The office friend is practically an institution at this point. You eat lunch together, you vent about the same manager, you text each other memes during the all-hands. It feels harmless. According to one guy who’s hired over a thousand people, it actually isn’t.
Nir Bashan, author of The Creator Mindset and a creativity consultant who has spent his career studying how people think at work, wrote in Psychology Today that workplace friendships are, at best, a distraction—and at worst, a liability. The piece generated more response than almost anything else he’d published. “Nothing I have ever written has received more of its share of hate email—and some love email too,” Bashan told VICE.
The argument, in short: the social architecture of a friendship and the social architecture of a professional relationship are incompatible, and trying to make them coexist in the same building usually blows up both.
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The data, for what it’s worth, pushes back on Bashan’s position. A 2025 KPMG survey found that the majority of workers would trade 20% of their salary to work alongside close friends, with 45% reporting feelings of loneliness in the workplace.
A separate 2024 KPMG report found 81% of workers consider workplace friendships highly valuable. People clearly want this. Bashan’s argument is that what people want and what actually serves them professionally are two different things—and office drama is usually where that contradiction plays out.
“Office drama is the most expensive free entertainment in America,” he told VICE. The friendships people form at work create expectations—loyalty, backup in meetings, someone to agree with their version of events—that professional relationships were never built to handle. When those expectations aren’t met, the friendship sours and takes the working relationship down with it. The creative cost is real, too.
“Creativity requires the freedom to be wrong out loud,” Bashan said. “You can’t do that in front of people whose approval you need socially.” An idea floated in front of a friend-colleague carries social stakes a brainstorm with a professional acquaintance doesn’t.
Bashan isn’t advocating for eating lunch alone at your desk every day. A Capterra survey found only 11% of workers ranked coworker relationships as a top factor in job satisfaction—which suggests most people already sense the office isn’t where their most important relationships live. Professional relationships can be warm, even fun. They just work better when no one mistakes them for something they’re not. The office is not brunch. It was never brunch. Treating it like brunch is how you end up with neither.
The post Why You Shouldn’t Make Friends at Work, According to an Expert appeared first on VICE.
