I noticed my colleague eats lunch in his car every day instead of the breakroom and understood he's not being antisocial—he's exhausted from spending 8 hours pretending to be a version of himself that doesn't exist at home

Every morning at 12:30, I watch the same scene unfold from my office window. My colleague walks past the breakroom, ignores the cheerful invitations to join lunch, and heads straight to his car in the parking lot. For months, I thought he was unfriendly. Maybe even a bit rude.

Then one day, I saw him sitting there, head tilted back against the headrest, eyes closed, completely still. Not eating. Not scrolling his phone. Just... being.

And suddenly, I understood. He wasn't avoiding us. He was recovering from us.

This realization hit me like a freight train because I recognized myself in that moment. Back when I was deep in my financial analyst days, I used to lock myself in bathroom stalls just to breathe without performing. I'd sit there, fully clothed on a toilet seat, finally letting my face muscles relax from the constant professional smile I wore like armor.

The invisible weight of workplace performance

Think about your morning routine for a second. You wake up, maybe stretch, shuffle to the kitchen in your ratty pajamas. You're completely yourself. Then something shifts as you get ready for work. You select clothes that say the right things. You adjust your voice, your posture, your entire personality to fit what's expected.

By the time you walk through those office doors, you've transformed into Professional You. And Professional You might be nothing like Real You.

During my nearly two decades as a financial analyst, I became an expert at this transformation. I laughed at jokes that weren't funny. I attended happy hours when I wanted to be home. I nodded enthusiastically in meetings while my mind screamed about the absurdity of spending forty minutes discussing font choices for a presentation.

The exhaustion wasn't from the work itself. It was from the constant translation between who I was and who I needed to be.

Why authenticity feels impossible at work

Have you ever noticed how we describe work relationships? "Work wife," "work husband," "work friends." We literally categorize these connections as separate from our real relationships. There's a reason for that.

Most workplaces have unwritten rules about acceptable personalities. Be friendly but not too personal. Be confident but not arrogant. Be creative but color inside the lines. We squeeze ourselves into these narrow boxes, cutting off pieces that don't fit.

I remember sitting in team meetings, listening to conversations about weekend plans that always seemed to involve activities I'd never choose. Golf outings. Wine tastings. Networking events disguised as fun. I'd smile and say, "Sounds great!" while mentally calculating how many hours until I could go home and tend to my garden in blessed silence.

The pressure to conform isn't always obvious. Sometimes it's just the subtle understanding that being too different makes you less promotable. So we perform. We become workplace actors, and the performance is exhausting.

The lunch break rebellion

When I finally understood what my car-lunch colleague was doing, I felt a deep respect for him. He'd found a way to carve out thirty minutes of authenticity in an eight-hour performance.

In his car, he didn't have to engage in small talk about TV shows he doesn't watch. He didn't have to pretend to care about office gossip or feign interest in someone's detailed description of their child's soccer game. He could just exist without the mask.

This reminds me of something I learned during my burnout recovery at 36. My therapist asked me to describe a typical workday, and I realized I was using phrases like "put on my game face" and "switch into work mode." She pointed out that I was describing work like a costume I wore, not a place I went.

That's when it clicked. The exhaustion I felt wasn't just physical or mental. It was existential. I was tired of not being myself for the majority of my waking hours.

Understanding the energy cost of pretending

Research backs this up. Emotional labor, the effort required to manage feelings and expressions to fulfill job requirements, is genuinely draining. When there's a gap between how we feel and how we must appear, our brains work overtime to maintain the facade.

Think about the last time you had to be nice to someone you couldn't stand. Remember how tired you felt afterward? Now multiply that by eight hours, five days a week, for years.

During my analyst days, I thought my exhaustion meant I was working hard. I wore it like a badge of honor. But looking back, I realize much of that tiredness came from performing friendships rather than experiencing them. I was so focused on being likeable and promotable that I forgot to check if I actually liked the person I was pretending to be.

Finding pockets of authenticity

So what do we do with this understanding? We can't all eat lunch in our cars, and honestly, isolation isn't the answer. But we can start recognizing the performance for what it is and give ourselves permission to step offstage occasionally.

I've learned to build small moments of authenticity into my workday. I stopped pretending to love coffee and started bringing my favorite tea. I quit fake-laughing at things that aren't funny. I began saying, "I need a few minutes to think about that" instead of giving instant responses that Professional Me would give.

These seem like tiny changes, but they add up. Each authentic choice is a small rebellion against the exhausting performance.

More importantly, I've started looking for the other car-lunch people. Not literally, but figuratively. The colleagues who also seem tired of pretending. The ones whose eyes glaze over during forced team-building exercises. The people who light up when you talk about something real instead of work-appropriate small talk.

The path forward

Understanding my colleague's car lunches taught me something valuable about compassion. We're quick to judge behaviors we don't understand. Someone seems antisocial? Maybe they're just tired of being social in ways that drain them. Someone appears unfriendly? Perhaps they're conserving energy for relationships that matter.

After nearly 20 years in finance, I learned that understanding human behavior was far more valuable than understanding market trends. We're all performing to some degree. We're all exhausted from being versions of ourselves that don't exist anywhere else.

The solution isn't to stop caring about work or to become unprofessional. But maybe we can start questioning which parts of the performance are actually necessary and which parts we've just accepted without thinking.

Final thoughts

Next time you see someone eating lunch alone, sitting in their car, or politely declining another team happy hour, remember they might not be antisocial. They might just be tired of being someone else.

And if you're the one sitting in your car, know that you're not alone. We see you. We understand. We're all just trying to find moments to be ourselves in a world that constantly asks us to be someone else.

The real question isn't why that colleague eats lunch in his car. The real question is why the rest of us don't.