Episode 46: The Workplace is not a Family
July 7, 2025
Somewhere between family and expendable asset, there is a better way to think about the people we work with.
There is a growing chorus of voices repeating a message that sounds pragmatic on the surface: your job is not your family. It’s meant to clarify expectations, but underneath, it may be doing something else entirely. This episode pushes back on that narrative, exploring how language like this, even when well-intended, contributes to a larger trend of dehumanizing employees. The conversation isn't about clinging to outdated notions of loyalty; it’s about protecting the idea that work can still be a place for connection, collaboration, and something more than quiet isolation.
Transcript
Someone sent me a post on this, and for whatever reason, it just kind of, I don't know, it just bugged me.
Not that they sent me the post, what the post was implying.
It's something that circulates all the time, and I've thought about it before.
In fact, there was another podcast that I had been working on with a couple other people.
We never actually published any episodes, but this was one of the topics that we discussed over on that show as well.
And you see this on, I mean, definitely on LinkedIn all the time, seen on Reddit as well.
I'm sure it's on most platforms.
And the saying goes, or the thrust of it is, work is not a family, or your company is not a family, or something to that effect.
Like, that's the general idea.
I think it's usually phrased in terms of, work is not a family.
Now, what I'm going to say, I think, is a bit of a straw man.
I think I'm going to take a fairly extreme point of view on this for the purposes of this episode.
I don't necessarily believe it to this extreme, but the more I've seen this adage, the more it's kind of rolled around in my head, and the more I think there's some real problems with this type of mindset.
So, the general idea usually goes like this.
Work is not a family.
Workplace is not a family.
You're there to provide value for the company.
The company is there to provide you compensation.
It's purely transactional.
Don't treat it like a family because they won't have your back anyway.
You know, that's sort of the idea.
They won't have your back, and they shouldn't really – I mean, implied in there is sort of – you would think implied in there is that you shouldn't really have the company's back either, but that's usually not the case.
Usually what they're talking about is you should be all in on the company, but they're never going to have your back, and that's okay because they're giving you money, and that's what this relationship is.
So, don't get attached to your coworkers.
They're not going to have your back, blah, blah, blah.
Here's where I've kind of finally landed on this.
This is a piece of advice that is disingenuous in its intent.
This is a piece of advice that often is positioned as if it's supposed to be beneficial to the employee, as if opening your eyes – let's imagine that you're the employee.
This is often positioned in a way such that this is trying to open your eyes as the employee.
It's trying to open your eyes to the reality of the situation, and now that you're awake, they can't get one over on you, and somehow you're better for it.
In reality, I think that this mindset benefits the company more, whatever that company is.
And I'm really trying not to have this come off as down with the establishment and big companies are bad and whatever.
But it's hard for me to go into my point of view without at least sounding somewhat in that direction, and I think it's somewhat warranted.
This idea, I believe, is a continued part of this movement or this trend or whatever toward just continuously dehumanizing the employee in a company.
As if the company is doing something so important, so worthwhile, that everyone should just be a cog in this machine that just raises that company up at the expense of everyone's humanity.
It behooves, particularly in today's world, it behooves a large organization or even a mid-sized organization to not really have to care about the individual.
And to not really have to care about one another and to not really treat them as people, but instead as just productivity producing units of work output and nothing else.
It behooves them to do this, among other things, it behooves them to do this because you then, as the employee, you become replaceable.
Chances are in your family, you're not replaceable.
Chances are you're very important to some number of people.
And I'm going to speak family in sort of broad strokes here a little bit.
I don't necessarily mean purely blood-related, immediate family.
I don't know.
Extend it to whatever you think of when you think of family.
Maybe it's your Fast and the Furious, right?
Like, it's all about family.
Whatever.
Like, you know, tight group of friends.
Whatever it is that you're kind of thinking about there.
If you're in a group like that, you're not replaceable.
If you're in a company that actually treats everybody, where people treat one another as some form of family, you become less replaceable.
People begin to trust you.
You have trust in others.
You have people's back.
They have yours.
There's a concerted effort to work as a group to be greater than the sum of your parts.
That's not good from an organization's standpoint at the high, high levels.
You know, your CEO levels, your founder levels, your whatever.
That's not good from their perspective.
They need you to be a replaceable part.
So that the moment it is inconvenient for you to be there or that they have to think for more than two seconds what they might want to do with you next, it's easier to just cut you loose in a completely non-human way.
You go on your way and everyone sits around and says, well, work's not a family.
It's just work.
We're letting this happen.
We're all part of this.
If you buy into this mindset that you're saying that, yes, I am willing to no longer be a human being because inherently human beings, social creatures, group mindsets, they're attracted.
Whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, to some extent, you automatically, inherently build community wherever you go.
And particularly something like work where you're spending eight, nine, ten, God knows how many hours a day in a week in a month in a year.
You're spending all that time there.
You will be, whether it's remote or in person, it doesn't really matter.
You will inherently seek out community building.
So as we continue to allow ourselves to essentially be dehumanized in this way, while simultaneously reposting sentiments like this on social platforms and professional platforms like LinkedIn, we're damaging our own ability to both be employable in the long haul and to be human while we're there.
Like we're starting to wonder as a society, oh, how come AI is going to come in and take all of our jobs?
Because we've turned our jobs into nothing more than, you know, assembly line style thinking where you just do this little thing.
You talk to nobody.
You don't need to interact.
You do a thing.
It's well documented.
You do it over and over and over again.
And then, and you're supposed to what, dedicate your entire life so that some billionaire can make another billion dollars?
Like, is that what we're all in it for?
If you're not going to come to work to build community, if that's not a piece of it, right?
If you go back in time a while, there was a time from everything that I've read.
I mean, obviously I was not alive during that time.
This could all be just rose colored glasses stuff.
Maybe this was never a thing.
I don't know.
But there sure seemed to be a time in American work culture where the company looked out for the employee.
And so, we're supposed to what?
Look out for the best needs of the company or the best, you know, the best interests of the company and provide all this value.
But then on the other end of it, be told that it's not a family and they should be able to do whatever they want with us.
And because we're being compensated, which frankly, they probably min-max to the extreme, like, hey, here's some pretty crappy benefits, most likely.
Here's salary that we have brought down to the absolute minimum that we can get you in the door for.
Make sure you bring enough value so that we can 10x our company.
I think that's just – I think we have set ourselves up as a working society to be replaced, to be replaceable.
And so, echoing out this sentiment of work is not a family, I think is – it's not just a philosophical thing.
I think that there are real practical – real in-practice pieces, components to this, consequences from this, that we are allowing ourselves as an employee culture to become completely replaceable.
And we shouldn't be because it's dehumanizing.
And these companies that we are providing constant value for are looking out less and less for the people, and we're saying that's okay.
I'm going to try to link to the video that kind of set me down this road.
Again, it's not the only one like this, and I want to be really clear.
This is a bit of a straw man, because in this guy's little short clip, he does make the point of differentiating between – he's saying work is not a family, and what he does say work is that work is a community.
And I think that's probably a better word.
Like, if I had to pick a word, I agree with this guy that, yeah, workplace probably isn't a family, but it is a community.
So, I just want to make that clear.
Like, I'm not necessarily basing all this because of the specific thing that he said.
It just so happened to be the clip that kind of sent me down this rabbit hole.
Instead, it's more about – I don't think everyone gets that nuance.
That's the problem.
He explains it in a video.
But when you see one of these posts that just says, the workplace is not a family, don't get attached, or whatever, it doesn't typically – those posts don't typically go into the same level of nuance.
That, yeah, not a family, but it still is a community.
They don't usually say that.
And I think what's getting out there into the cultural zeitgeist is instead this idea that it's okay to not be connected to other people in such a large part of your life.
Just do what's good for the company.
They'll compensate you as long as you're convenient to keep around.
And when you're out the door, that's fine because you should have known that going into it.
And I think that's a pretty dehumanizing way to go about working and living in the modern era.