5 ms·

I'm 34 and once you add in the weekends I am and talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting

I'm 34 and once you add in the weekends I am and talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day. At Gym1 I talk to my lifting coach but most of the time I'm in my head focused on training, after that at Gym2 I'm just trying to do my accessory work and conditioning and don't talk to anyone other than "hey" back to "hey Ryan" from the staff at the door. I go home and my retired mother that lives with me stays in her room and I go to mine, rinse and repeat. Not entirely by choice but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time.

jfk13 7y ago
I'm not quite sure whether you're saying you wish you were less alone, or that you're fine with how things are. But what strikes me in your comment is that once you leave your ("basically alone") work situation, you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity?
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity? I'm not going to the gym for general health or to pump out bicep curls for the ladies, I'm a strength athlete. At gym1 if I'm not actively using a barbell, I'm sitting down trying to recover for the next set. At gym2 I'm trying to get my accessory work and conditioning done so I can get home 12 hours after walking out the door for work so I can have 3 hours before bed to eat/shower/read/watch tv. The weekends are my free time, a childless couple that lives a half hour late rand I will go get food but that's pretty much down to quarterly because the weekend for them is also their downtime when they have to do everything, including see their families that both live an hour or so away. The rest of my friends all have kids and the weekends is when their kids have the bulk of their events from birthday parties to sleep overs to sports/dance. And as far as making new friends, I can't just walk up to strangers in public "Hello fellow biotic doing their groceries, I see you're buying beans, I too eat beans, let us be friends and go do something after we take our groceries home". Add in the fact I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, where it's extremely abnormal to not be married with kids in your early 20s, and even there I'm the odd man out. Everyone there is busy with family stuff too constantly and the bulk of the social events are youth-centered. Basically I walk around life getting excited when I think someone is waving to me only to be gut-punched with an operating chainsaw when they were waving to there stranger behind me. Or God help me, when someone does actually say hi or ask me how it's going my brain just starts flashing "error, does not compute" because I've been so long without regular social interaction I forget how to respond.
  - diogenescynic 7y ago
    Join a club or get a hobby that is social outside from religion, or play a sport instead of lifting weights all the time. It’s definitely harder to make friends as you get older but shared interests and repeated interactions are the key, IMO.
Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-aware of how any pleasant extraneous conversations they have are being heard by every single other person in the room. With a small team maybe that's not so bad if everyone has good chemistry, but not so with a large team. When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to. My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare." Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.
- fencepost 7y ago
  Making an open office kitchen unappealing with 2 words: microwave fish
- opo 7y ago
  >...Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas. Yea the research shows that open offices lower collaboration: >...Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
Ididntdothis 7y ago
“talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day” That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Our open office isn't for fostering communication or anything, we don't need to communicate, if you have time to communicate you aren't working. Our open office is so the team lead at the back of each row can watch everyone. :/
  - stirfrykitty 7y ago
    A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people. You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.
appleiigs 7y ago
I don't do Crossfit, but with all that time in the gym, I can see why their community spirit is very appealing. Edit. I also live with my retired mother. For her simply having the option to socialize with me is enough. She knows she can watch a movie with me at home or ask me to go grocery shopping with her.
- RobertDeNiro 7y ago
  I totally see crossfit as filling that gap that churches and religion left behind.
  - stirfrykitty 7y ago
    My church has tons of social offerings with tons of attendance. Men's groups, women's groups, teen groups. I recently went hunting with some men from my church for an entire weekend. A couple of weekends later, my wife went with the women on their retreat. The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.
Loughla 7y ago
>but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time. Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, I have made it clear to my friends without kids that if you want to hang out, we're headed to the pool or to a park with the kids for the most part. Occasionally we'll have time for adult nights, but because of our geography, childcare is hard to find. Some were okay with that and we're even closer friends now, and my kids call them 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. Some were not, and we grew apart. Which has to be okay. The moral of the story is, it's not their fault 100% that they're busy, and if their friendship is important, you should actively work on it. Like an adult. That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds. It does, probably because it's so asymmetric. Now, I guess it is expected that the one's own kids will be more important than friends. But this "if friendship is important" thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >thing has to go both ways to at least some extent. That's correct, the problem, in my experience, is that people expect everything to be the same as it was before friend A had a kid. It's called growth and development, and it's healthy for many people. So expecting them to hang out until 2 am and play video games and drink like you used to is probably not realistic. Maybe, depending on the person. My point was that if the friendship is important, remember that children aren't a barrier to YOUR needs. That is a human, the care and development of which your friend is personally responsible for. Understand that you may have to hang out with them at a park while their kid plays, rather than in your living room drinking beers. Does that make sense? I feel like I do a terrible job of explaining myself.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, "Hey Michael, so, yeah, I'm just gonna show up to your kid's third grade graduation, what door do I enter the school in to look like a total creep?" Er... a lot of that stuff is going to be like that, or going to the Children's museum, or a child's park, or family events with extended family, or family vacations/road trips. Kinda creepy to just show up at that stuff "oh hey, fancy that, how funny we ran into each other at Chuck-e-Cheese and I'm here without a kid and I think the police are now here to ask why I'm here as a single adult male with no child".

jfk13 7y ago

I'm not quite sure whether you're saying you wish you were less alone, or that you're fine with how things are. But what strikes me in your comment is that once you leave your ("basically alone") work situation, you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity?

ryanmercer 7y ago
>you're choosing to spend a lot of your discretionary time doing "alone" stuff in a gym. Might it be healthier overall (even if less focused on specific physical outcomes) to spend some of that time and energy engaging in a more social activity? I'm not going to the gym for general health or to pump out bicep curls for the ladies, I'm a strength athlete. At gym1 if I'm not actively using a barbell, I'm sitting down trying to recover for the next set. At gym2 I'm trying to get my accessory work and conditioning done so I can get home 12 hours after walking out the door for work so I can have 3 hours before bed to eat/shower/read/watch tv. The weekends are my free time, a childless couple that lives a half hour late rand I will go get food but that's pretty much down to quarterly because the weekend for them is also their downtime when they have to do everything, including see their families that both live an hour or so away. The rest of my friends all have kids and the weekends is when their kids have the bulk of their events from birthday parties to sleep overs to sports/dance. And as far as making new friends, I can't just walk up to strangers in public "Hello fellow biotic doing their groceries, I see you're buying beans, I too eat beans, let us be friends and go do something after we take our groceries home". Add in the fact I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints, where it's extremely abnormal to not be married with kids in your early 20s, and even there I'm the odd man out. Everyone there is busy with family stuff too constantly and the bulk of the social events are youth-centered. Basically I walk around life getting excited when I think someone is waving to me only to be gut-punched with an operating chainsaw when they were waving to there stranger behind me. Or God help me, when someone does actually say hi or ask me how it's going my brain just starts flashing "error, does not compute" because I've been so long without regular social interaction I forget how to respond.
- diogenescynic 7y ago
  Join a club or get a hobby that is social outside from religion, or play a sport instead of lifting weights all the time. It’s definitely harder to make friends as you get older but shared interests and repeated interactions are the key, IMO.

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago

I have found that truly open office plans act as significant discouragers of social contact at the office. Everyone except for the truly oblivious are hyper-aware of how any pleasant extraneous conversations they have are being heard by every single other person in the room. With a small team maybe that's not so bad if everyone has good chemistry, but not so with a large team. When everyone has their own office or cube space, people aren't nearly as averse to friendly conversations because there is a sense of moderate privacy there. Additionally, you feel comfortable having social interactions in shared spaces, because you know you have the 'safety' of your private or semi-private cube to return to. My last nightmare of a job was open office with ~100 employees. Even the kitchen was part of the open office, right in the middle, so even during lunch there really was no space where people felt comfortable having any sort of non-work-focused social interaction. I would go weeks without any friendly interactions at all despite being surrounded by people. It got to the point where I would walk out of the office building after 8+ hours onto the busy streets of downtown, and feel alienated/isolated/detached from all of the other people walking around. I was really getting concerned about it because I hadn't made the connection. I mentioned it to my therapist, and she asked me to describe my standard workday, and when I did she said "It's no wonder you feel like this at the end of the day, your working environment sounds like a nightmare." Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas.

fencepost 7y ago
Making an open office kitchen unappealing with 2 words: microwave fish
opo 7y ago
>...Yet we are supposed to believe that open plans lead to increased collaboration and sharing of ideas. Yea the research shows that open offices lower collaboration: >...Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

Ididntdothis 7y ago

“talking is extremely discouraged at work, in an open office, so even at work you're basically alone just siting there listening to music or podcasts all day” That’s the nutty thing about open office. The thing that’s officially supposed to encourage collaboration leads to people sitting there with headphones trying to isolate themselves and rules to not talk to each other.

ryanmercer 7y ago
Our open office isn't for fostering communication or anything, we don't need to communicate, if you have time to communicate you aren't working. Our open office is so the team lead at the back of each row can watch everyone. :/
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  A sort of paid-worker panopticon situation is how I see it. I did the cube farm thing back when I worked for UUNet, and it sucked. Everyone talking, prairie dogging talking to the guy in the next cube, people farting out loud, the stinky food, the phone conversations of the admin next to you trying to work out some awful multi-spoke VPN issue with a distant office, cursing all the while and everyone within earshot hearing it. Not a good scene. One of the senior admins got a talking to for one night on his shift printed out name tags with "Winston Smith" and taping them over the 90 cubes in the office.
stirfrykitty 7y ago
I cannot work in an open office. I was forced to when I began my career in NOVA as a young Unix nerd, but now that I'm over 20 years into it, I won't work where I don't have my own office. I have one now that I share with one other person, but it's a massive office and our desks face each other from across the room. The lights are out and the trance is streaming. I cannot concentrate around people walking around, the jocks talking about fantasy sports, or silly gossip. And the smell of some people's food is truly off putting. Anyone with any kind of seniority needs an office to work. I just cannot fathom working around a dozen or more people. You have to love these IT companies that have job offers up with photos of people working in complete harmony. It's total rubbish. No one wants to work that way given the choice.

appleiigs 7y ago

I don't do Crossfit, but with all that time in the gym, I can see why their community spirit is very appealing. Edit. I also live with my retired mother. For her simply having the option to socialize with me is enough. She knows she can watch a movie with me at home or ask me to go grocery shopping with her.

RobertDeNiro 7y ago
I totally see crossfit as filling that gap that churches and religion left behind.
- stirfrykitty 7y ago
  My church has tons of social offerings with tons of attendance. Men's groups, women's groups, teen groups. I recently went hunting with some men from my church for an entire weekend. A couple of weekends later, my wife went with the women on their retreat. The issue is that most churches today in America are more or less social clubs. Christianity takes a back seat to less important things. Hence the mega churches in my area bleeding members in favor of small churches that focus on the Gospel, but yet do offer things for families.

Loughla 7y ago

>but all my friends are married with kids and have zero free time. Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, I have made it clear to my friends without kids that if you want to hang out, we're headed to the pool or to a park with the kids for the most part. Occasionally we'll have time for adult nights, but because of our geography, childcare is hard to find. Some were okay with that and we're even closer friends now, and my kids call them 'Auntie' or 'Uncle'. Some were not, and we grew apart. Which has to be okay. The moral of the story is, it's not their fault 100% that they're busy, and if their friendship is important, you should actively work on it. Like an adult. That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds.

balfirevic 7y ago
> That's not meant to be as preachy as it maybe sounds. It does, probably because it's so asymmetric. Now, I guess it is expected that the one's own kids will be more important than friends. But this "if friendship is important" thing has to go both ways to at least some extent.
- Loughla 7y ago
  >thing has to go both ways to at least some extent. That's correct, the problem, in my experience, is that people expect everything to be the same as it was before friend A had a kid. It's called growth and development, and it's healthy for many people. So expecting them to hang out until 2 am and play video games and drink like you used to is probably not realistic. Maybe, depending on the person. My point was that if the friendship is important, remember that children aren't a barrier to YOUR needs. That is a human, the care and development of which your friend is personally responsible for. Understand that you may have to hang out with them at a park while their kid plays, rather than in your living room drinking beers. Does that make sense? I feel like I do a terrible job of explaining myself.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Then put yourself where they are. As a married friend with kids, "Hey Michael, so, yeah, I'm just gonna show up to your kid's third grade graduation, what door do I enter the school in to look like a total creep?" Er... a lot of that stuff is going to be like that, or going to the Children's museum, or a child's park, or family events with extended family, or family vacations/road trips. Kinda creepy to just show up at that stuff "oh hey, fancy that, how funny we ran into each other at Chuck-e-Cheese and I'm here without a kid and I think the police are now here to ask why I'm here as a single adult male with no child".