[pandler]

> I would argue most relationships with coworkers aren't genuine. You might have a different metric for this, but mine is that when you change jobs, these relationships evaporate.

True, my relationship with my coworkers is scoped to my work environment, but I don't think that makes them not genuine. Rather, they are circumstantial, limited, and probably have a time limit on them. I don't value them any less for what they are. In fact, I embrace them for what they are: a meaningful aspect of the large chuck of my life that I spend working, even if they never exit outside of that realm.

Some of them do, like you say, slip through the cracks and do become friends outside of work.

As an analog, I spent about 5 years traveling and working remotely out of a backpack. I met A LOT of people, and I had many genuine and sometimes perspective-changing interactions with people. Most of them I don't keep in touch with anymore, but that doesn't devalue the time that I spent with them, even if we knew from the moment we met that we would only ever interact face-to-face for a few months.

Transactional and/or circumstantial and/or scoped to some time-bound aspect of your life != genuine