Co-workers? their boss? some entity of the company they are employed by?
Are these farmers/fishermen working solo? it could be their family, but generally in such a situation their family is also employing teenage labor in the form of offspring.
>You would just talk to your family when back at home.
how does that work when you have no family? In the classic times you'd also gather around at a bar to discuss the day with strangers. That doesn't quite work out so well in modern urban environments where even bars come in as groups.
As far as social situations go, colleagues rank somewhere near the bus driver I greet every morning in terms of how much fulfillment they give me.
If I graduated amidst COVID, I may legitimately not have anyone to talk to.
I guess some people have all the luck. By the time I graduated:
- my family was across the country
- neighbors have never been really friends
- close friends mostly went to San Fransico. No one was in my town.
- Meetups didn't form any relationships.
If there was no work I'd just be lonely, and not for the lack of trying.
At one point I went to a lot of tech meetups and I think they're cool for other reasons but not for forming meaningful relationships. The things that have been most fruitful in that are ones that bring people together for value-based reasons: religion, volunteering, organizing for a specific local cause or movement.
In between are activity-based things like book clubs, sports leagues or game groups. They are good for meeting people to hang out with but individuals in them tend to be transient and I haven't formed many deep friendships from them. Sometimes the line gets blurry though, like martial arts dojos & boxing gyms are activity-based but tend to form tight bonds.