The workplace is one of the primary sites in modern life where human beings spend time near each other without actually meeting. You see your coworkers daily for years. You know their work habits, their professional opinions, their performance under pressure. You may know nothing about their lives. This is not neutral. It is a particular kind of relationship — adjacent, not connected — that workplaces actively produce and most people accept as normal.
To meet a coworker as a full person is to acknowledge, in some practical and ongoing way, that the person across the desk or on the other side of the Slack channel is living a life of the same scope and complexity as yours. They have a history that preceded this job. They have concerns that have nothing to do with the quarterly review. They have relationships, health, ambitions, losses, and an interior life that the professional context is not equipped to see and has no particular interest in seeing. The professional context exists to extract and coordinate a specific kind of performance. It is not organized to recognize the full person, and most of its norms actively work against that recognition.
The habit of not meeting coworkers as full people is so common that it has become invisible. We have professional norms that make it almost impolite to acknowledge the human dimensions of the people we work with: don't make it personal, stay focused, keep it professional. These norms have real purposes — they prevent certain kinds of exploitation, maintain the boundary between work and private life, allow people to maintain whatever separation they choose. But they also function as permission to treat the people you work alongside as professional functions rather than people. Over time, this produces working relationships that are simultaneously close and entirely superficial.
The cost of this is distributed in ways that are easy to miss. The coworker who is going through something significant — a sick parent, a failing marriage, a health crisis — and who shows up for work because the work needs to be done, is doing so inside a professional context that has almost no language for what is happening to them. If they are lucky, they have a manager who handles it well. If they are less lucky, the professional apparatus treats their declining performance as a performance problem and nothing more. The fact that a full person is in distress is not invisible — it shows up in the work — but the professional frame routes that signal through the wrong diagnostic. The person becomes a performance issue rather than a person having a hard time.
Meeting coworkers as full people is not the same as requiring intimacy or abandoning appropriate professional distance. It is something more modest: remaining aware, in your daily interactions, that there is a full person behind the professional function. Asking real questions occasionally. Noticing when something seems off and saying so. Carrying the knowledge that the project team member who seems difficult might be dealing with something you don't know about, and letting that possibility temper the judgment you would otherwise make.
Law 1 — We Are Human — is not an abstract statement in this context. It is a practical description of what you are dealing with every time you interact with a colleague. You are dealing with a human being, not a professional unit. Acting on that description consistently — in how you speak, how you listen, how you interpret behavior, how you respond to difficulty — is the daily practice of Law 1 in the workplace. It is not large or dramatic. It is, done consistently, transformative.