You’ve been isolated for years. You just didn’t notice because you were trapped in meetings.
Connections with colleagues feel shallow, and you’ve mounted defenses to protect yourself against political shenanigans. You “quiet quit” a long time ago, and while it seemed like a good way to manage stress, it just made you feel numb and alone.
And now you’re plotting your escape, but to what? To be a solopreneur and feel even more alone? No thank you.
So before you go from the frying pan to the fire, let’s fight isolation with a clear view of what it actually is and how to combat it. And we’ll question whether you’re as alone as you think.
The Corporate Isolation You’re Already Living
You might have a colleague or two who makes your workday bearable. You get together for lunch and complain about the management, the review process, the ineffective company vision. It’s reassuring. But is it support?
With work colleagues, there’s always another agenda present. Maybe your colleague wants you to validate their bitterness. Or you worry that someone will expose your lack of skill. And everyone is trying to protect their own roles.
When stakes are high, community at work comes with an asterisk.
I recall leaving several jobs and being surprised by how little I heard from my work friends. But then I remembered how proximity and utility drove much of our connection. We always needed something from each other, whether that was a commiseration partner or a report review.
Once I was on the outside, I was no longer a relevant part of their workday. And that work day was draining – of course I didn’t make it onto the priority list of additional people to reach out to.
When you leave a job, you’ll miss your work besties. But weirdly, you’ll also miss the people you didn’t like, the routines that drove you nuts. They were all part of a familiar scaffolding that you figured out how to manage.
It’s easy to get into a spiral of missing what you never wanted, judging yourself for it, and then feeling awkward, not calling anyone, and watching way too much reality TV.
Once you have a realistic understanding of your current level of connection and isolation, you can move on to the choices at your disposal.
Signs You’re Not Out in the World Enough
Before you blame your job for all your isolation, let’s get honest about how much of it you’re creating yourself.
Here are a few signs that you may not be getting out into the world enough:
- You go more than one day without talking to anyone outside your home or work
- You can go several days in pajamas without noticing
- Your friendships have atrophied – you wouldn’t know who to call in an emergency
- You’re starting to get a little weird (and no judgment – it for sure happened to me, too)
These are classic signs you need to fight isolation more aggressively, even if you’re still employed.
If looking objectively at how you might be reinforcing your isolation makes you feel cranky, we’re on to something.
After the pandemic quarantines lifted, do you remember how we all had to get used to being around other people again? We got so accustomed to social distancing that we weren’t sure what to do with our faces and bodies once it lifted.
It can feel like that after you leave the cocoon of the corporate world and have to encounter new strangers with their weird habits and ways of talking.
My first training after leaving the corporate world was on grief recovery. I was suddenly in small groups where people shared deeply emotional stuff and no one said “leverage” or “strategize.” Interacting with them like a normal human required me to slow way down and consciously exit the jargon-filled world I was accustomed to.
You don’t have to go through this kind of social exposure therapy. You can be selective about who you welcome into your new world.
You Get to Choose Now
I met a new retiree who was pleasant and welcoming – he seemed like he would get along with anyone he met. He was describing the types of interactions he designs around now that he has control over his time. “I no longer associate with unpleasant people,” he told me. It sounded a little radical to me. You just decided to cut them out of your life? Yep.
But he was tuning into what helps him feel happy and productive. And if you’re leaving the corporate world and all the toxicity it comes with, this approach feels like a no-brainer.
No one is forcing you to work with jerks, so don’t.
You now get to create a new relational ecosystem outside of the corporate world. How to do that starts with understanding your capacity for social interaction.
Reflect on the various work environments and teams you have been part of. Which ones brought out the best in you? Maybe it was a small project team of three people where you all had equal responsibilities and got into the flow of work. Or perhaps you were leading a team of 10 where your delegation and facilitation skills brought people together to create great work.
Even if you don’t have an idea yet, you probably have some intuition about what role you’d like to play: either out in front as the visionary, or behind the scenes making it all happen.
You’ll change over time, and that’s totally normal. Thriving one day working on your own, and craving some company the next day.
I worked with a client who discovered that he could tolerate almost any number of colleagues, provided he had the option to shut an office door and give himself some quiet time.
Now that you know who you’ll let in, let’s talk about what you actually need from them.
Tune to What You Actually Need
When I talk about fighting isolation, I’m not saying that other people have to be up in your face every second of the day. This is about setting yourself up for the level of contact you want with others, when you want it.
You can start by paying attention to the type of connection you enjoy. Like whether small talk is energizing or makes you want to poke your eye out with a fork. Who your best collaborators are and what you like about them.
You might contemplate the types of people who exhaust you, even if you like them.
Many of us have “once every 4 to 6 months” friends and “weekly-check-in” friends. Guess what? You can consciously change the cadence of your connection if you want. While it might sound nerve-racking, you can absolutely call a friend and say, “hey, could we talk more often?”
Not every interaction has to be a heavy over-share. What’s important is getting in the habit of social interaction outside of work. This is your on-ramp to post-corporate life.
Fight Isolation Starting Now
You have all the ingredients for social connection: who, why, and how. It’s time to put your isolation-busting strategy into action.
You can start small: one coffee with someone every two weeks. A class that meets in person, regularly. If you have some flexibility, go work at a coffee shop or co-working space for an afternoon each week. Volunteer somewhere.
And if you can, include generations other than yours in this effort. Ideas and collaborators can come from anywhere.
You can reinvent yourself alone. But you’ll go faster and have more fun if you fight isolation with others.
Design your social world the way you’re designing your next chapter. With intention.
Then burn the map and build what fits.
For more on building resiliency, check out Episode 2: GenX, Build This Before Leaving Corporate and Episode 5: Why GenXers Struggle to Leave.
And here’s an example of a group fighting isolation on the ground: the U.S. Chamber of Connection.
