That's a chad move from you, but doesn't your boss/manager notice that ? I know corporate culture sucks so badly precisely because they want to create some "artificial family", not matter how creepy/corrupted it is by capitalism. Substracting oneself from that is always hard, so I'm curious to know how to manage to do it.
My office is not much of a faux-family hellhole, luckily, and most of my colleagues are way older than me and have families of their own. But even still, I'm always very private about my personal life around my coworkers. I laid the groundwork for this well before the pandemic, which obviously helped. But if I got invited to stuff I'd either say, "maybe, I haven't decided yet, I'll have to see how I'm feeling," (like if it was far in the future) or just very plainly, "I'm sorry, I can't today/tomorrow." No one has ever asked me "why not?", but if you just say something vague like "I have other plans" then most people will take the hint. I try to ask my manager how the event went afterwards, just to show polite interest and not let it become a weird awkward thing we don't talk about.
It probably helps that, when it comes to work stuff, I am wide open and make myself available and useful to my teammates and my coworkers in general. So I perform well and am open to engagement while at work, but that's it. None of my managers have never made a big deal of it.
I unapologetically skipped every single work party, happy hour, whatever. I don't owe those people a second of my time that I'm not being paid for.
That's a chad move from you, but doesn't your boss/manager notice that ? I know corporate culture sucks so badly precisely because they want to create some "artificial family", not matter how creepy/corrupted it is by capitalism. Substracting oneself from that is always hard, so I'm curious to know how to manage to do it.
Alas, poor Jorick!
My office is not much of a faux-family hellhole, luckily, and most of my colleagues are way older than me and have families of their own. But even still, I'm always very private about my personal life around my coworkers. I laid the groundwork for this well before the pandemic, which obviously helped. But if I got invited to stuff I'd either say, "maybe, I haven't decided yet, I'll have to see how I'm feeling," (like if it was far in the future) or just very plainly, "I'm sorry, I can't today/tomorrow." No one has ever asked me "why not?", but if you just say something vague like "I have other plans" then most people will take the hint. I try to ask my manager how the event went afterwards, just to show polite interest and not let it become a weird awkward thing we don't talk about.
It probably helps that, when it comes to work stuff, I am wide open and make myself available and useful to my teammates and my coworkers in general. So I perform well and am open to engagement while at work, but that's it. None of my managers have never made a big deal of it.