Social Work Without Being Social
There is a particular kind of unease that arises when form and content drift too far apart. I felt it recently in a job interview for a position in social work. On paper, social work is a profession built around human contact, sensitivity, judgment, and presence. In reality, I found myself sitting across from two people who felt more like accountants auditing a balance sheet.
One was from government HR. That alone already establishes a frame. HR, in theory, is about people. In practice, especially within state systems, it has evolved into a discipline of risk management, compliance, and procedural hygiene. The second person was a social worker. I expected at least some shared language of lived experience, some signal of emotional attunement, some curiosity. Instead, I encountered something closer to an automaton. Not unfriendly. Not dismissive. Simply hollow. Polite, correct, and affectively absent, as if emotional neutrality were a professional requirement rather than a limitation.
Nothing overtly went wrong. No hostility, no disrespect. They followed the script flawlessly. And that was precisely the problem. The entire conversation felt antiseptic. As if life itself had been carefully disinfected out of the room. I kept thinking: where is the circulation here? Where is the sense that anyone in this room has ever actually sat with a distressed child, navigated a fractured family, or absorbed the quiet, grinding chaos that defines real social work?
The irony is obvious. These are professions explicitly labeled “social.” HR. Social work. Fields that, in theory, demand a fine-grained sensitivity to people, moods, tensions, and unspoken dynamics. Yet the representatives of these roles behaved as if emotional sterility were the highest professional virtue. As if curiosity, presence, or relational depth would introduce contamination rather than competence.
This is not about individual failure. It is structural. In bureaucratic systems, especially in low-context societies like German-speaking Switzerland, roles slowly replace persons. Over time, institutions select for those who can perform functions without disturbing the surface. Warmth creates ambiguity. Ambiguity creates responsibility. Responsibility creates exposure. And exposure creates risk. So people learn to flatten themselves. They become correct instead of responsive, neutral instead of engaged, legible instead of alive. The result is an antiseptic professionalism, safe to touch but impossible to inhabit.
In such an environment, social work is quietly redefined. It is no longer about being with people, but about managing cases. No longer about judgment shaped by experience, but about adherence to frameworks. The human being becomes a variable to be stabilized, documented, and processed, not a presence to be encountered.
Sitting in that interview, I realized something uncomfortable. People with strong relational intelligence, people who read rooms instinctively, who bring emotional presence, who tolerate complexity without reaching for scripts, are not obviously wanted here. They are potentially destabilizing. They introduce tone, nuance, and moral friction into systems that have optimized those elements out.
The result is a quiet inversion. Professions meant to engage human fragility are increasingly staffed by individuals trained to maintain distance from it. The work continues. Forms are completed. Protocols are followed. But something essential drains away. Not competence, but vitality. Not ethics, but contact. Not procedure, but presence.
That is why the interview felt like a meeting with two accountants. Not because they lacked intelligence or goodwill, but because the institutional culture rewards abstraction over engagement. Numbers are safer than narratives. Criteria are safer than judgment. Distance is safer than presence.
Social work without being social is not a moral failure. It is what happens when systems become more concerned with their own stability than with the messy reality they were created to address. But it leaves behind a question that becomes difficult to ignore once it has been asked:
If the people entrusted with caring professions no longer feel alive in their roles, where, exactly, has the human part of the work gone?