The GREAT Misallocation

Image: Two friends in their 50s embrace warmly. No professional network ever hugged you back like this.

For ten days this summer I followed my aunt around her Greek village, trying to resolve some questions around connection, particularly in the world of work.

She navigates obligatory proximity with grace. Every day, the same 1200 people. Loose-lipped Nikos, Yiannis with his vaccine conspiracy theories, both neighbours she doesn't particularly like. Yet she manages interractions with what looks like effortless consistency and genuine warmth.

I found corporate obligatory proximity exhausting. Same principle - people I didn't choose, forced together by circumstance, expected to maintain some baseline of functional relationship. Where my aunt seems effortless, I'd end the day depleted. Where she's mastered a system that works, I felt like I was drowning in shallow connections that demanded a lot and nourished very little.

What's the difference? I went to the village to understand.

Susan Pinker's research on Sardinian centenarians shows that even low-quality social contact provides measurable health benefits, she calls it "social regulation": regular, predictable interactions that support wellbeing regardless of personal affinity. I haven't ever loved that mode of perfunctory relationship, being more sensitive to deeper emotional connection. But I was open to seeing what I could learn from a society where you exist with a relatively small group of people you don't select until you, or they, die.

Watching her operate, I noticed she greets everyone by name and maintains exactly ONE personal fact about each person: "How's your grandson's football team doing?" Nothing deep, just one human detail. While the engagement is a tad performative and surface level, she engages quite genuinely in communal problems such as the perennial water pressure concerns, the mayor's empty promises, and the rubbish collection without needing to like the people she's discussing them with.

This didn't feel satisfying. Five days in and I felt an emptiness that made me want to escape back to the anonymity of the big smoke.

What I haven't mentioned yet are those deeper connections that were constant during those ten days including her daughter and granddaughter in Germany (they speak at least three times daily) and friends she speaks to on the phone every day. Not the people she sees day in and day out in the village.

What I was observing was a system for managing obligatory proximity. The village provides civic function and fills days with interaction, but doesn't provide meaningful connection. Genuine community requires some form of conscious curation. So Pinker's research might be spot on for those who have the constitution to find shallow networks sustaining. For the rest of us, it just proves we're studying the survivors.

TRANSFERRING THESE LESSONS IS PROBLEMATIC

Back in Athens, I considered why I'd never developed the skills my aunt has mastered and in fact why I bother trying to develop those skills at all? Let me explain.

My aunt’s had four decades to calibrate her social system with the same 1200 people, about half the size of my last big corporate environment, the Havas Village. My last years in advertising involved constant rebuilding: new leads, strategic pivots with new people, endless restructures (pandemic and otherwise), client changes, businesses melding together. Each time starting over with a completely different cast of characters.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle calls this "life mix" - constantly shifting between different social contexts with different rules, unlike the stable social hierarchy my aunt operates within.

There's a cost to our brains that rarely gets discussed. Research shows that we process workplace exclusion using the same neural pathways as physical pain. When you're constantly in the high-stakes early phase of relationship formation whilst professionally vulnerable (new role, uncertain future, unfamiliar environment), your brain starts treating colleagues as potential threats or saviours. You’re not exactly relaxed.

The village bypasses this entirely through stability: scripted interactions, stable hierarchy, the same 1200 people for four decades. And even if modern work offered village stability, some of us simply don't have the constitution for maintaining hundreds of shallow connections. I've always wanted fewer, more meaningful connections. The sycophantic keeping in touch, maintaining relationships as insurance policies just in case I might need them someday feels weird to me. Why maintain connections with people I simply worked with as a credit for some future favour? Doesn’t that energy belong with people that matter now?

THE GENDERED BIT

Unsurprisingly there's a feminine perspective worth exploring here.

The weak ties approach which favours many connections, nothing too deep, is inherently masculine in its operating principle. Mark Granovetter's 1973 research studied male professional networks and assumed you can maintain hundreds of lightweight connections with roughly equal cognitive and emotional cost across all people.

That assumption doesn't hold for many women, particularly those navigating change in midlife (which can start as early as 35 or younger). Its proven that we disproportionately bear the burden of emotional labour in workplaces: managing others' emotions, smoothing over conflicts, reading the room, remembering the birthday cards, acting as unofficial therapist when colleagues are stressed.

Now add hundreds of weak ties connections on top of all that emotional labour. Same expectation as men, double the work. No wonder we're knachered.

So why have we been sold this model as some universal professional practice? Robin Dunbar's research shows we can maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, but modern workplaces force us to interact with hundreds more. What happens when you're wired for depth over breadth and modern professional life demands the opposite?

WHAT PHILOSOPHY TELLS US

I wasn't finding satisfying answers in psychology, sociology, or neuroscience, so I turned elsewhere: Buddhism and philosophy.

Aristotle identified three types of friendship: utility (useful to each other), pleasure (enjoyable company), and virtue (mutual respect and growth). Most workplace relationships fall squarely into the first category, useful connections that don't actually nourish souls.

Corporate culture has pulled off a neat trick. It sells us utility relationships dressed up in the language of community and belonging, then pathologises those who recognise the difference as 'bad cultural fit' or people who 'need to be better at networking.'

I think back to the Havas Village fondly - clever, curious people, work I enjoyed. But with 2000 people and constant churn from restructures, client wins, losses, and the relentless movement of advertising talent, it could never be the village the name promised. Not because anyone failed, but because the structure wasn't built for it. We were there for work, not shared life. Why did I exhaust myself trying to force depth where the architecture didn't support it?

Let’s look at Buddhism - because why not? It enshrines three jewels of practice: the Buddha (the teacher who shows the way), the Dharma (the teachings themselves), and the Sangha (the supportive community of practitioners). Sangha, or community, is essential in Buddhism but also essential to its success is stability, genuine mutual support, and depth. Corporate environments, by contrast, offer transactional relationships, constant churn, and performative connection, then call it community. Looking at my aunt, she isn't confused about civic function versus sangha. The village provides one; she cultivates the other through chosen relationships. Corporate environments demand civic function, dress it as community, provide no stability for depth. We get swept away by the promise, thinking it will nourish our souls.

It doesn't. It won't. It can't.

WHO DOES THIS MODEL ACTUALLY WORK FOR?

Some people thrive with broad, shallow networks. Most of us don't, and the evidence is overwhelming.

Some brains need more recovery time after social interaction. Some get overwhelmed by constant low-level social demands. Whether you're introverted, highly sensitive, or neurodivergent, large corporate environments with hundreds of people drain you faster than you can recharge.

Gen Z grew up maintaining hundreds of digital connections. They're brilliant at it. Yet 75% report feeling lonely.

So this model - maintain extensive shallow networks, stay constantly available, provide village-style consistency without village stability - fails broadly. Neurologically diverse people can't sustain it. Even digital natives who should excel at it are miserable.

the misallocation

We've got this backwards. We pour our social energy into hundreds of shallow workplace connections — performing enthusiasm, managing emotions, staying "in touch" — and often arrive home with little left for the people we actually care about. Modern work wasn't designed for depth, and our brains weren't built to make hundreds of weak ties nourishing. I kept asking myself: why am I spending so much effort here, when the relationships that truly sustain me are elsewhere?

It only dawned on me after years of trying that I'd been attempting profound connection in the equivalent of an airport security queue, when everyone else was just hoping to keep their shoes on. The 'village' had promised culture and community, but was actually delivering something far more transactional – practical, streamlined, built for utility. They weren't doing it wrong. I'd just believed the branding and joined the wrong queue entirely.

And the structure actively prevents anything else. Constant churn, endless reorganisations, and matrix structures make depth impossible. Recent organisational psychology research is damning: repetitive reorganisations erode clarity and support, downsizing destroys trust, and people end up feeling both over-connected and profoundly lonely.

We’ve been sold two lies. First, that workplace connection can replace actual community. It can’t. Even villages don’t work this way. Second, that maintaining extensive shallow networks is universally sustainable. It isn’t. For many of us, it’s actively depleting.

Here’s what actually matters for professional function: reliable delivery, clear communication, collaborative competence. What doesn’t matter? Coffee chats, forced enthusiasm for team drinks, pretending utility relationships are friendships. That stance may be read as antisocial or “not a team player.” Better that than draining yourself performing connection you don’t have capacity for, with people you didn’t choose, in service of a model that leaves you empty.

In modern work, you’re always connecting with new teams, new bosses, the metaverse division you didn’t ask for etc. The need to reconnect never ends. But most of these ties will dissolve. What lasts is the people you choose. The real question: will you have the energy left for them?