> They're not your friends

Your co-workers can be your friends. But we're not obligated to be. If you're my friend and colleague, sure, vent to me. If we're not, I don't give a flyig fuck about your views on geopolitics or gender or whatever, particulalry if you owe me a deliverable, doubly so if you've chosen a hot-button issue nobody actually has any new takes on other than blind agreement or condemnation. (And unless they’re voiced outside work in a way that affects me, I don’t have a right to care about it either.)

I only become real friends with my peers at a company AFTER one of us leaves the company. Oh I'll be friendly, grab lunch with you, talk about tame hobby stuff.. but that's the end of it. I'm not coming to your summer bbq, I'm not inviting you to my birthday party and the only time I'm seeing you on the weekend is if we're both in the office trying to get something done.

Prrreeeeeach. Not quite on topic here, but when I started working at Big Co., they sent 3 weekly Teams invitations each for hula hooping and desk yoga sessions. That infuriated me to no end because I knew how ineffective so many of my new coworkers were there and that they were making more than some of my coworkers who were actually providing value. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have infuriated me because the people attending those people were probably having less of a negative impact doing that rather than re-opening a solved issue or whatever the fuck useless thing they were doing.