One of my old friends says: everyone changed after I left my job. In the first week, the number of calls and messages checking in on me had dropped by roughly 50%. In truth, I was never sure whether those messages were meant to check on my wellbeing after retirement, or to check on the future of the people reaching out when their own turn at the end of a career came.
I still recall with gratitude the warm reel of memories I share with former colleagues. They were more than just colleagues — we shared daily laughter, household secrets, the details of our frustrations and successes, and WhatsApp groups that never fell silent even on weekends. I said farewell to them with their warm embraces filling my heart with absolute certainty that these were lifelong friends whom neither distance nor the busyness of life could drive away.
In less than two months, clouds gathered over that certainty. I noticed that my phone had gone very quiet; their messages arrived only on occasions and in formal language. By chance I would see on social media photographs of them gathering without anyone thinking to invite me, and I asked myself bitterly: "Was all of that a lie and hypocrisy? How did that warm familiarity turn into complete coldness, as though I had never been among them?"
My friend's predicament is not unique; it is the recurring version of the shock of endings that thousands of people go through every day. Yet one important explanation that we should not ignore is that his colleagues were not hypocrites, nor was he naive. The only thing that happened was that he had not placed matters in their proper context.
The vast majority of these impressions do not arise because people are bad, but because of a grave error in "managing expectations" and the absence of correct classification of the type of relationship. We very often fall into the illusion of familiarity produced by daily proximity — we take an office colleague for a "lifelong friend" and expect those who are passing through to remain deep within our emotional circle. When the context disappears or the bond is severed — through a resignation or a change of workplace — we are shocked by their silent departure and interpret it as a betrayal, when in truth we had placed them in the wrong box.
This brings to mind the well-known theory of the "proximity effect" in social psychology, which is powerfully supported by psychologist Robert Zajonc's theory known as the "mere exposure effect." Zajonc holds that the simple repetition of exposure to a particular stimulus — a person, a song, a painting — makes us instinctively inclined toward it and fond of it. The human brain is at ease with the familiar: faces seen daily in a waiting queue, or beside the coffee machine at work, or in the gym gradually shift from the category of "strangers" to that of "familiar people" without any effort on our part to get to know them — unless an exception occurs, such as the revelation of repellent traits or hostile conduct on the part of those individuals.
This theory does not necessarily mean that every familiar relationship is a superficial one, or that its continuation depends solely on whether the context persists or disappears; but it helps us understand how daily familiarity can give some relationships a sense of depth greater than their actual nature can sustain.
This theory goes a long way toward explaining why we fall into the trap of misclassifying the relationships we encounter in the workplace. Such relationships are born and flourish within a specific framework or context — an office, a classroom, a sports club, and so on. The common interest is the bond that keeps them alive, or the compulsory daily presence, or a shared professional goal. These relationships can be described as warm, interactive, and sincere in their moment; but they were formed within a specific context, and the moment that context disappears — whatever the reason: resignation, graduation, relocation — it is entirely natural for them to cool, fade, and return to their true dimensions.
We cannot compare these relationships to, or place them in the same box as, substantive relationships built on deep intellectual, spiritual, and values-based compatibility, whose parties are not bound together by a shared office or a passing material interest.
The psychological shock occurs when we "promote" a collegial relationship and place it in the box of substantive relationships by personal decree, as happened to my friend. When his colleagues stopped reaching out, he need not necessarily have interpreted that as hypocrisy on their part; they were simply practicing "workplace collegiality" within its natural limits. The absence of the context — which is the job — means the absence of daily contact, and this is a perfectly natural and healthy life cycle for human beings.
In the end, we must recognise that people leaving our lives — or our leaving theirs — is not evidence of our social failure. People enter our lives like chapters in a book: some are short and end with the conclusion of a situation or a place, and some extend for a long time.
The train of life has room for everyone, and its stations are always changing — provided the carriages do not collide at the crossroads.