How to make friends as an adult Pt. 2: Talking about work doesn't have to suck

A better way to think about small talk

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

I willed myself awake, my eyelids gaining weight by the minute, as one of my colleagues droned on about the minutiae of our codebase. While I genuinely like my teammates, I'm often frustrated that my only interactions with them consist of discussions about code reviews, architectural patterns, and pull requests. We hold a biweekly team social where we sit down for an hour to talk about things BESIDES our jobs. I value this time but realized that our conversations would remain surface-level and work-related unless I took the reins. At our recent social hour, we began our typical discussions of tech-centric topics. Eventually, we hit a lull in the conversation, and I hastily diverted us into uncharted territory: "Does this job give you all a deep sense of purpose? Or does that primarily come from other facets of your lives?" They sat there, stunned by the weight and bluntness of my questions, yet we stumbled into an illuminating and wide-ranging conversation about the emotional realities of our work. One team member explained that he enjoyed his "work" but not his "job", a distinction he described in great detail. Another spoke of how, while she enjoyed her job, she was a model on the side and found that more akin to her calling than being a software engineer. Through this discussion, I realized that talking about work doesn't have to suck, provided you discuss how you feel rather than what you do.

I used to play this game when I met strangers: I would try to see how long I could go without knowing what their job was. While this served as a useful forcing function for formulating more interesting questions, I still frequently found myself in shallow and uninteresting discourse; evidently, my knowledge of the occupation of my conversational partner was not, in fact, limiting my conversational potential; the issue was how I approached conversations. What sense did it make to steer clear of an activity that comprises over a third of our waking hours? Buried beneath my compulsive habit of defaulting to surface-level topics lay a misstep in my understanding of what creates close bonds — unearthing the contents of one's heart, not the details of their work, is at the core of meaningful exchanges about any topic — even subjects as mundane as the weather or one's occupation.

Communication is at the core of our relationships. We spend our lives in constant contact, yet many of us struggle to truly listen to each other. Gaining a deeper understanding of our fellow man is a tricky undertaking; others can seem so opaque, their ways of seeing the world so foreign, and the task of digging deep so effortful that, even armed with all the right questions, we fail to bond. The little experience I've had has taught me that the first step to improving in this domain is to focus on the emotions and stories encompassing one's experiences, rather than recounting the facts of one's life.

Talking about your job doesn't have to suck.