Friends are people I like, share hobbies and interests with and want to have around me in my life. I picked my friends myself and I’m proud and happy with them.
Coworkers are people I’m stuck in a room with 40 hours a week. Of course you should be polite and friendly, because you’re stuck with them. They got foisted on me and dealing with is part of why I get paid.
There’s a huge difference between “not a living hell” and “sharing my private life and feelings”. If everyone is professional and polite, that’s great, but I dislike quite a lot of the people I work with and wouldn’t spend 10 minutes with them if I didn’t get paid for it.
If you dislike so many people you work with and feel like you are “stuck in a room” at you job, why don’t you get a different job, where you like your coworkers and enjoy what you do?
I enjoy the work I do. I’m self employed and I got to hire all my coworkers myself. But "this person should be my close personal friend"is a very poor criterium for hiring someone.
Maybe I could have phrased it better. Most people at work I have a perfectly fine professional relationship with, but I wouldn’t be friends with them. It’s like neighbors, it’s good to be nice with them, but in the Grand scheme of things, we’re only spending time together because of physical proximity.
Maybe I have really high standards for friends, but if I didn’t work with these people, we wouldn’t find eachother remotely friend-material, so why does working together change that?
Friends are people I like, share hobbies and interests with and want to have around me in my life. I picked my friends myself and I’m proud and happy with them.
Coworkers are people I’m stuck in a room with 40 hours a week. Of course you should be polite and friendly, because you’re stuck with them. They got foisted on me and dealing with is part of why I get paid.
There’s a huge difference between “not a living hell” and “sharing my private life and feelings”. If everyone is professional and polite, that’s great, but I dislike quite a lot of the people I work with and wouldn’t spend 10 minutes with them if I didn’t get paid for it.
If you dislike so many people you work with and feel like you are “stuck in a room” at you job, why don’t you get a different job, where you like your coworkers and enjoy what you do?
I enjoy the work I do. I’m self employed and I got to hire all my coworkers myself. But "this person should be my close personal friend"is a very poor criterium for hiring someone.
Maybe I could have phrased it better. Most people at work I have a perfectly fine professional relationship with, but I wouldn’t be friends with them. It’s like neighbors, it’s good to be nice with them, but in the Grand scheme of things, we’re only spending time together because of physical proximity.
Maybe I have really high standards for friends, but if I didn’t work with these people, we wouldn’t find eachother remotely friend-material, so why does working together change that?