How I Learned That Work Is Not Your Family

Years spent in cultlike workplaces under cartoonishly incapable bosses has spooked me from going back to the office.

The moment I heard my inbox ping, I knew. The email bore a calendar invite for a noon meeting that day at my boss’s home, which had served as the company’s makeshift office for the four months I had been working with them. In that time, the sound of a new email had begun to trigger a Pavlovian dread response, since it often preceded an urgent demand to call them now about some unforeseen error in my work. This time, though, I had a gut feeling this would be my final email.

On the half-hour drive to my boss’s house, I felt an acute sense of unease. Not necessarily about the material impact of losing my job but for having to confront the reasons why I couldn’t hack it here. I knew they were doing us both a favor by letting me go, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a personal failure. Usually when I’d arrive at their house, I’d awkwardly attempt to ease the tension between us with compensatory politeness. But this time, there was no masking the miasma of resentment. The air of resignation was almost a relief.

“I know these past few months haven’t been easy for you either,” they said. “It’s not your intelligence or your skills. I don’t know what it is, but this isn’t working out.”

I nodded stoically, shrinking into my chair at their kitchen table, gazing dead-eyed out the window at the gardener trimming the backyard shrubbery. My boss had founded their company nearly twenty years earlier. There were five other loyal, longstanding employees who’d all fallen into a familial rhythm, and I just couldn’t get in sync.

“Look, I’m not a good manager, and I’m only getting worse,” they said, taking a stab at the real issue. But the subtext contained a familiar cop-out I had heard in previous jobs: You don’t belong here.

“We’re like a family” was a familiar refrain—and it worked on me.

By that point, early in 2019, my résumé conjured the image of a restless millennial job-hopper looking for the “right fit.” To me, it represented a failure to launch. Over six years, I had tried my hand at tech start-ups, boutique marketing agencies, and small design consultancies. They’d all been sold as a scrappy alternative to the fusty corporate environments I thought I was allergic to based on some misguided belief that such workplaces were boring, stifling, and uncool. “We’re like a family” was a familiar refrain—and it worked on me. On paper, breaking down silos, eliminating hierarchies, cross-collaboration, open-plan offices, accessible CEOs, and a social committee appealed to me. But on every start date, I quickly realized I had been sold a lie: that its scrappy spirit was a flimsy facade hiding an environment of chaotic disorganization. My email wouldn’t be set up or I wouldn’t know who to report to. I’d be given piecemeal work without an understanding of the larger project. I’d be expected to know things without having been taught and felt discouraged from asking questions.

These high-stress, pressurized environments felt like an endurance test. I never knew where I stood without any formal check-ins or timely performance reviews. People gossipped and played favorites; certain people’s fuckups were overlooked while others were penalized harshly for no apparent reason. Getting sucked into the same work environment over and over was deeply demoralizing. I marveled at friends’ abilities to simply find a job and keep it for as long as they wanted—and felt a bone-deep sense of shame about my inability to do the same. I could trace my persistent stomachaches to one gnawing question: What was so wrong with me that work felt impossible? A few layoffs, instances of mistreatment, and manipulative managers later, I realized that I’d fallen for a failed promise: The workplace is not my family.

Nor was I alone in falling for it. This ostensibly freewheeling culture emerged from the mid-aughts tech boom in Silicon Valley. Over the past fifteen years, companies from banking to agriculture have imported it to draw young talent, projecting an image of a hip, familial, perks-laden workplace. “These fanciful ideas were meant to liberate employees from the drudgery of the office,” writes Arielle Pardes in Wired. “Instead, Silicon Valley ruined work culture—not just for people in tech but for all of us.”

Today, Ping-Pong tables, unlimited vacation, and “chief happiness officers” have been widely adopted. So has the prevailing ethos of treating your employees like family—part of a broader cultural shift away from work-life balance. Now, work is life.

The workplace as a family is an appealing proposition for job seekers looking for a collegial environment. But it’s predicated on the slippery idea of “culture fit”—a hiring practice that groups colleagues into cliques. “Families can be unwelcoming to outsiders,” writes Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic. Per Pinkser, “When a business is presented as a family, its workers may feel pressure to pledge an unreasonable degree of loyalty to their employer . . . all in the spirit of harmony and a shared purpose.” This enmeshed culture alienates “those who are cut from a different cloth than the typical ‘family’ member,” says Tessa West, a psychology professor at NYU, in the same piece. Such workplaces are unable—or unwilling—to accommodate diverse personalities or skill sets, isolating the black sheep of the family.

The pandemic has only deepened this “integration” of work and life. Remote work dissolved any boundary between the office and home, establishing an umbilical connection to our employers. Many workers burned out and began “quiet quitting,” a term for setting mental boundaries at work and limiting emotional investment in their jobs, likely a widespread revolt against hustle culture. The term itself presupposes an unhealthy relationship to work—it only exists at all because employers expect people to give their lives to their jobs, often at the expense of their well-being and leisure.

The recent hiring freezes at companies like Google and Wealthsimple and mass layoffs at Netflix, Shopify, Snap, and Hootsuite are not just a response to economic uncertainty or a fissure in the facade of a tech utopia. They’re a stark, deflating reminder of workers’ increasing disposability. At an all-hands meeting in June, Mark Zuckerberg warned his workforce that he would be “turning up the heat a little bit” to weed out employees who “probably shouldn’t be here,” in order for Meta to weather short-term economic instability. It’s worth noting that some people are genuinely motivated by competition and pressure at work, while others aren’t cut out for it. Regardless, Zuckerberg laid bare a grim truth that I have long sensed is implicit in countless workplaces: You’re family until the going gets tough. Suddenly, it’s not personal; it’s business.

The expectation to intuit my bosses’ every thought was a hallmark of nearly every job I had, especially in lieu of any real oversight or communication. (You don’t have to train someone if they’re telepathic.) If I didn’t, I’d sometimes be scolded like a child. Once, while moving offices, I was asked to clean filthy garbage bins in the sink. Soon after, on a slow day, I was asked to spend an afternoon varnishing the floors of our new office (and buy the varnish). I’d argue that janitorial work fell outside of the scope of duties, but I and the other two junior employees had no job description to refer to for nearly a year. “Everyone does everything,” right?

My most bitter memory, though, is losing half a thousand-dollar bonus as an entry-level employee after my manager, who I was close to, blamed me for a mistake he had made during my first week on the job—a task that certainly wasn’t part of my job. When I raised the issue to a vice president, they said that my supervisor was “probably just a bad manager” and left it in my hands. With my confidence shattered, in myself, my employer, and my ability, suddenly the power dynamics of this chummy workplace snapped into focus. Another reminder that these people, and this place, were not my family.

You’re family until the going gets tough. Suddenly, it’s not personal; it’s business.

Being laid off reminds you how false the family metaphor is. No matter the circumstances, losing a job is brutal and destabilizing. Being fired by your “family” is impossible not to internalize as a shameful rejection and personal failure. In her 2018 essay in Hazlitt, Sarah Hagi writes about how being laid off can surface feelings of disillusionment and inadequacy in a culture that valorizes employment and links self-worth with professional success. “As long as employment is treated like a coveted prize,” she writes, “it’ll always be personal.” Reading this, I felt the twinge of recognition. Professional setbacks can reinforce perceived personal flaws, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where failure feels inevitable because I am a failure.

For me, years of criticism, humiliation, and alienation crystallized into a crippling self-doubt that wounded my self-confidence and calcified into an all-consuming worry. In 2019, I was diagnosed with a mild form of “just right” OCD—a constant feeling that something is “off”—which was likely an internalized response to a constant and paralyzing fear of fucking up at work. I would scrub my hands raw to ensure there were no soap suds left; I’d regularly be late because I couldn’t leave the house if the cuff of my pants wasn’t just so. This simmering anxiety also manifested physically. An unanticipated meeting or work-related phone call would force the acid in my stomach to lurch upward, scorching my upper abdomen, eventually sending me to the hospital for an endoscopy. (The nurse told me my stomach was in fact “pristine,” and the persistent abdominal pain was probably a physical sign of mental distress.)

After being fired in 2019, I began to treat the act of pursuing work as a kind of exposure therapy. I’d react to the possibility of a new job the way an arachnophobe might to a tarantula crawling up his arm. Eventually, therapy brought clarity and perspective. I began to see myself not as defective or incapable, but placed in environments where I was ultimately set up to fail, thrown in the deep end and penalized when I couldn’t swim. Therapy—and a dedicated effort to decouple my self-worth from perceived professional success or stumbles—helped recoup my self-confidence, which had been sanded down after years of unstable employment and exploitative workplaces.

Years spent working in cultlike workplaces under cartoonishly incapable bosses has, for the moment, spooked me from ever entering an office again. And since January, I’ve been enjoying the breadth of opportunities and flexibility afforded by freelancing. Instinctually, I know that keeping a certain distance from the workplace and its attendant anxieties makes me feel more psychologically safe and less emotionally fragile; I feel more in control when I’m free of its grip. I’m more resilient now than I was years ago; I say no more and try to avoid chaotic or enmeshed workplaces. Still, sometimes a new challenge or constructive feedback triggers latent feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. So, if I ever do return to the office, my colleagues will remain just that. I have enough shit in my real family to deal with.