Do I Have to Talk to My Coworkers?

Some jobs don't require interaction. Some jobs, everybody's wearing AirPods. Some jobs feel pointless. Should you emotionally engage if you don't have to?

HEY THERE, and welcome back to a work-culture newsletter that helps you convert the stress of work directly into belly fat.

Which is why the Mode/Switch was off last week. We all needed to concentrate on overeating. (I hit all available benchmarks.)

Yesterday, just to remind myself what pointlessness feels like, I returned to the gym. Nobody cheered when I walked through the door, which was weird, but whatever. So there I was holding the plank position, glaring at my phone timer, quivering like a spruce in an Xmas tree shaker on Victoria’s Tree Farm.

This is what work feels like.

The Mode/Switch is about coping with all the work stuff that’s hard to talk about. Like, the fact that, when it comes to NOT TALKING AT WORK, you can hold that position like a friggin’ ultra-planker.

Get in, losers introverts, we’re going to figure this small-talk thing out with the help of a trend, a study, a story, and a shift.

This Week’s Trend

Maybe your craving to not talk helps explain the weird proliferation of quiet fads.

Quiet quitting, quiet hiring, quiet promoting, quiet firing, quiet luxury, quiet vacationing, quiet breathing, quiet boundaries, all the Quiet Place movies, and that deadliest of expressions, quiet farting.

Why don’t we say secret or stealthy or hidden or subtle? Why’s everything quiet?

Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong used to say that every era has a dominant sense. They called it the sensorium. Maybe our sensorium today is shaped by the AirPod.

Maybe you keep quiet at work for the same reason you wear earbuds: you crave enclosure, quiet, focus. And in today’s attention economy, what could be scarcer?

All this to say: if you hanker for quiet at work, I kinda like that about you. But there’s more to be said on the the question of whether and when you should talk on the job.

This Week’s Study

Charles Berger was a 1970s social scientist who said that, when talking with strangers, people’s main goal is to eliminate uncertainty. So he concocted theorems like, the more you show “nonverbal affiliative expressiveness”—by which he meant smiling and nodding—the more certainty you will feel. And so on and so obviously so forth.

Most people eliminate uncertainty, the theory suggested, using four strategies.

• An interactive approach, in which you say things like, “How’re you doing this morning?”

• An active approach, in which you ask other coworkers what the new guy’s like.

• An extractive approach, in which you social-media-lurk to study the new manager.

And what, you ask, is the fourth strategy? It’s the one when you say little and watch much. Berger called it the passive approach. Which reminds me of a story.

This Week’s Tale

A couple Sunday mornings back, I got together with a couple of readers of Digital Overwhelm: A Midlife Guide for Coping at Work and asked for their feedback. They told me their main takeaway is that tech doesn’t just make work busy; it makes it weird. Wish I’d thought of that. They’re right, though, digital work creates an uncanny overlay to the underlay of everyday work culture.

• Your everyday underlay: how you act in person, IRL, walking the hall, hoping nobody’s in the bathroom, nodding at all the AirPodders you pass.

• Your everyday overlay: how you are on Slack, in the Teams meeting, in the DMs.

I know what they mean about a digital gauze over every relationship at work. While I was writing this newsletter, a coworker’s email arrived, sounded equal parts chipper and threatening. Should I go talk to the emailer right now? Should I wait till I see them?

Anyway, one of the guys I was talking to about my book happens to be an engineer whose job doesn’t require much dialogue. The only point of conversation in his job, he explained, is to maintain a minimum amount of social cohesion—so the workplace doesn’t flicker into filaments of asociality.

The guy added that he’s a skeptic about work’s meaningfulness. Plus, he doesn’t really want friends at work. He doesn’t want to emotionally engage on the job. He hates it when a coworker comes up and says, “Hey, how was your weekend?"—because that nicety prefaces something the coworker wants him to do.

Why do I have to talk nice to the person above me, he asked me, just so I can get a good performance review?

That question’s been bugging me ever since. Is there an available mode/switch?

This Week’s Shift

I get that corporate culture makes communication feel like a board game with too many rules. And I really get the need to be your introverted self at work. So, yeah, go ahead and set your quiet boundaries out loud.

But I think’s there’s one good reason to stay open to everyday workplace talk.

Pretty much my favorite book over the past year has been Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine. Here’s an arresting thing the book has to say: “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.”

Eternal questions: who are we? why are we here? where are we going? why’s it so effed up?

Engineering questions: how much force can be applied here? what’s the limit condition? what functionality’s available? what’s the noise in the system?

O’Gieblyn’s not unhappy about this state of affairs. But she does like eternal questions. At last year at Calvin’s Festival of Faith & Writing, I asked her to sign my copy of the book. In the flyleaf, she wrote, “Stay human.” That’s my mode/switch for this week: you don’t stay human by talking only when the workplace machine requires it. You stay human by keeping big questions open with rather small talk.

What I’m Talking about at Work These Days

• Reading - Just finished Richard Russo’s 2019 mystery novel Chances Are… And I’m reading Matt Halteman’s Hungry Beautiful Animals, which may be the shrewdest, funniest book I’ve read in a while, even though its argument is very serious. I’m also reading Matt Lundberg’s Christian Violence, Christian Martyrdom, which urges just-war advocate to keep talking with pacifists.

• Hearing - You should stop reading this newsletter and go listen to the most recent episode of Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study Podcast. Their discussion “Why Is It So Hard to Make a Good Blockbuster?” is more than pretty great. (But I’m also thinking about giving up podcasts for Advent. They’ve taken over my life.)

• Skimming - Matt Iglesias on climate change. Also, Deb Rienstra’s indispensable Refugia newsletter on the same dire subject. They don’t exactly agree, but they’re brilliant to think with.

• Watching - Gladiator 2. Or GladIIator, as the graphic designers put it. Try quoting this at the water cooler: “The gates of hell are open night and day; smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to come back from hell and view the cheerful skies, in this the task mighty labor lies.” I thought the first movie was about the hero and the nuclear family. This sequel was about the city. So, not as good a blockbuster, but a more ambitious one.

• Also Watching - What is up with our preoccupation with assassins? The other day, I was putting in a piece of toast, and I turned the toaster’s knob from 3 to 4. And I thought, “That’s exactly the sound that a gun scope makes in Day of the Jackal.” But I’m watching this Peacock Original just to hear Eddie Redmayne breathe as he adjusts his killer scope.