I am in a group chat with two coworkers from a job I left five years ago. I don’t remember when or how the group chat started, only that I’d never hung out with these women out of the office, or even much within the office. All three of us worked on different teams, but we bonded on Slack about workplace frustrations and late 2010s memes. That regular chit chat solidified into an unlikely text-based clique.
I quit our company first. The second woman did a while later. The third still works there and keeps us supplied with gossip. In our group chat, we complain about our new jobs and our apartments and politics. We continue to share memes.
When I left that job – the job that had been the center of my life and identity for half of my twenties – I thought I knew which friendships would last beyond my exit. My work husband with whom I wrote headlines every Friday would surely stay in touch! The boss who hired and mentored me would attend my wedding someday, right? The team I worked with late into the night at conferences promised we would get brunch together semi-regularly, at least once a year.
I spent the majority of my time with these brilliant and funny and kind people. I went on business trips with them, shared hotel rooms with them, commiserated with them, cried with them. We attended political rallies together, watched the World Cup in the office theater together, missed connecting flights together. My coworkers felt like family.
This illusion of kin wasn’t an accident. The company actively fostered a “we’re all family here” atmosphere. It hosted expensive annual staff retreats at conference hotels, complete with talent competitions and open bars. Boisterous all-hands meetings had the energy of a variety show interrupted by dry line graphs. This culture attracted a lot of former theater kids and passionate nerds.
That social cohesion mixed with a mission-driven nonprofit party line created a pleasantly cult-like environment. I easily forgot this was a job instead of a calling. As a progressive and naïve twenty-something, I was the perfect mark.
It is good for the bottom line to convince employees that workplaces are communities; it encourages loyalty and late nights spent around the keg in the kitchen, instead of at home with our actual families. But every job is an exchange of labor for compensation, no matter how many bean bag chairs are in the office. The moment you need more from your employer than they get from you, you pose a problem. Your value diminishes. You become expendable, if you weren’t already.
That may sound cynical, even harsh, but it’s worth reiterating. As long as we live in a culture that expects us to passionately love our work, it is vital to remember that work can’t love you back. “A job is an economic contract. It’s an exchange of labor for money,” Simone Stolzoff wrote in The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work. “The more clear-eyed we can be about that, the better.”
I could go over all the ways my former employer disappointed me, but the bitter grievances you hold onto from bad jobs are rarely as interesting to others as they are to yourself. I’ll take responsibility for my part in my heartbreak: after graduating from college, I yearned to find a close-knit community that shared my values and interests. I found it in my workplace, and I built my young adult life on top of its foundation. It was a structurally unsound decision that left me with no work-life balance and horrible boundaries.
Leaving that job hurt more than most breakups. I felt abandoned, disillusioned, and utterly lost. Who was I outside of this company? What was I worth without my job title? My friend Carlos Maza described it as an “ego death,” a total loss of sense of self. I thought I had a whole world outside of work, but I spun out in the months that followed my departure.
It hurt even more to realize some of those “family members” weren’t carrying over to this new chapter of my life. My work husband didn’t text me back. My old team never got that brunch.
But some people stuck around. They weren’t the people I expected, but I was grateful they made an effort to stay in contact with me. An engineer from the tech team took me out for tacos. A fact-checker read the first draft of my novel and gave me detailed feedback. A woman I never worked with directly but recognized from all-hands meetings interviewed me for her documentary. I pet-sat for a galaxy of former co-workers, most of whom left the organization too.
I attended weddings, referred old co-workers to new jobs, and inherited used coffee makers and ice cream bowls when they upgraded their kitchenware.
This month I published my first book. But How Are You, Really is a novel about a young woman who struggles with burnout after working for a startup that pitched itself as a “family,” only to lay off most of its staff. My heroine Charlotte is economically precarious and disconnected from her friends, not sure how to ask for help and admit that she is struggling. In the five years since she graduated from college, she has lost her community and fights to get it back.
Every author worries that they will face an audience of empty chairs on their book tour. To my delight, old coworkers showed up at every stop to support me. Folks who couldn’t be there in person celebrated me on social media, tagging me on Facebook in pictures they took of their hardcovers. These were people I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, some not since my last day at the office in 2019. They hadn’t forgotten about me, and they didn’t think less of me for quitting. Ironically, several of them had been laid off by our old company just like my heroine. (Similarities to actual organizations and individuals within the book are purely coincidental.)
When I chose to leave the company, I felt like my colleagues turned their backs on me. But all these people still care about me, all of these years later. They are proud of me.
A company is not family because a company cannot care for you. A company is not a living thing. It is an entity without feelings or loyalty. But a company is made up of people, and some of those people can become real friends. Community can exist within and around companies despite corporate exploitation, when coworkers choose to care about each other as human beings.
I still have nightmares about working for that company, but I would never undo those five years because of the friends I made there.
My group chat friends sat front and center on my book tour, their warm faces reassuring me whenever I got nervous. Today in the chat, we’re talking about a B-list actor who is rumored to be a nightmare to work with on set.
I found the people who share my values and my interests after all. It turns out my values are deeply anti-capitalist, and my interest is in opossum memes.
Recommended:
Buy my millennial college reunion novel But How Are You, Really.
Ella Dawson 