Quote:
Originally Posted by loochy
This is so true. Companies, especially large ones, try to gaslight you into believing that you are a part of a family and that your coworkers depend on you. They try to manipulate you into becoming attached to the job and the people you interact with instead of treating it what it actually is: an exchange of your time and effort for money. Your real family is at home. Now I'm not saying that people should be miserable asses at work, but see it for what it is, and don't forget that you'll be forgotten and replaced in weeks, if not days.
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This is exactly what happened to me.
I got hooked in, line and sinker. Young guy working at a large “hip” company surrounded by other young people in the same boat as me. Tons of extracurricular activities and events you actually wanted to go to. It didn’t take long for me to see my coworkers as my real life best friends. Especially since we would do happy hours and hang out on weekends outside of work.
The work was mindless and boring, but the company did a masterful job of making a day of work feel like going to hang out with your friends so you didn’t care how tedious and dull it would’ve been otherwise.
When everything collapsed on me, it was a cruel lesson that if you meet someone through work, as long as you still work with them they are a coworker first and a friend second.
I made the mistake of forgetting the coworker part and entrusting these people like they were lifelong friends. God it still hurts. I absolutely did not handle some things well but to get stabbed in the back by people that told you that you could trust them is just hard.
Brutal life lesson for a stupid naive young man.
It also plunged me into a deep depression that I’m still crawling out of. Plus I neglected my real friends far too often for these phonies because I thought they represented what I wanted my life to be.
Ugh.