Not here to make friends
What happens when setting work boundaries turns into shutting our colleagues out?
In the spring of 2006, I started working at an advertising agency. It seemed fancy at the time: nice offices, luxury cars in the parking lot, lots of women in heels buzzing around. My job certainly didn’t pay enough for one of those BMWs, but I did get business cards and dental insurance. I was 22 and had just moved to Arizona with no money and even fewer connections. I felt lucky to be there.
The work wasn’t glamorous. As a junior copywriter, I spent half my time proofreading others’ work, and the other half trying to drum up creative ways to write about 4,000-square-foot McMansions in planned communities on the fringes of the Phoenix suburbs.
Three months in, I had run out of ways to talk about open floor plans and stainless steel appliances. I’d also noticed a few things — like how one senior writer’s copy was always littered with creepy innuendo. Or how the agency owner would scream at junior account staff whenever a client was upset. Or the fact that we had to be there at 8:30am, no matter how late we’d worked on a pitch the night before.
Then Andrea showed up. Like me, she had just moved to Phoenix with her partner. Unlike me, she’d spent years working at large agencies in Chicago. She took one look around and realized the place was a mess.
Within weeks, I started spending half my days working from her office. We’d bounce ideas off each other and give critiques. We’d get burritos and crack jokes about the creepy guy. She made my work better, and she taught me a lot.
For one, she taught me that I wasn’t lucky to be there. I was actually underpaid and underleveled. I quit that job after 10 months.
But Andrea? She just visited last month. We texted last week. She’s one of the first people I’d call in a crisis. I wouldn’t trade that friendship for anything.
In August, Gallup released a report based on surveys from 15,000 U.S. adults claiming that not only has having a “best friend” at work long been correlated with higher levels of workplace satisfaction, but that this difference has become even more pronounced since the start of the pandemic:
In 2019, 33% of employees who had a work BFF were satisfied, while 23% of those without a work BFF were. That gap widened in 2022 to 32% and 15%, respectively.
Meanwhile, back in March, Capterra released the results of a very different study. They asked 1,000 U.S. employees to rank the relative importance of 14 job satisfaction factors (such as “job security” and “compensation”). Researchers then looked at which factors were most frequently listed within respondents’ top three. What they found was that “relationships with coworkers” was the least important of all 14 factors they tested — less important than recognition, learning opportunities, or relationships with managers. Just 11% of respondents listed it in their top three.
In that study, just over half of remote respondents also said that having friends or other social relationships at work was either minimally or not at all important to them. “Friends at work? Today’s employees aren’t interested,” the study concluded.
So one study tells us that people don’t care about work relationships anymore, and another tells us that people with work friends are happier than those without them. Huh.
This juxtaposition got me thinking: Are we trying to convince ourselves that work relationships don’t matter to us — and ending up more isolated and miserable as a result?
The more articles about work friendships I read, and the more talk with my clients and network about their experiences, the more I believe the answer is yes.
Five years ago, Dr. Marisa G. Franco started her first job at a university. As the only Black assistant professor on faculty, she decided that befriending her colleagues was too risky. “I felt the weight of being very different, and worried the more I exposed myself to them, the more I might experience racism and microaggressions,” she told the New York Times.
But that self-protection ended up coming at a steep cost:
One afternoon, she decided to measure herself on the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, which gauges feelings of isolation. She realized that although she had colleagues all around her, she felt very much alone, because they knew nothing about her beyond her work.
So when Dr. Franco got a new job in 2019, she took a different approach: she started telling her colleagues more about herself — everything from her summer vacation plans to her experience being mistaken for a different Black person at work. It changed her life so much she’s now publishing a book on platonic friendship.
Dr. Franco was certainly right about one thing at that first university job: opening up to colleagues carries risk. People could treat you differently, they could gossip, they could betray you. Management could use your connection to your colleagues as a means of manipulation — making it seem like you’re letting your friends down if you set boundaries.
That’s the thing about vulnerability: it’s risky, by definition. But what we don’t talk about often enough is the other side of the equation.
Hardening yourself — walling yourself off from some of the people you interact with most often — carries risk, too.
For Dr. Franco, that risk was profound loneliness — something researchers were already deeply concerned about before the pandemic, and are now seeing as a crisis of its own.
In my coaching work with people in tech and design, I hear about this kind of loneliness all the time — particularly from people who changed jobs during the pandemic, or whose teams had high turnover. And it’s not just me: UX designer-turned-connection coach
spent this spring talking with designers about their experiences with connection and disconnection, and she found that time and again, loneliness was a major issue. Making matters worse, she wrote, “design culture has an addiction to perfectionism,” so people don’t talk about what’s wrong. In this environment, “lonely designers can falsely believe that they’re the only ones who are having a hard time.”“But I’m not lonely,” you might protest. “I just keep my social life outside work!” That’s great, and I do think trying to get all of your social needs met at work is a recipe for problematic power dynamics and eroded boundaries. By all means, center your social life elsewhere.
But friendship at work isn’t just about happy hours and “forced fun.” It’s about feeling seen and understood. It’s about feeling like people are in your corner when things get hard.
It’s about knowing that even on your worst day at work, you’re not alone.
That kind of connection only comes when you lower your guard, though — when you take yourself off defense, and find ways to be yourself with the people you work with.
In March of this year, I asked people in tech and design how their relationship to work had changed over the course of the pandemic. More than 200 people responded, and over and over — across job functions, age ranges, locations — I heard the same themes:
“I’ve become more against the idea of ‘career’ and work as a required main ‘identity.’”
“I’m way more transactional now. Labor in, money out.”
“Work is a paycheck that funds my life and hobbies. I owe it 40 hours a week and nothing more.”
“I’m not committing nights and weekends for capitalism.”
I cheered when I read these responses. It felt like a reckoning — a rejection of “lean in” and “rise and grind,” and a reclamation of humanity over hustle.
But I’m also worried at the level of cynicism and despair I see in people right now.
I’m afraid we’re not just distancing ourselves from corporate bullshit, but actually isolating ourselves from the very things we need to make it out of this moment: Community. Connection. Care.
As Yvonne Lam put it recently:
I wonder whether we’ve been enmeshed with work for so long that we don’t know what a healthy boundary could look like, so we’re picking estrangement because it looks like a clear choice.
If you’re not familiar with the term, enmeshment is a psychological concept usually used to describe family systems where boundaries between people are unclear or nonexistent — such as a parent who is so involved in their child’s life, the child struggles to form an independent identity, or is even punished for doing so. Applied to work, enmeshment might mean adopting a company’s goals as your own, prioritizing work above all else, and identifying so strongly with your career that you’re not even sure who you are without it.
In other words, it’s what a lot of professional work culture touted as totally normal before the pandemic.
But while ping-ponging from “work is everything” to “work is nothing” might feel like the solution, it’s not a treatment for burnout. In fact, it might make things worse.
In times when our intrinsic motivation is low — that is, when our work doesn’t feel personally meaningful — it’s actually our work relationships that can save us from burnout. In one study from 2010, which tracked several hundred university employees over a two-year period, researchers found that “for employees who do not experience pleasure or do not find personal meaning in their work, high-quality relationships with coworkers may help them cope with their work experiences and reduce the likelihood of burnout.” They also found that the converse is true: “poor interpersonal relationships with coworkers can make people more vulnerable to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization over time, as well as to depletion of feelings of personal accomplishment.”
Depersonalization. It’s a core facet of burnout, and one I wish we talked about more often. Because depersonalization isn’t just about our own feelings. It’s “the development of dehumanized and cynical attitudes” toward the people around us.
That’s what I’m worried is happening right now — that through the cloud of burnout, too many people are seeing their colleagues less like fellow humans, and more like time-wasting barriers standing between them and their “real lives.”
That’s not setting boundaries. That’s just being a jerk.
Andrea’s not the only lifelong friend I met at work. I met Christine at another agency in 2010. I’ll be at her wedding in October. I met Amanda in 2005 during a brief stint at a for-profit university. We talked last week. I met Katie during training for a call center job in 2003. I saw her when I visited my hometown last month.
I’ve also lost work friends. Some faded out once we stopped working together. A couple fell apart when one or both of us didn’t react to work stress well. I’d love to go back in time and handle those situations differently — set stronger boundaries, communicate my needs more effectively, be a better listener.
But I don’t regret any of those relationships, not even the failed ones. They made me who I am.
I definitely talked about work with all of these friends — sometimes too much, if I’m being honest. But we didn’t just bond over toxic bosses or rude customers. We bonded over live music, home cooking, progressive politics. We bonded through sharing our heartbreaks, our family dramas, our life changes.
We bonded because we took the risk of opening up to one another, and found we had a lot more in common than our job titles.
That’s a risk I’ll keep taking.
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