A former colleague and I met for smoothies this afternoon to catch up. He left our company last summer after being angry about a lot of the processes and politics he faced internally. The company he went to was a public company but had no New York office, so he was 100 percent remote in his role. Initially, he found it great: he could work from home full time, make a proper breakfast every morning, schedule everything around his gym sessions. But gradually, he got lonely and felt miserable. He felt like all he did was stay at home for work and after work. There was no separation of time. It would be 8pm suddenly, and he realized he was still working and hadn’t eaten any dinner. The work itself plus the remote nature of his role got to him, so he ended up resigning this week.

The grass isn’t always greener when you leave. I thought about this when I was leaving him and going back to my office today. He decided he wanted to leave this type of role completely and is trying something new. But he says he still has no regrets about leaving our company — he couldn’t take the politics anymore.

But realistically, when do you ever fully leave politics? You can leave a company and its individual issues, but then you’ll move on to the next one, and it will have its own set of issues and back talking. It just keeps going.