Preferring to spend time with friends and family is normal. It doesn't mean someone's coworkers are so toxic that regular interaction with them is an ordeal.
That very sentence has already suggested that your coworkers are not your friends (or else they'd be in the group of "friends and family" that you enjoy spending time with).
I think the very point of GP is that there are many people who do, in fact, develop friendships with their coworkers.
Why do they have to be? It is strange that there is some unspoken stipulation that they NEED to be to have a good working relationship. I can talk to my co-workers about why webpack sucks without wanting to cook with them.
I've certainly made many friends through work, but in my experience a for-profit workplace is an artificial environment with a lot of distorting incentives that make it more challenging to establish genuine friendship.
Fair enough. I believe there's some truth to this. I do think it's hard to separate between genuine friendships and transactional relationships that happen to be symbiotic while you're working together (but will rapidly deteriorate when you don't).
Sometimes I do wonder how much of this is the fault of skewed incentives of the workplace, versus just a paradox of human interaction. We think we're developing friendships by spending a lot of time with people, without realizing that time spent is of a transactional nature rather than furthering some connection. I spend a lot of time with coworkers, therefore a feel close to them. However, when asked, I realize I know almost nothing about them below the surface.
In any case, I can appreciate that forming friendships at work can be more challenging. But I do believe many people (including myself) have done this, and when it works it can be incredibly powerful and make work much more enjoyable.
If you want to hang out or work with your friends, nobody is stopping you. Maybe you should make mutual friends that don't need management to force them to be with you
To be clear, I'm not saying that employers should force employees to work in an office so they can spend time with their friends.
I'm simply saying that those people who have developed friendships with the people they work with likely don't view "going to work" as a painful, soul-sucking task they have to perform simply to achieve a paycheck.
It is, in fact, possible to simultaneously realize that you're in a transactional business relationship with an employer who is compensating you for services, and that those around you are also in that same relationship, and to use that as a common ground upon which a friendship can be built that makes the transactional relationship less painful.
I also believe there are some people who do, genuinely, enjoy the work they do. The general point I'm trying to make throughout this thread is that it'd be great if folks realized that there is a diversity to opinions about work much in the same way as there is diversity to every other thing in life and it's simply not a binary choice between "work is wonderful and I want to spend my life at the office" and "work is awful and I can't stand commuting, sharing space with coworkers, paying egregious rent, etc." As with most things in life, the reality is most people live somewhere in the middle of that gradient. Acknowledging that is helpful if we want to make progress towards optimal, inclusive solutions.
