Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues?
You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.
You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.
In some ways, I find it's more enjoyable to not be friends with my colleagues; to keep my personal life and work life as widely separated as is feasible.
But really this is just more a case of I wouldn't be comfortable talking about my deepest desires with a random person. Sure, once I get to know someone a bit, I'm fine to do that...but a random interviewer? Eugh.
[1] That said, my Russian partner would not consider them friends. Friends in her world are people you can count on for anything and how many of us can say that about our colleagues?
Being friendly should suffice, not all of us want to get too personal with the same people we might need to have professional arguments with.
We're all different.
Edit: Not to belittle your son's wisdom, of course. I totally agree.
I think he mostly got it from my wife and I sitting down with our children after having a fight and telling them that we're still mom and dad, we've put it behind us, and it's okay not to get along all the time.
Of course, intra-office competition at that level is highly destructive but that's what people are acculturated to.
"hey, what'd you do this weekend?"
"well, my friends and I run a historical re-enactment society where we all go to this remote retreat in the mountains, dress up as Nazis, and pretend that they won World War 2."
and you know what, if it was possible to just hold your finger down on the "rewind time" button for 15 seconds to just never ask this kind of friendly question, life would be so much easier. how do you reply to this? just stay out of other peoples business if you have to work with them.