Dealing with rude people at work (and in life)
We're isolated and stressed.
Soon after I joined Threads back in July 2023, I was taken aback by some of the rude replies I received. My social media diet up until that point had been mostly LinkedIn (where people are typically professional), Facebook (where I'm connected only to friends and family), and Instagram (pretty pictures!). I was on Twitter for a long time, but abandoned it amid Musk's antics.
Threads became a place where people pick fights. Call each other stupid. Post comments that are intentionally designed to rile.
But is this experience merely reflective of the population as a whole? Pew Research recently released survey results that found 47% of U.S. adults say the way people behave in public is ruder than before the Covid-19 pandemic (with 44% saying the behavior is about the same, and 20% saying people are "a lot ruder."
What gives? Did we all forget how to behave during Covid lockdowns? Did the decrease in face-to-face interactions lead to diminished empathy?
During that time, the message from institutions was clear: it's everyone out for themselves. There were vastly different opinions about "the right thing to do." Individual preferences became a force stronger than the collective good. Misinformation was rampant.
As a result, we lost trust in institutions — and each other.
Did isolation make us stop caring about each other?
Loneliness. Disconnection. Lack of social interaction. Did the pandemic cause us to forget how to be kind, or did it exacerbate a path we were already headed down?
I've been a staunch advocate of remote work for a long time. Back in 2010, when my employer went fully remote, the company hired consultants to come in and teach everyone "how to do remote work correctly." How to stay engaged, how to measure work by results instead of hours spent at a computer, and how managers could lead teams.
The near-overnight switch to remote work in March 2020 was done under duress. There was no planning. And while it was necessary to keep people safe, most companies did not go back through an exercise to make sure they had created a supportive work environment. According to a survey by the American Psychological Association, 45% of workers aged 18-25 said they feel lonely while they are working. Whether they're continuing to work remotely today or not, many people in this cohort would have entered the workforce at a time when businesses were shut down due to Covid.
We’re living in a time when empathy seems to be in short supply — not just among individuals, but also in institutions. People feel more disconnected because they are (or were) working remotely for companies that never figured out how to do remote work correctly. And companies feel emboldened to act callously when they're interacting with a remote workforce, versus facing humans in an office. Just look at the example of the Better.com CEO firing 900 people via Zoom. Or a friend of mine who found out that he'd lost his remote job because he was locked out of his computer one morning.
We experienced a confluence of events: isolation, stress, and lost trust that institutions have our backs in any way. It's clear that corporations will always put their own self-interests first.
On top of that, people feel more empowered to be rude online. Going back to my Threads example, Meta has announced that it will roll back its hate speech rules. Studies have shown that hate speech on X/Twitter has increased exponentially over the past few years. So, in addition to loneliness and stress contributing to a shorter fuse and ruder comments, there are no longer any guardrails to prevent outright harassment and hate speech. While people have held hateful views since the dawn of time, systems and decorum kept comments in check. Not anymore.
How can we reconnect?
I have no illusions that individual changes in behavior will have a societal impact. You may make a personal commitment to "be kind," but it won't make a difference without collective buy-in that being kind is the right thing to do as a society.
We've entered this cycle of rudeness and detachment, with no clear way to forge a different path.
And so my advice is: protect yourself. Find your people. You can't force the rest of the world to care about you or your well-being, but some people will freely give their support and friendship. Find those people.
At the end of the day, your employer doesn't care about you. You can't rely on work for socialization. But you can build a professional network outside of the workplace — people who do care about you and your career.
Smash that "block" button rather than put up with people who are rude or harass you. If they were interested in civil discourse, they would have approached the conversation another way. There's no point in engaging. Protect your peace.
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