In Remembrance

When I was laid off back in early 2019, my emotions ran the gamut from sadness to fear to anger. That isn’t terribly surprising. But one feeling caught me off guard, and it took me a couple weeks of unemployment to name it: loneliness.

It’s not as if I was truly alone; I still had my family, who are awesome, and friends I saw regularly. But so much time is spent with coworkers, time that requires no planning or effort in the way that maintaining other friendships requires, that inevitably colleagues become a significant slice of a person’s social circle, and when that’s suddenly taken away it can be a shock.

While not as acute, there’s a similar feeling when a job is left voluntarily. As soon as word got out about my departure from my previous job, even though I was sticking around for a couple weeks to ease transitions, my interactions with coworkers changed, an unspoken realization that further investment in these relationships had limited value. “Let’s stay in touch” is a common refrain, but to do so takes effort that usually doesn’t get made. No matter how strong the connections may seem (and given the nature of things like mutual goal pursuit and shared trauma, they can feel quite strong), once the bond of shared employment and daily interaction is broken, that’s usually the end of it.

Nevertheless, I truly value the “work friendships” I’ve had during my career, even if they only last for a season. I was enjoying an afternoon coffee a while back reflecting on this topic, and a wave of nostalgia hit me hard enough that I decided to do something about it, sending out a bunch of LinkedIn “hey how’s it going?” notes and planning a happy hour get-together for former employees of the startup I worked at from 2014 to 2019. The latter happened this past week and it was delightful catching up with folks, most of whom I hadn’t seen in years.

Besides the upheaval that comes with job changes (voluntary or otherwise), the nature of work friendships are changing thanks to remote employment. I’m a big fan of ditching the commute and having a flexible schedule, but it does comes at the cost of the communal benefits of an in-person office. For many folks social circles are shrinking (see Bowling Alone for a deep dive on this phenomenon in America); not going to an office isn’t helping.

The above has me thinking about alternatives ways to help people fill this gap, tech people in particular, and tech leaders especially, since their potential for loneliness is compounded by being in positions where they can’t be completely transparent with the majority of their colleagues. More to come on this soon.