It sort of confuses me when people say, "Sorry, I'll stop talking about work," when we're at a social event as if it's the cardinal sin of having fun.
I get the reasoning: a lot of people have a pretty deep trench dug between their professional life and their personal life, and they don't like when those things mix. And they view talking about work as a sort of admission that nothing else interesting is happening in their life, and therefore they must resort to something as fundamentally boring as their job. They should be talking about something more interesting like what episode of Grey's Anatomy they are on or recent IPAs they have tried. You know, interesting things.
I think this is BS. Tell me about work. Whether we like to admit it or not, work consumes a third of our time and probably half of our mental capacity. Hearing about someone's week and totally ignoring work feels to me like watching Finding Nemo and deleting all the scenes with Darla: sure, you can still piece the story together just fine, but boy are you missing an awful lot of key moments there. We're not defined by our jobs, but I don't want to talk to you and just automatically cut out a third of who you are and how you spend your time.
If you don't want to talk about your job to me, that's fine. We can totally avoid the topic. But don't put up that fence for my sake. Just open the gate.
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