I dislike this type of comment as it presumes that one person's personal experience is "reality" or a reasonable representation of what everyone else has experienced.
It assumes that something as complicated as personal relationships can be can be distilled down into some sort of "average" or "normal" protocol and that if your experience doesn't align, then you are an outlier, not-average, not-normal.
I don't think the concept of "average" or "normal" is particularly useful for something as multi-dimensional as establishing personal relationships.
Some of my longest and best friends are people I met in my first job after college.
It's my own experience, and the experience of literally everyone I've ever talked to about it, and something many people have written about in articles about the difficulties of making friends as an adult. No doubt there are people who maintain friendships with people they've worked with long after leaving a job but I don't believe it's very common. If your experience is different then I think you are an outlier. There's nothing wrong with that. You're better off than the rest of us.
Here is an interesting article that discusses the misunderstanding of what "average" means in a multi-dimensional context: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
You may actually be right, in the sense that most people don't form long lasting friendships from co-workers, but you can't conclude that just from your personal experience. It was your elevation of your personal experience to universal truth that I was pushing back on. Basically don't use anecdata as evidence of some larger truth.
GP is spot on, though, and there is absolutely no way around it.
Relationships with most coworkers is motivated and defined by work circumstances. The only reason you found yourselves sharing a space and a schedule and experiences is the fact that someone pays you to be there, but otherwise you would be doing something else somewhere else with someone else. More importantly, if any of you switches jobs, your time and focus and sometimes even city or country will change. Even though professional relationships can flourish into personal relationships, the vast majority and the norm is that the only reason you're even aware you exist is that you want that paycheck and consequently you have to deal with each other.
* assuming that the distribution of experiences is oriented towards a single "cluster" (probably a better statistical term for this)
* assuming that your personal experience just happens to be aligned with that cluster so as to be representativeMore than half of all my friends outside the office started out as coworkers in the past. And the remainder are almost exclusively people that I met as a result of social activities with these 'original' friends.
Let's put it this way: how many current and past coworkers do you include in your current social, non-professional group?
Turns out, coworkers are humans and can have the same outside work interest as me. Be that music, board games, cooking, reading, hiking, etc.
Sure, most people from previous work I don't have any contact with. Same is true for most people I met outside work. Friends can come from everywhere, I don't see a reason to pre-filter.
It's easy to believe the people you work with are friends to socialize with, but the reality is that most people cut ties with their coworkers as soon as they change job, especially early in your career when you're hopping from one job to another every few years. Those people are temporary friends at best.
I recommend doing everything you can to cultivate friendships outside of work.