Pretty much this. For those of us who had to live through the Great Awokening in places like San Francisco, the workplace became a place to be questioned and re-educated in your political and moral beliefs, unless you already had the correct opinion.

Except, even if you did, you could always be just a little purer. You could show off to your coworkers how you were a better ally than them, maybe they would be as good as you if only they “did the work" harder.

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/memory-hole-archive-... captures the experience pretty well

The answer for years was to just keep your mouth shut while the hysteria subsides. It still is likely the right answer. In theory bringing everything to work would be great in a perfectly liberal environment, but we just don't live in that world. The illiberal and the intolerant will just gain leverage over you in a competitive environment such as the workplace.

I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."

Sure, but that sort of behaviour is plainly abusive unless you're actually working in an explicitly religious setting.

But merely saying "I'm taking next Wednesday off to celebrate Eid" ought to be fine everywhere, as is "this weekend I'm singing in my church choir then going for a picnic".

Similarly, wearing a wedding ring or mentioning that you have a partner should never be a problem, but issuing a company-wide invite to your next sex party likely will be.

"Personal" isn't a synonym for "intimate". It's reasonable to assume that people are able to share the former without forcing their colleagues to deal unnecessarily with the latter.

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This says a lot more about you than them.

My religion uses hallucinogens in ceremony and if I got fired for speaking about my religious practice I would certainly sue the shit out of them.

I'm spending almost a third of my life at work, no shade to the people having to work to pay the bills, but I'd like to get a bit more than just that out of that time: Learn new skills, meet interesting people, have good conversations, have fun. Having something akin to friendship with long-term coworkers and collaborators makes all of that much easier.

I'm not saying that people should talk about this all the time, but are you saying you don't want people to feel able to mention key details of their personal life?

For example? Because usually, people who say this have something in their mind about which they should rightfully be ashamed. Like people who want other people to have lesser rights.

Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.

That is right. The hierarchical nature of this setting makes it impossible to be fully open, unless you truly are the most uninteresting person on the planet. If not, open and indiscriminate sharing is going to be a potential liability. Some things in life are very useful to know, and I believe being deliberate about what you share about yourself with whom is one of them.

If you ask your employer to treat you like a robot - don't be surprised when you get replaced by a robot.

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