Rotten Bridges
Our professional networks are sacrosanct. Every person you once sat next to is a long-term asset. Let any connection lapse and you are supposedly sabotaging your future.
Most workplace relationships are not oak trees. They are small wooden bridges. Two people thrown together by chance, a hostile manager, a doomed project, a crisis sprint, or a re-org. You meet in the same trench every week, exchange eye rolls, share war stories, maybe a meme. For a while, that bridge carries real weight. Then the context changes. One of you moves teams, the executive’s shadow no longer falls on both of you, or the project is quietly killed off. The bridge still stands, but nobody walks across any longer.
Sociologist Mario Luis Small shows in Someone To Talk To that people lean on “strong ties” far less consistently than pop psychology suggests. Under stress they often confide in whomever is nearest at that very moment: a colleague they barely know, a former classmate, a neighbour. Support is situational. When the situation shifts, the relationship often loosens without drama.
Mark Granovetter showed that acquaintances can be surprisingly powerful for spreading information such as job leads, precisely because they connect different social clusters. What folklore tends to overlook is that you are not commanded to keep every tenuous connection alive until retirement. There is a difference between recognizing that weak links can matter and turning every ex-colleague into a perpetual obligation.
Reconnecting with dormant ties can sometimes yield useful information and insight, often more novel than what you get from your current network. That said, the ex-teammate who resurfaces does not reach out out of curiosity, but because their new PM wants a free brain to pick. The “quick catch-up” quietly becomes a series of documents to review. The “old pal” funnels you questions their own org should be answering, because you are more reliable than their chain of command. At that point, you are not investing in your network. You are doing unpaid maintenance on a bridge that no longer leads anywhere you want to go.
Rot is a better metaphor than fire for how most of these ties end. You rarely need to stage a dramatic break. You simply stop reinforcing the structure. Over time, the timbers soften and the nails loosen. The path leading up to the bridge changes too. Your footsteps once carved a clear desire line through the grass. Now that you no longer go down it, the grass grows back. The organization may still show a neat line between your two names, and LinkedIn may still display the connection, but there is just a fading track on the ground and a structure slowly giving itself back to the elements.
It is a contextual friendship. You got along because you were under the same local gravity. Remove that field and very little remains. You each drift off in different directions. There is nothing immoral about that. Not all camaraderie is friendship. Some relationships are simply the social scaffolding of getting through a bad patch.
The networking crowd treats every such scaffold as a permanent monument. It whispers that you might need that person one day, so you should always say yes, always hop on the call, always review their idea, always keep the channel open. What it rarely acknowledges is that this turns your finite attention into a public utility for anyone who remembers your name or has your business card buried in the back of a drawer.
A more honest stance is simpler. Some bridges were built for a particular crossing. Their purpose is complete. You do not owe them perpetual upkeep. The rotten bridge does not demand an explanation. It simply returns to earth. And you are free to walk elsewhere.