With lockdown it has become a truism to vaunt the advantages of going into work or school; we require society and the screen won’t do it. The advantage of work relationships is that they have the potential (mostly fulfilled) of remaining superficial. Your intercourse with your co-worker tends to remain functional. You may well spend more time with them than you do with your life partner, but the co-worker may know next to nothing about your real life. It is a training in the art of discretion. You skate around on the surface of things and rework a number of functional conversations interminably; an exercise in theme and variations. I would not know how to do a statistical analysis of this, but I would lay a wager on the fact that a lot of superficiial relationships is healthier than a few deep ones. With the former you feel you are integrated into a meaningful quantity of others; with the latter it may just be a few crackpots who escaped the statistical norm. Added to which, sometimes you don’t want to get beneath the surface.

peoplearerubbish.com