mentally afford being bad at some of them. Don't let any of them define who you are. This lets you act with true confidence (not insecurity disguised as overconfidence), which is extremely pleasant for yourself and others.

[alentred]

You seem to contradict yourself, or at least actually support the OP's point. If you don't define yourself with your job, but have other self-identities outside, there is nothing sad about having different takes to the amount of personal information shared in various circles.

Extending on that, I do not agree with "do not define yourself with your job". Why not? It's a big, if not biggest, part of almost everyone's life. What's bad is defining yourself with your job ALONE. Psychological safety comes from having multiple self-identities: be an engineer at work, a volunteer on weekends, amateur radio enthusiast on Thursdays nights, or whatever, and don't mix those!

[reactordev]

>”this is a recipe for a sad life”

No, this is a recipe for surviving corporate America. You can have and make friends but be cautious of coworkers that you work directly with. I’ve made friends outside of work. I’ve made friends at work but I do not expect to be friends with everyone I work with.

[wasmitnetzen]

>> a sad life

> corporate America

Sounds like you're saying the same thing.

[red-iron-pine]

"work friends aren't real friends, but they sometimes can be"

[kunley]

Disagree. It's just admitting that the company can and will be cynical when it comes to the conflict of interests between them and the employee.

Making friends at the workplace is fine until there is such conflict, then where will they stand? If they will turn they back on you (and most of them will), then how much is such relation worth in the first place?

[lkjdsklf]

It’s also sacrificing your career.

Professional networks are a massive important part of growing/building a career. This is especially true in an environment where there are mass layoffs constantly.

Building personal and trusting relationships is a huge part of developing that network.

This doesn’t mean you should turn every coworker into your therapist, but the other extreme is also bad for both your career and your person.

[aljgz]

How's that different from friends at your sports club? How does the risk of your workplace friends not taking your side balance against the benefit of the possibility that they will support you?

Should I give up years of joy and sense of community and belonging for the fear that someday my workplace friends will betray me? And then years more of suffering in my next workplace?

A strategy that minimizes risk rarely maximizes reward.

[reactordev]

The tragedy strikes when you associate your workplace with belonging because here, at-will employment means you never truly belong.

[kakacik]

You see things in binary mode, world is anything but that.

If I am not making friends at work, it doesn't simply equate to "sad life". Maybe it would for you, but then you can question why behaving so, work isn't and shouldn't be one's central piece of existence. Maybe you were never fired, or never saw firing for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you work so much its hard to have an actual life outside of work. At the end it doesn't matter, but folks do see things differently to you and its fine.

[ricksunny]

#2 I believe that there is at least one entire culture on the planet that comports itself this way, whose emergent macro outcomes can be debated.

[aljgz]

Interesting... Can you elaborate? I did not get the reference.