I remember the first time I was told that it was bad for employers to feed lunch to their workers.

I was working with an outside contractor on a project for the American Enterprise Institute, and for lunch, I brought him upstairs to the AEI dining room. This is a great perk, as employees and scholars can get delicious and healthy hot lunches daily for a very reasonable price — and then sit together, talking and lingering.

But while we were filling up our plates, this contractor told me he thinks it’s inappropriate for employers to feed their employees. Feeding us and bringing us together in the name of fostering camaraderie isn’t properly what an employer should do, he told me. In fact, he thought it was exploitation.

“They’re just trying to stoke good feelings and satisfaction,” he said.

“I think making people happy and fostering relationships is good,” I replied, confused. After all, I had just written a book about how our culture is too disconnected — how we don’t belong to enough things.

“I see it as exploitative,” my guest said.

Work isn’t about relationships, feelings, and connections, he argued. It’s a simple transaction: You give them labor, and they give you money. Any money they spend on your feelings or making you feel at home is about tricking you into complacency.

At first, I was floored by the idea that making people happy at work was somehow greedy capitalism, but pretty quickly, I understood his mindset: Employment is a simple transaction.

One cartoon from a decade ago perfectly captures that mindset: A job applicant, when asked to be totally honest in a job interview, only says, “I am willing to perform services in exchange for currency.” That’s the beginning and end of a job, in this view.

I think that’s wrong. I think employment can and ought to involve relationships. I think supervisors should be mentors and even role models. I think, as a culture, we are far too transactional and insufficiently relational.

And yet, I think parts of our culture are excessively attached to work.

I once knew a boss who seemed to take it personally when anyone but the lowest-level hourly employee left for another job. One day, at a company celebration, this boss said the company was his “family.” Then, it made sense to me. I would be pretty upset if my brothers, wife, or children gave me two weeks’ notice because they found a better opportunity with the Collinses.

Work should not take the place of family. Yet today, work seems to take the place of family — and even more important things, such as faith.

Workism, as writer Derek Thompson calls it, is endemic among millennials. “For the college-educated elite,” Thompson writes, work has become “a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community.”

Workism, he writes, “is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

Workism is a major cause of our baby bust and falling birthrates. If you find your main identity and worth in work, you will not tolerate family, which is the chief rival to work.

Of course, work often goes together with family — and with faith. I write this on May 1, the day the Catholic Church honors St. Joseph the Worker.

So, I propose a middle ground. Work should be a real relationship but not our most important relationship. Ideally, the jobs we do ought to form our identity, but they shouldn’t be our identity. We should find meaning in our work, but we should find more meaning from faith, family, and community.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

On that last score, work should be one of our communities but not our only community.

So, you shouldn’t feel exploited if your boss buys you lunch. But you also should try to make sure you’re home for dinner.