Are most jobs lonely?

See this thread

Life's what you make it

[quote]I'm early 40s and every single job I've had in my life has been lonely/boring. I've never bonded with anybody, even with co-workers in my own age group when I was younger.

I’m afraid that seems like a you problem, OP.

oh no, u dont trust coworkers hon, they out 2 get u if they r friendly

go 2 a gay friendly church & make friends there

What's wrong with going solo? 🤷‍♂️

I’m struggling with the opposite problem. I’m a middle school teacher but also an introvert. Lately the CONSTANT interaction with kids, coworkers, etc. has left me desperate for some time alone.

I like some of my coworkers but some of them suck and don’t pull their weight. I think quarantine ruined me in a way because I could use less human interaction.

My advice to you is to find a coworker that you think you’d get along with and ask them casually to eat lunch with you one day. Most people are dying for a chance to talk about themselves.

Yes, most jobs are lonely. There's a surfeit of interaction (see R6) but none of it is meaningful.

We weren't built to spend all day with people who really don't care about us, while neglecting family and friends.

I always used to say you're either worked to death or bored to death.

Me, I prefer the latter.

My job is mostly remote. I have developed a crush for my boss. I can't help it. The woman is sexy (I am a lesbian).

OP sounds like an autistic Gen Zer. AKA a total fucking loser with zero social skills.

Well more draining than lonely. Though I will say that most work friendships tend to dissolve quickly once you leave the place of work. Shows like the office push the myth that these people will eventually be your besties if you stay long enough. Audiences eat it up because they don't want to believe all of those years will be wasted around people they have no lasting connection to.

[quote] OP sounds like an autistic Gen Zer.

From the OP:

[quote] I'm early 40s.

r10 is obviously an illiterate retard with a one-track retarded mind.

An autistic millennial, then.

In this context, "millennial" will refer to anyone I disagree with who's under 100 years old.

I’ve had lonely moments working but at the same time, it wasn’t routine. There was one day I was all by myself at work on my birthday with no one to talk to and it was an awful horrible experience.

R12 Your feelings are easily hurt - how odd

I met my best friend through work, but we didn't become really close until we had both left the place.

Work is lonely, but you're still more likely to make friends there than during most other adult activities.

Is it possible for a boss to actually care about an employee? Or is it always strictly business?

OP, I think it depends on the field a person works in. I've always worked in a creative field, I work in fashion and music advertising, I also did store display many years ago.

I've always had a blast with most of my co-workers, I've remained close friends with three former co-workers, we still stay in touch after many years and get together during the year. It's difficult for one of my friends, as they left our state, but they come in around the Holidays and we all get together for dinner and try to get to the MET museum and MOMA

In any field, there will always be the shit stirrers in a department, it's usually sour people with no drive and little talent, they're basically jealous of the others who have more talent, charisma and better personalities.

Wasn't there some test people were able to take which led them to the type of job suited to their personality?

When I was younger and worked retail, I became friends with several co-workers and found two of my future partners while working.

I stayed friends with one of the people I met back in the 90's and we hang out all the time. At my current job, it was really hard at first as I've noticed younger people don't know how to make conversation anymore. I lucked out and became friends with one woman who is about 20 years younger than me and we get along great. But most of the people you meet at work, even if you think they are going to be lifelong friends, they likely are not. I anticipate that the younger woman will likely fade away if I leave the job. She's married with kids and I'm old. I've "friended" some of my ex co-workers on facebook but that's about the extent of our "friendship" now.

"Is it possible for a boss to actually care about an employee? Or is it always strictly business?"

I suppose it's possible, but bosses are just slave owners who want to keep you under the illusion that you're not just giving up your time and body to make him richer.

We work at a nonprofit, though, R20.

Back in the days when I used to wait tables and bartend I met some really cool & interesting coworkers. I became friends with a lot of them and we would go drinking after work often. I’m still friends with a few of them today. I really think it depends what field you’re in. Also, if you work with people who are married with children they tend to not make friends at work.

I work in an office with married-with-children types and there is no socializing after work. Ergo, no outside of work friendships.

I don't tend to offer much of myself as I'm a stoner and have a pathetic life and I don't want to broadcast those facts. It takes drinking outside of work to get past these social barriers.

R12 is too fucking retarded to stand on her own two retarded feet.

I had one supervisor who became an actual friend. When I started working at that job, my mom was dying of cancer. That supervisor had lost her mom when she (my supervisor) was maybe 16, so she was really understanding. Anyway, we stayed in touch after I left that job. She's retired now and we've lost touch, but we had been friends for a while.

R23, you sound like me. I work in a customer facing job and am in an office with five coworkers. I come home every night exhausted, get high, watch tv, go on DL, zone out. Repeat. My actual position isolates me from my coworkers; while most of them are in the office working, I am an oncall tech person for a university, and am always our in ther campus buildings, trying to fix things for professors, students, employees at the cash register in the middle of the student union, surrounded by hundreds of people trying to get food. But none of them know me. I'm there fixing a problem, then I'm on to the next problem. My coworkers are close, because they're around each other all day.

It depends on the job for starters. Working in a lot of creative offices over time like Architecture and digital studios, it was a lot easier to talk to people and make friends. Artists are more open to change and oddities of individuals and don't automatically put up a wall. Also a lot less Mommy Frau types in that environment. Even the woman who did have kids were more on the cool alternative side of things. While most friendships would fade quickly after leaving, I could almost bank on one good friend out of each job that lasted long term. That's out of an office of 30 to 100 people.

In other jobs like teaching, we were not allowed to socialize with the students outside the classroom even though all the students were adults in college level courses. We were supposed to socialize with other instructors but in that setup, you were lucky if you got to talk to anyone during a 30 minute break in the teachers lounge. After 3 long years of doing that, didn't make a single friend. Probably the loneliest job I ever had.

Fetterman wins!

Wrong thread R28.

I've found it varies wildly from job to job. In my last role I was part of a really close team. We all got on well and it was a pleasure to go to work. Lots of lunchtime and walking friends. Plenty of jokes. When that job ended I found myself in the role I am now. Almost no friends. Polite hellos only. Looked on as the older, irrelevant guy. Always at the empty, unpopular end of the table at team lunches.

Sometimes it's just chemistry and if it isn't there then it isn't there.

There's a big difference between comradery and friendship. A lot of people assume they are the same in a work environment but in actuality they are very different things. In a good working environment, you feel like part of a team, you share ideas with each other, respect each other, you might go out to lunch together, bitch about the boss or office politics to each other, share personal things about your life with each other etc. This is not friendship. It's comradery.

Thats where people get depressed sometimes thinking their friends were not real, or just using them. I learned over the years to realize that's usually not the case. It's basic human nature to want to get along with other people. Especially if you have some common goal like working as a team or in the same company. I take it for what it is. It's not disingenuous, I think of it as more situational friendships. It's real at the time, and there may be true giving or caring but at the end of the day, once the situation changes, the common goal no longer links each other.

Real friendships can grow out of that but I would never assume just because the office threw me a birthday party that any of those people are actually my true friends.

My co workers are afraid of me. I’m a bitch. They know I have HR on speed dial and am friends with Jovey. They do not cross me in fact 2 are running scared due to HR investigations I initiated.

R31, you sound miserable and are over-analyzing the work environment.

Once again, it depends on what people do for a living. If you are cop or a detective, watch your back, there are a lot of dirty cops and detectives around. I worked with a woman whose narc detective husband was extremely corrupt, he even got addicted to the drugs he recovered from the dealers. The husband was also selling stolen high end items, the woman was always coming to work with extremely expensive handbags. Their situation was like a storyline from a cop series. My work colleague, no, we were not friends, eventually divorced that creep and is remarried to an art director. We remained cordial and send each other Christmas cars, but I cannot say we socialized outside of work. Once a month she'd sometimes joined me and my actual work friends when we'd go out to dinner.

Why assume people who work together cannot become long lasting friends, are assume they are backstabbing individuals or out for your job. It's not always a situational friendship. Even within a department, not everyone can do another person's job, most times there isn't any backstabbing or vying for your job involved.

So, where would you suggest people meet others to form friendships? Most people do create friendships through school and work. Where do we spend the most time?

My niece's closest friends are mostly her former college friends, they're all still in touch, in fact, two of them are her current roommates. All these people work in creative fields, my niece is always getting freelance gigs via these friends who work in various areas of fashion, music and in show business.

I was a high school teacher in a tough urban school. It was a stressful job. All the young single teachers used to socialize together and even vacation together. I’m still friends with some of them 30 years later. I’m not sure boring office jobs bond people as much. Or maybe young people today are more introverted.

I had a lot of fun...and met a lot of hot men...while working at Falcon Crest winery. 🍇🍷🥵

Yep, my job is lonely for sure. In the olden days, most meetings were in person but now everything is email and Skype messages. When I go on vacation, I don’t even bother to change my voicemail out of office ‘cause no one ever calls my work number.

The kind of interaction you get at a job doesn’t solve the problem of loneliness. I don’t think in-person meetings are gonna help, R36.

R33 you sound like you Better Call Saul.

[quote]So, where would you suggest people meet others to form friendships? Most people do create friendships through school and work

I never said that, I said you just cant assume that everyone who is friendly with you at work is actually a friend. In fact I said you CAN have friends who grow out of that. I also said nothing about backstabbing. I said it's NOT disingenuous when people are friendly, it's human nature to want to be friendly. You have poor comprehension skills.

I find work friends from my twenties have stayed with me. This from later years, not so much.

R37 It’s the human interaction in the form of pre and post meeting chat that makes the job less lonely for some people.

I admire people who can put together these after-work hangouts. It's a special skill that come from the role they play in a social group. They are natural leaders.

Yeah, they can be. At the end of my working career I felt like Peter from the movie "Office Space". I was like " Damn its Good to be a Gangsta" on the day I quit my job. Work just sucks.

I've always been friendly with (most) of the people I work with and like them in their own ways, some very much, but in 40 years of work I have had only two or three colleagues whose friendship has lasted any length of time, i.e.: change of jobs or geography.

And that's fine. And comes as no surprise. I'm friendly at work, but don't cultivate a lot of outside contact. The annual Xmas party, a colleague who designed his new house and has a party, maybe an afterwork outing for a lecture ir an exhibition; it's not an impenetrable rule of division of professional/personal spheres (and I don't mind sharing things about my personal life.) There's nothing secretive.

I just prefer not to be in the loop for every afterwork happy hour, every "team-building" experience, everyone's birthday party, wedding. I've had colleagues meet at my house and then we proceed to some common interest event, but that's an odd thing; my house was never a hangout for colleagues, no casual stopping by, no impromptu dinners shared.

Through professional organizations, however,I have made more friends, and lasting friends, but that's a situation that bypasses the workplace itself. Those relationships are easier and longer lasting be sure they require some effort beyond chatter in the office coffee room.

For me it's just easier to figure out everyone's quirks and style and get along with them at work. Some I like, some I don't. Some I'm frank with, others I'm careful and correct but always pleasant. It's not a lesson learned from being burned, it's just that I always assumed the workplace was its own special neat with its own rules. That varies somewhat depending on profession or occupation or even work climate, but the majority of colleagues I genuinely liked and respected tended to act much as I did and didn't cultivate a lot of casual afterwork socializing.