Some say you spend the second 50 years of your life becoming who you've always been.
Having spent 40 hours a week for the last 20 years working in an office environment in a technological field has been fun but I can't help but feel there's more to life.
Thank God.
When I started my current job I had a general rule that I would not socialize outside of work with the people I worked with. I was a bit of a snob, thinking technologists were boring, or if not boring at least fairly single-minded by necessity.
Using this logic and working as a techologist means I am boring. There is a grain, or more, of truth there.
On one occasion while giving a presentation I thought to myself, "My God this is boring". I can't imagine what the audience perception was. It was boring...that's a fact. No amount of tap dancing could change that. Thank goodness those situations are rare for me. Sorry for those of you who may be forced to participate in something similar on a routine basis.
To be a well rounded person we need to interact with people not like ourselves. I'm not saying that I couldn't have fun, converse, be friends, go fishing, to a party or have a beer, with co-workers, only that outside of work I am more interested in people who do, or at least talk, about other things; rather than continuing my work-life 24/7.
My wife's eyes would glaze over when we did spend time with someone who was familiar with the type of work I was doing and the conversation would focus on technology/engineering topics or even more painfully mind-numbing, if the conversations steered towards people we knew, but she didn't. My point is that the don't socialize with coworkers rule may not simply be for yourself but for your spouse/significant other/partner as well.
One of the difficulties/downsides to work related friendships is that there is a "box" defining who you should be at work. You may or may not fit in that box very well but you have to appear to fit in it somewhat in order to function. That's fine for what it is, when in Rome...
Hopefully we have friends and family outside of work where we can take off a couple of our masks. With a good friend, particularly one who you've been through a few things with, you can be, talk about, and enjoy who you are without worrying about "appearances".
Everyone needs a space to be a human being, someone with flaws, beauty, craziness, whatever...in other words a person, not an employee.
There is of course some ambiguity here. You want to be a "real" person at work, to be integrated, whole. Not sure how this works if you are an agent for management or the owner and not allowed to express your own thoughts but are rather tasked with presenting the corporate line which you may or may not agree with.
Generalizing who people are by what their job is, or by some labeling scheme, is in most cases a bad idea. I bristle at attempts to classify people using labels; Myers Briggs or things like that, or throwing out a label as a shorthand way to pigeonhole someone.
I'm an INFP on the Myers Briggs scale by the way. I think that means Inquisitive, Nutty, Fat, Papa ;-)
We use ambiguous terms like "liberal", "conservative", "right wing", "engineer", "manager", "salesman", "worker", "designer", "democrat", "republican", "christian" as a means to theoretically aid communicaton (or sometimes to stop communication e.g. political talk shows where someone says someone else is a member of the "far left wing" or is a "neo conservative"...no two people would have the same definition of those terms but they work if you don't want to think too much).
On the other hand if you are a psychiatrist having a code to identify someone might be a necessity at least for insurance purposes...but that's a fish of a different, controversial and interesting color.
I have had opportunities to go to school as an adult with groups of creative/design/artistically/free thinking/liberal oriented people, or if not actually those things at least thinking they were. A few of them had the idea that "engineers/techologists are like this"...this being some preconceived idea that people working with technology are boring or conservative or narrow minded or shy or introverted. Some grain of truth maybe, but definitely not the whole story. I found it interesting that they considered themselves open minded, creative, free thinkers and could hold onto their biases so well.
Everyone has their own row to hoe. I'm a lucky person. I got to do a whole bunch of different things with different people in different places before I landed in a cube. Even with my cube dwelling duties, I've done a fair job of keeping up my life, doing different things in different places with different people. Now that I have passed that 1/2 century mark I realize it's those different things what make life so sweet.
