On the unbearable loneliness of your 9-5 videos

The 'corporate girlies' are making me sad again.

TikTok’s algorithm is a very responsive thing. You sit through one video, look at the comments one time, and set in motion a lengthy chain of what you will be shown for the next week/month/eternity. This can work in mysterious ways. For example: my TikTok algorithm has somehow figured out that I’m engaged, but has failed to accurately assess my budget for the wedding, meaning my For You page is populated by videos earnestly suggesting a £2,000 dress as an ‘affordable’ option. Also: cats!

I must have unintentionally dwelled a touch too long on one genre of video in recent weeks, as interspersed with wedding and cat content are many, many clips of people sharing their ‘a day in the life’. The majority of these have some variation on ‘as a corporate girlie’ in the description. The majority of these are currently making me very sad.

This is not a judgment on the work these women are doing. The videos rarely get into the specifics of the jobs, instead showing snippets of the commute, of purposeful typing, of getting a fancy salad from the office’s canteen. The women seem reasonably content and until they say otherwise, there’s no reason to assume the work they do isn’t fulfilling.

What makes me sad is the loneliness inherent in these vlogs. I watch them and am reminded of just how isolating the working world can feel. I’ve seen multiple ‘days in the life’ in which the protagonist doesn’t appear to exchange any words beyond ‘a flat white with oat milk, please’. These women wake up at 6am, go to the gym, commute for an hour, then sit at a desk surrounded by empty chairs, attend Teams ‘meetings’ in soundproof booths and nod along, eat their fancy salads at their desk, send emails, type a lot, leave the office late, commute back home, make themselves a solo dinner, watch TV, do their nighttime skincare routines, and go to bed.

Now, some important notes: these are TikTok vlogs of people’s jobs, which may have confidentiality issues around filming interactions with colleagues. The clips are edited to suit a specific narrative and the less aesthetically pleasing, un-ASMR-y moments of collaboration may have been snipped out. And work requires deep work. A lot of the time you do need to work in quiet isolation.

But… when there’s so much chat around the importance of being in the office for in-person collaboration, I have to ask: why are so many offices seemingly forcing people in just to be alone all day? Why, when so many traditional workplaces aim to sing the praises of being in one room, together, are so few actually facilitating that type of working?

I can’t see any justifiable reason to make workers come into the office just to do Teams meetings and tasks that could easily be done from anywhere. And I think we should question our acceptance of this as ‘just how work is’, and the presentation of an isolated existence as what a ‘day in the life as a corporate girlie’ looks like.

We often think of loneliness as an issue for the elderly, alone in their homes, long stretches of retirement ahead of them. But we know that loneliness is far from exclusive to this group. Being in the working world should be a protective factor, but it’s very often not. It’s all too easy for workers to slip out of view, to sink into isolation without anyone really noticing. Consider the coworker whose work friends left the company, leaving them with no one to get lunch with. Or the one who’s a team of one. The manager who got a promotion but hasn’t quite gelled with the people on her level, and is alienated as ‘the boss’ by her former colleagues. It’s comforting to assume that they’re fine, that they have a social life outside of work, that they don’t need to have that connection in their working hours. That might be the case! It also might not be.

We also often think of loneliness as not a work issue; that’s something personal and thus not bosses’ concern, right? Not so. We know that loneliness is directly linked to burnout, that it lowers work performance and increases the amount of time workers take off sick. Connection is a key component of job satisfaction, increasing retention and fostering more creative thinking. Creating a working environment that allows for and encourages social connection (and true collaboration) makes pragmatic sense… but also, it feels like a moral duty. Work takes up such a significant portion of our lives; those with power should be doing what they can to prevent that time from being ruinous to our mental wellbeing… and that includes making social connection a priority.

So, yes, I’m banging the hybrid drum again. I’m not anti-office or anti-WFH, but anti-100%-one-all-the-time-with-no-thought-given-to-how-to-tailor-work-to-fit-each-environment. Working from home is great for many reasons, especially mental health wise, but loneliness is often brought up as a reason not to do it. That argument doesn’t stand up to questioning, though, if the response is to just make people be lonely in the office. A hybrid – but crucially, a tailored – approach gives workers the best of both worlds… as long as each working set-up is designed to maximise its respective benefits.

By which I mean: consciously redesigning office time to be for the purpose of social connection and collaboration, and allowing workers to work from home when they’re doing tasks that are better done solo. But also: figuring out ways to foster real connection even when people are working remotely. Understanding that connection at work matters and treating it that way won’t cure all loneliness or fix all job-related issues, but it’ll go a long way… and reduce the number of miserable ‘day in the life’ videos filling up my feed, at the very least.

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Work-related reading recs:

• Love this piece from my colleague Amy Beecham: You accidentally became important at work – now what? A career expert explains how to deal with it

• Very interesting read about the role of light in workplaces and why the go-to fluorescent lighting in offices needs scrapping

• How to stop feeling stagnant at work when you’re working non-stop

• The secret to happy employees? “Paying attention and acting on what truly matters.”