I spent a very significant amount of my waking time working. This is one of the best opportunities to make friends, and IMHO it's also nicer to work with friends than with non-friends.
Most of the friends I made as an adult came from a work related setting.
Yep, my first thought was also to define friend. As the joke goes, friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies. Few people in a lifetime will be real friends, and it doesn't matter how you end up meeting them.
When you inject friendship in a work relationship, you are also injecting mechanics that are not work-related and can ultimately lead to problems in the work setting.
You can be pleasant around co-workers but being all out friends is dangerous.
fully agree with this. Plus, if you're worried about "promotion competitiveness" souring friendships with people in your team, you can always make friends with people in other departments and meet them during lunch. This doesnt have to be a hard binary rule
You don't build real friendships at work, yes. But you can definitely meet people at work that you end up building a real friendship with outside of work.
Weird, I haven't worked there in 5 years and still get together with different folks once every few months to once a week. Great way to find a new job too!
One should not forget that most psychologists and psychiatrists are borderline nut jobs. OK that's just personal experience, but ask anyone who knows these people... crazy drama follows them everywhere. Just sayin'.
Millions of incels agree, but Nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say. Obviously, the article is absurdly reductionist and lacking in nuance.
At the end of life, what's more important: friendships regardless of source or putting up walls and boundaries to avoid all possible sources of joy and sorrow? Sounds like the coward's way out if you ask me.
What a sad way to live. The majority of my close friendships revolve around working on or toward things together. It gives a rich context and purpose to them.
This is a US culture thing, and Americans tend to disagree a lot with this (because nobody is aware of their own culture, it's just "how things are"), but US culture really puts work very high in the list of life priorities.
It's the Protestant work ethic, and I see so many people being oppressed by it without even realizing it. Everyone must be as productive as possible at all times, and they must do great at work, and they must sleep under their desks, and if they aren't a good worker they are nothing.
I much prefer to work four days a week, six hours a day, and enjoy my modest life with my friends and family.
Ignoring an environment where you spend a big chunk of you life for things like friends and relationships sounds like a bad idea. Saying that this automatically leads to drama at work is questionable. We have a huge decline in friendships.
Also, you don't know if somebody is a good friend beforehand. You mostly find out if shit hits the fan. The same also applies to family members. Plus, people change. Sometimes good friends stop being good friends and normal friends stand up for you unexpectedly.
Maybe a better advice would be to manage you expectations. Don't expect others to stand up and risk something for you unless they explicitly said they would.
I think it's a bit unethical to post narrow opinion pieces on 'psychologytoday' while masquerading as fact (strong words, but I would simply be happy with them posting 'opinion piece' at the top)
I disagree with the article, or at least think it is blinkered.
Some of my best friends were made through work.
Drama has nothing to do with workplace friends, for some of us.
I consider the article to be potentially damaging.
I would call this article to be an artefact from the before-times mindset, but I do understand that I am not in the same position as a lot of FTEs.
Down the line, I believe it is important to be sociable and a “nice guy” at work, but I also believe that making friends in the workplace is very dangerous.
It’s a work place, you never know what can happen, you could get fired, or hesitate to jump on a good opportunity outside of the company because you are emotionally attached to “friends”.
Many people will say that they made friends are work.
However, the workplace is a competitive environment and those "friendships" get a reality check when it's time to chase that promotion/raise/new position or when things go South.
I'm friendly with people at work but I tend to keep boundaries on what I share. I wouldn't, for instance, discuss a romantic problem with them but I would tell them what I did for fun over the weekend. When I was younger I was more open with friends at work about all sorts of things but it came back to bite me in the ass. People at work like to gossip about everything and everyone so I avoid telling people anything I wouldn't want to be public knowledge.
Semi-agree - though with caveats. Some of my closest friends I’ve made through work but also having a larger attachment to the people at a company I’ve worked at makes it easier to justify staying in a bad position or being honest about the place being bad.
I worked at Lyft for a while and hesitated saying anything bad about it because I had lots of good friends who still worked there. I also stayed much longer than made sense and prioritized projects over my health cause of a sense of “if I let this slip everyone else will get punished”. Ultimately this was not true - the friends would have wanted me to make the best call for myself. But I can vouch, atleast personally, being nice and liked at work but avoiding making close friends on the immediate team I work on has been better all around.
Terrible advice. You spend a very large portion of your life at work. Making friends that you can blow off steam and share memories with and building a network can be done simultaneously.
I'm in my 60's. My observation is people that pick up friends at work during their career always have a job, get recruited for jobs, they survive layoffs more often. And deal with stress at work better when things get shitty. So it's a positive thing for your career and mental health.
Management thinks employees having work friends is a bad thing. Cause it reduces the power they have over employees.
All of my long-lasting adult friends came outside of work. I always make friends at work, but when one of us switches jobs, we usually lose contact and don't really talk anymore.
This article seems premised on the idea that if you aren't prepared to share all the intimate details of you life and dreams with someone then they aren't your friend. In my view this is a false premise which then leads them to some poor conclusions. There are certainly tensions between friendship and organisational structure but somehow I have made some great friends at work and I think you can too.
Yes, please: let's keep pushing this narrative that we are supposed to all be lonely, isolated, selfish, individual people. Building friendships and relationships is bad for us, don't you know.
Sigh.
Utter tripe. Good Lord, the West is really psyching itself out on these topics at a time of record-low birthrates and societal decay. No, Psychology Today: we need to be making more friends everywhere we can, even at work.
My father is now retired and still meets regularly with his former colleagues from various employers.
I've known some of them since I was little and practically grew up with a few of their children. I am still in close contact with some of them and they are definitely my childhood friends.
But are his former coworkers his friends? I don't know, but I know that I want the same for me and my kids.
In my eyes, making friends is a good way to help improve job security.
If I were to lose my job, I have friends across a number of companies who I could ask for a leg in. Frankly I think that’s the best way to make lateral movement in general, you can get an honest (somewhat) unbiased feel for a job without having to work there first.
Reaction after skimming article: Somebody who has that simplistic a worldview - either about the huge range of human relationships which are referred to by "friend", or about the nature of workplaces and coworkers - needs to have a long talk with a grown-up.
When this guy says don't get caught up in the drama trying to create a favorable narrative, he probably means something more like, create a favorable narrative with more influential people at the company, not with people you like hanging out with.
I think a reasonable point is being made in the article, but it’s pretty clumsy. Work relationships are not like your school drinking buddies. They come with more expectations, boundaries, and can be more complexly transactional. No reason to avoid them though, and you would really be hurting your career.
Article title should probably be, “Remember the difference between your professional friends and your personal friends.” Most people learn that one in a few months of working.
One of my very very best friends was my coworker. We went to Devops Days Berlin together which was a dream come true for two house music fans from Toronto. We went to Berghain! We’ve been hanging out for about a decade. He dropped everything with his wife and kid to bring me supplies when the building I lived in got a worst-case infestation of bedbugs during the pandemic. He always invites me to his DJ shows and we message almost every day.
I spent a very significant amount of my waking time working. This is one of the best opportunities to make friends, and IMHO it's also nicer to work with friends than with non-friends.
Most of the friends I made as an adult came from a work related setting.