Well working remotely helps, ha. But I do have to be on calls constantly with my manager and others. But before when i was office based, it was hard. I had the same struggles at OP. I often just didn’t have the emotional capacity to eat lunch with my team and to engage in bullshit small talk conversations for an hour. It was always the same conversations over and over again. One guy would talk about his kids and complain about his mean wife. Another guy would argue politics. One woman would just talk about other boring bullshit and she was incredibly judgemental whenever I’d talk about my life. The worst was when the COO would sit with us and just straight up brag about the expensive things he owned. No joke. This happened a ton.
I’d eat at my desk a lot. And you can bet your ass that people noticed and some even gave me shit for it to my face.
I may need to clarify this. I didn’t mean to say that I don’t want to speak to anyone at all. That’s just not realistic with most jobs. I just mean that I don’t feel the need to be friends with them, and I’m not interested in getting to know anyone outside of the immediate professional duties we have to perform. I don’t care about their personal opinions or their families. I just don’t fucking care. In fact, I actively don’t want to know about anyone at work. I just want to do my job and leave/sign off and talk to my actual friends/family. I have no room for work relationships. I only have a finite amount of energy and I rather just put that into my work.