You don't have to do anything - if it's more important to you to bring your authentic beliefs and opinions in front of others - you're free to do so. But if your number one priority is getting ahead at work - or simply aiming to develop social cohesion with a group around you, conforming to that group's beliefs and culture are helpful. This applies not just to the 40 hours you work, but to any group you want to be welcome in, whether it's your school, country, church or sports team. And after a little while, it's not really pretending anymore.
> Maybe we should tell kids that in school
Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts. We obviously lecture about peer pressure, but most of this is learned innately. Society couldn't exist without these social pressures, even though they're not always beneficial.
> Half of the reason we have school is to socialize kids to these very concepts.
School is a brainwashing machine that limits the range of acceptable dialog and therefore leads to a culture of mediocrity.
Don't get me wrong, you should always be polite and empathetic towards others. But the most world-changing ideas don't come to you when you're dedicating huge amounts of your processing power to self-censoring or arbitrarily creating constraints because you're worried that the group will cancel you over them.
There is an actual range of acceptable dialog though. The workplace is not the right forum for discussing politics and religion, or your sex life. Not discussing that stuff is necessary not only for politeness but good rapport and productivity.
>But the most world-changing ideas don't come to you when you're dedicating huge amounts of your processing power to self-censoring or arbitrarily creating constraints because you're worried that the group will cancel you over them.
The most world-changing ideas are not hot button ragebait talking points or political soapboxing. Furthermore, it should not require a lot of processing power for you to stay on task at work and not inject controversial narratives into everything. You might be lucky enough to have some friends at work who enjoy talking to you about that stuff but have a little respect for everyone else who isn't in the mood for your shit.
I concur - the cost of this conformity is that creative outliers can be crushed, and their ideas (maybe important ideas that could save the organization from some dire outcome) can be lost.
I mean you can be expelled, socially ostracized, held back. There are plenty of ways to punish students for expressing verboten opinions or proclivities.
Unless you went to an insanely strict school (I don't know, maybe you did), you're talking about different orders of magnitude between the trouble you can get in for voicing an unpopular or unorthodox opinion at work vs school.
"I think women are biologically more suited to staying at home with kids."*
Result of saying this at school: some of your classmakes dislike it/you. Maybe they talk shit about you to your friends.
I think you’re significantly overstating the certainty here, especially if you couched that in being based on your religious beliefs. A lot of places have senior management who agree with that and most of the times I’ve seen things like that it gets no more than a reminder not to talk religion/politics at work, if even that.
The one exception is if you’re in a policy making position: if it sounds like fuel for a lawsuit arguing that women aren’t being fairly compensated or promoted, that is more likely to get attention. A lawyer I know mentioned that most of the DEI programs his firm setup were requested by CEOs specifically to protect the company from lawsuits, with the goal of being able to cut one manager loose rather than having the whole company be liable.
But what 5th grader is being punished for repeating things he overheard his Dad listening to on Joe Rogan? Think about things a school-age child is more likely to actually say/believe though:
"Math is pointless." -> Uh oh, Johnny's dumb! Might need to hold him back a grade.
"I'm not going back inside. I'm going to keep playing on the jungle gym." -> Uh oh, Jenny's a troublemaker! Might need to suspend her.
"Isn't believing in God kind of silly? What if gay people aren't possessed by the devil?" -> Uh oh, we can't have little Harriet disrupting our parochial school's curriculum with these kinds of thoughts. Either send her to Pastor Dave's Devil-Free Summer Camp this summer, or next year she'll have to go to public school!
Generally any disciplinary action against a student must be justified. Saying something like "We sent this kid to detention because he said his parents voted for X" is not going to hold water, especially if you are talking about drastic punishments.
Nobody has to like you in school. But that's the same as the rest of society.
Living in a society with other people who you interact with is about compromise and that means behaving in a way that aligns with social and cultural norms - which change from place to place.
I interviewed for a major company and was rejected for being "too combative" after I corrected an interviewer on what unit tests are supposed to cover. I got hired somewhere else and my boss mentioned he had also been rejected by the same company, so I mentioned that they rejected me over being combative. My boss laughed, like rolling on the floor laughing about it - because our company culture was so different that he considered me a peace seeking negotiator between teams.
It's called being professional. Your coworkers don't exist to be a sounding board for political, religious, or overly personal topics. This is just the baseline. You don't need validation about that stuff to do your work. Pushing people out because they don't have the same "vibe" is counterproductive and makes everyone worse off.
If you told kids in school the truth, it would be that juvenile attitudes die hard. Adults are too often like big kids. Looks and superficial stuff still matter a lot, although you can still get admitted to companies if your job requires actual skills or characteristics that you have.
I find it easy to go to work and do my work and just choose not to share some things. That's not pretending as much as good healthy boundaries.
I once sat next door to a group of HR folks who brought their personal lives into the office every day. People in conference rooms I booked crying and so on. Now a random one off of that, whatever, but it happened a lot and people bringing their emotional issues TO work really felt like a weight on me and those around me.
Boundaries can make work a heck of a lot easier to deal with. Depending on your situation it can even be an escape at times.
I can't guess at the specifics of that situation but if someone has cause to cry it's not like you can just ask them to do their crying outside of working hours. On the other hand maybe they have very little cause.
99% of the time I'd just nope out and let them have the room and I did ... many times ... but after a while it was so often it was frustrating.
It was one of the weirder situations I've encountered in the working world. Many of the crying encounters started with what seemed like personal conflicts within the HR team (they sat next to us so you couldn't help but overhear that). Then they'd go to deal with it in the conference room.
Eventually I found a way to safely express the level of distraction and discomfort these constant conflicts were having on me and those around me. Some emotion at work is bound to happen, but folks crying on conference rooms about an argument that seemed to be about banal internal HR processes, there's also an inappropriate amount of emotion too, and that impacts others.
Granted this was the HR team who complained to our management that the 24/7 tech support team who had to be on the phones all day "wasn't very friendly / social" ... it was weird.
My "whole self" is my hobbies and my passions and interests. A few of those overlap with the stuff I do at work. At work I do the work stuff, which conversely also overlaps with my passions (that's why I'm there). Other passions don't overlap with what's useful at work, so I don't do those there. I'm not pretending, just not doing those things at work.
I think this is an important realization - you are in a sense being paid to play a role at work, and there is a script for that role that everyone expects you to follow.
One of the benefits of having such a script is that it standardizes how to interact with people in a particular role, and reduces the friction of having to change workflow based on a specific person.
Yeah, its a perfectly fine system. You don't have a friend who you don't talk about the same things that you talk about with another friend? Or things you don't share with family? whats the difference?
