I cannot imagine the destruction of social bonds in work being a long-term positive, except possibly from a full-bore anti-work perspective. There are three considerations that dominate my thinking:
If camaraderie is out, this means the business succeeds or fails on the financials alone. Startups will reap a grim harvest of failure, because virtually none of them are financially viable and the camaraderie of being in that environment is a significant factor in survival until the threshold is crossed. The valley of death gets wider and deeper; the ability of a business to endure a recession or disruption also goes down.
If camaraderie is out, a job does not fall back to neutral, it falls back to hostile. It is actively bad for people’s health to be shut off from social contact for long periods, and this means that jobs in general will be bad for you; they are sources of stress with no countervailing psychological forces.
Teamwork suffers to the same extent as camaraderie, which means any type of work that relies on multiple people to adapt quickly takes a direct production hit. The conditions for camaraderie to develop are also the conditions that produce enough familiarity with teammates to enable high performance with them.
To take this further, my original argument was the idea that there are people who pursue camaraderie above all else. They not only refuse to pursue more socially valuable forms of work, but they demand that other people subsidize them.
If camaraderie disappears, they might pursue more socially valuable forms of work. In my mind, the model is a bit like a forced “sobering-up.” I imagine it could reduce the number of people with a sense of privileged, selfish entitlement.
But it’s also possible that the reverse happens. Maybe those people, losing camaraderie, will just become unhappy, while still feeling a sense of privileged, selfish entitlement, and doing even less to help other people. Their unhappiness would be a bad thing, to my mind. It’s only good in the way an addict hitting “rock bottom” can be a good thing, if this terrible experience motivates them to turn their life around.
But “rock bottom” can also mean you give up, or even die. It can become a permanent state of affairs. Even if it might have some good effects, this isn’t the way you’d ideally like to obtain them.
I want to push back on the three points you bring up, although they’re good points all the same.
Businesses don’t succeed purely on the basis of camaraderie + financials. What about the intrinsic interest of the work? What about the prospect of helping other people?
If camaraderie is out, this might mean that jobs that were formerly places of companionship become neutral. But does it mean that jobs that were formerly neutral become hostile? Or does it just mean that we have a much larger number of jobs that are neutral?
The loss of productivity due to teamwork is an obvious bad, but that’s a separate issue. Obviously COVID and remote work cause lots of problems beyond the loss of camaraderie. I’m specifically talking about the effects of loss of camaraderie.
I think I agree with your original argument; more specifically my claim is that these people are a small enough fraction of the population that the harms to the majority in terms of happiness and productivity would be greater on net than any productivity boost the exclusively-social workers would experience.
Responding to your responses:
The crux of my belief here is that the interest of the work and the prospect of helping other people are not separable from the camaraderie element. The majority of the actual power these factors exert comes from the social reinforcement. For example, if the satisfaction of the work were enough, why not just work directly alone? This effect is much stronger in things like startups and/or charities, although entirely separately I can see an argument that most startups and charities collapsing would be much more efficient from an economic perspective.
I suspect this is a key disagreement—backing up a bit, I claim that normal for people is more or less continuous social contact. Social contact at work may not be as satisfying as family or friends, but it is at least something. So under this model, time at work is time away from social contact, which is strictly bad and added to the other costs of working a job. This turns a job into a pretty stark money-for-suffering trade, and I see no reason to expect compensation will increase even though suffering does.
I agree it’s a separate cost to measure, but I assert it shares the same cause. So there can be no scenario where you lose camaraderie but maintain teamwork (or enjoyment of the work, or the satisfaction of helping people) at the same levels.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
Where people are continuing to work a job in spite of the presence of a bunch of jerks, that’s at least a small sign that the job has some intrinsic value to them or others. Being freed of being around jerks means that they’re still working a job that we can maybe trust is socially valuable, but now they’re strictly better off. This factor means that time away from social contact is not “strictly bad” as you claim, though certainly it is for some people.
By contrast, people for whom camaraderie was a necessary condition for working their job is, to me, a small sign that their job has a relative lack of intrinsic value. While they’ve lost something that was of personal value to them, which is bad in its own right, there may be this countervailing benefit from the destruction of jobs that only exist because of the fun factor for employees/volunteers.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
This is an excellent point. There are whole companies with a pretty terrible reputation for this kind of thing; I wonder if they would go out of business because leadership doesn’t know how else to operate, or be saved by people suddenly sticking around for more than a year and developing real competence.
Further, I wonder how well the bullies are represented among that exclusive-social class, except in this case they work exclusively for the experience of domination rather than camaraderie. While I expect them to be the smallest segment we’ve discussed so far, I also expect their neutralization as being the biggest per-capita difference in terms of other people’s welfare and productivity.
If we model bad social experiences like bullying and jerkassery as akin to loss aversion, we might be able to make an estimate. If we model this “social loss aversion” as a 2:1, where experiencing 2 good social interactions is wiped out by 1 bad social interaction, then it starts to look like if one-third of workplace interactions are bad then losing social contact is a break-even proposition. I can easily imagine that being the case in lots of places, particularly since different people are bound to have different real curves for this “social loss.”
I cannot imagine the destruction of social bonds in work being a long-term positive, except possibly from a full-bore anti-work perspective. There are three considerations that dominate my thinking:
If camaraderie is out, this means the business succeeds or fails on the financials alone. Startups will reap a grim harvest of failure, because virtually none of them are financially viable and the camaraderie of being in that environment is a significant factor in survival until the threshold is crossed. The valley of death gets wider and deeper; the ability of a business to endure a recession or disruption also goes down.
If camaraderie is out, a job does not fall back to neutral, it falls back to hostile. It is actively bad for people’s health to be shut off from social contact for long periods, and this means that jobs in general will be bad for you; they are sources of stress with no countervailing psychological forces.
Teamwork suffers to the same extent as camaraderie, which means any type of work that relies on multiple people to adapt quickly takes a direct production hit. The conditions for camaraderie to develop are also the conditions that produce enough familiarity with teammates to enable high performance with them.
To take this further, my original argument was the idea that there are people who pursue camaraderie above all else. They not only refuse to pursue more socially valuable forms of work, but they demand that other people subsidize them.
If camaraderie disappears, they might pursue more socially valuable forms of work. In my mind, the model is a bit like a forced “sobering-up.” I imagine it could reduce the number of people with a sense of privileged, selfish entitlement.
But it’s also possible that the reverse happens. Maybe those people, losing camaraderie, will just become unhappy, while still feeling a sense of privileged, selfish entitlement, and doing even less to help other people. Their unhappiness would be a bad thing, to my mind. It’s only good in the way an addict hitting “rock bottom” can be a good thing, if this terrible experience motivates them to turn their life around.
But “rock bottom” can also mean you give up, or even die. It can become a permanent state of affairs. Even if it might have some good effects, this isn’t the way you’d ideally like to obtain them.
I want to push back on the three points you bring up, although they’re good points all the same.
Businesses don’t succeed purely on the basis of camaraderie + financials. What about the intrinsic interest of the work? What about the prospect of helping other people?
If camaraderie is out, this might mean that jobs that were formerly places of companionship become neutral. But does it mean that jobs that were formerly neutral become hostile? Or does it just mean that we have a much larger number of jobs that are neutral?
The loss of productivity due to teamwork is an obvious bad, but that’s a separate issue. Obviously COVID and remote work cause lots of problems beyond the loss of camaraderie. I’m specifically talking about the effects of loss of camaraderie.
I think I agree with your original argument; more specifically my claim is that these people are a small enough fraction of the population that the harms to the majority in terms of happiness and productivity would be greater on net than any productivity boost the exclusively-social workers would experience.
Responding to your responses:
The crux of my belief here is that the interest of the work and the prospect of helping other people are not separable from the camaraderie element. The majority of the actual power these factors exert comes from the social reinforcement. For example, if the satisfaction of the work were enough, why not just work directly alone? This effect is much stronger in things like startups and/or charities, although entirely separately I can see an argument that most startups and charities collapsing would be much more efficient from an economic perspective.
I suspect this is a key disagreement—backing up a bit, I claim that normal for people is more or less continuous social contact. Social contact at work may not be as satisfying as family or friends, but it is at least something. So under this model, time at work is time away from social contact, which is strictly bad and added to the other costs of working a job. This turns a job into a pretty stark money-for-suffering trade, and I see no reason to expect compensation will increase even though suffering does.
I agree it’s a separate cost to measure, but I assert it shares the same cause. So there can be no scenario where you lose camaraderie but maintain teamwork (or enjoyment of the work, or the satisfaction of helping people) at the same levels.
Some workplaces are also populated by bullies and obnoxious people. So while some people lose friendly contact with a great set of colleagues, others are freed from being forced to be around a bunch of jerks. Hard to say how that washes out in the end.
Where people are continuing to work a job in spite of the presence of a bunch of jerks, that’s at least a small sign that the job has some intrinsic value to them or others. Being freed of being around jerks means that they’re still working a job that we can maybe trust is socially valuable, but now they’re strictly better off. This factor means that time away from social contact is not “strictly bad” as you claim, though certainly it is for some people.
By contrast, people for whom camaraderie was a necessary condition for working their job is, to me, a small sign that their job has a relative lack of intrinsic value. While they’ve lost something that was of personal value to them, which is bad in its own right, there may be this countervailing benefit from the destruction of jobs that only exist because of the fun factor for employees/volunteers.
This is an excellent point. There are whole companies with a pretty terrible reputation for this kind of thing; I wonder if they would go out of business because leadership doesn’t know how else to operate, or be saved by people suddenly sticking around for more than a year and developing real competence.
Further, I wonder how well the bullies are represented among that exclusive-social class, except in this case they work exclusively for the experience of domination rather than camaraderie. While I expect them to be the smallest segment we’ve discussed so far, I also expect their neutralization as being the biggest per-capita difference in terms of other people’s welfare and productivity.
If we model bad social experiences like bullying and jerkassery as akin to loss aversion, we might be able to make an estimate. If we model this “social loss aversion” as a 2:1, where experiencing 2 good social interactions is wiped out by 1 bad social interaction, then it starts to look like if one-third of workplace interactions are bad then losing social contact is a break-even proposition. I can easily imagine that being the case in lots of places, particularly since different people are bound to have different real curves for this “social loss.”