You appear to be confusing "avoid" with "never interact with".

If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.

▲ Chance-Device 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That is what avoid means. Avoiding something means staying away from it to the best of your ability. You may well be constrained by circumstances such that you sometimes have no choice, but the intention of avoiding something is to come into contact with it never.

	▲	simoncion 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Avoiding something means staying away from it to the best of your ability Yes, that's what I said. "To the best of your ability." often means "You have to occasionally spend small amounts of time working with really shitty people.". OP said: `following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible...` Unless OP's professional life made them a ton of money, either they had a uniquely terrible professional life, or what you and I understand "avoid" to mean is not at all what OP thinks the word means.

▲ sodapopcan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Oops, just wrote something similar before seeing this. It came up recently in another community where it seems some people take the word "avoid" to mean "never" and in this case: "never not even in the past."