“Coworkers are not your friends.
They will snitch on you.
Do your job, get your check, go home.”
We’ve all heard this advice. It goes viral on twitter every other week. Black people say it and hear it especially, and rightfully so! “Professional” spaces open us up to and encourage so many microaggressions and harm. Why would you want to be friends with the people who do that to you?
This advice made sense to me for a long time. But now, nearly a year into a pandemic that is making all of us finally wake up to the necessity of community and deep relationships, and at a time where the average 20 something is more likely to critique capitalism than to praise it, this advice falls flat for me. I think we should be friends with our coworkers.
The expectations of the average working person (and I mean ‘people who need to work to live’) is ludicrous. At least 40 hours a week, although many of us work more. Our entire lives are often consumed by our jobs. We are encouraged to structure our entire lives around our future dream careers. And then we get there and we’re there all week and we think about it all the time and sometimes we’re working on the weekends too. It is so much of our lives.
I don’t want to compartmentalize! I don’t want to “turn off” who I am 40 hours a week. I don’t want to just focus on “the grind” when I’m at work. I want to be a full human being in my office and a full human being at home. At work, I need deep connections with the people around me. I need to be able to vent and I need to be able to experience joy alongside someone. I’m not willing to give that up 40 hours a week.
In the time of the pandemic, this is even more necessary. I’m working from home. Besides my roommate and boyfriend, my coworkers are the people I "see" every day. If some of them weren’t my friends, I wouldn’t be able to talk to them about how difficult everything is right now. How hard it is to care about work when tens of thousands of people are dying from something they didn’t have to die from. How much I miss being around loved ones. How everything absolutely sucks and how none of us are talking about it enough. Yes, you and your “real” friends can (and should!) do a Zoom too, but we already know how hard it is to stay connected to everyone right now. Being able to find friendship with the people I am actually meeting with everyday is not only necessary, but it’s convenient.
Okay, maybe you’re still not convinced. “Taylor, I have enough people in my life!” you say. “Taylor, I don’t care about none of that shit!” “Taylor, you’re a sap and not everyone needs connection in the same way you do!”
Sure. Here’s my other argument: by refusing to be friends with your coworkers, you’re letting your bosses win.
Sometimes I look at these viral tweets telling us not to befriend our coworkers and I wonder if it is secretly the Jeff Bezos-s of the world paying people to tweet them. Coworkers who don’t feel comfortable with each other won’t take breaks to chat. Coworkers who don’t feel comfortable with each other won’t share their salaries. Coworkers who don’t feel comfortable with each other won’t talk about problematic working conditions. Coworkers who don’t feel comfortable with each other won’t have the chance to realize they are being exploited.
If all you do is do your job, get your check, and go home, if you never talk to your coworkers about anything other than the literal task at hand, you’re not going to struggle together. You’re not going to advocate for better working conditions together.
If we refuse to be friends with our coworkers, then how are we going to unionize?
Of course everything said here has its caveats, a bunch of gotchas, a million aht aht aht!-s. But, if we want to build community and struggle with each other and subsequently change the world together, that starts right where we are. And for a lot of us, most of the time, we’re at work. Those are people we have the potential to change the world with.
So, if you ask me? Be friends with your coworkers. You never know where it’s gonna lead.
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