Behind the scenes at the magic kingdom

Photo by Bo shou.

If you're a tech person of a certain age, there's a good chance you've spent time in Vegas. Maybe it was for COMDEX or CES or BlackHat. The rite of passage starts when your company offers to fly you to Vegas and put you up in a hotel. In exchange, they just need you to staff the trade show floor for a few hours a day.

A few hours a day turns out to mean at least 12.

Trade shows run on humans. They require an indefatigable team, fuelled by black coffee and half a smushed tuna sandwich someone liberated from a tray on their way across the conference hall. By the time you get back to the hotel, you aren't sure you can ever say hello to another human. But then you wake up at 5am, get down to the show floor and do it all again.

If you've ever worked a trade show, you know that by the second day, you no longer feel like yourself. The smile on your face is a bit too broad. You pause, unnaturally, anticipating the same question that's come up the last twenty times you've given the exact same demo.

Nothing can touch you because you're not really you. You're playing a character. With a thick armour of protection. Whether the demo goes well or poorly. Whether the conversation is engaging or eye-gouging.

Plaster on that big ol' smile. Pull a branded polo over your head. And do not deviate from the scripted demo.

We used to call it going full Disney Princess. Where you spend 72 hours as a human avatar of capitalism. And find it takes a couple days before you can have normal conversations again.

Back to reality

Eventually you leave Vegas. At some point on the flight home, you realize your cheeks are sore from smiling so hard. Which is weird because you don't remember feeling happy. Because you weren't.

This thing. Where your cheeks are sore from smiling, even though you're unhappy. This is Instagram. Some of you just gasped. Please do not @ us. We're not talking about your Instagram presence. Your profile is grounded and relatable and not at all manicured in the way we're describing. We mean other people's Insta – and in that context, you all know exactly what we're talking about.

The issue is not so much the Insta-nonsense when it's contained to Insta. It's what happens when that nonsense spills into other platforms. And right now, we are witnessing the Instagrammification of LinkedIn.

We're all for putting a best foot forward. We're all for people bringing their whole selves to work. We will heart all the baby announcements, wedding announcements, new jobs, or promotions. But the thing that's incredibly jarring is seeing very positive, very shiny, very curated work updates interspersed with mass layoffs. And, worse still, to see very shiny posts about those mass layoffs.

We don't need it to be all doom and gloom. But what does it mean when there's no longer space to talk about what's working and what isn't? Why is it a problem that so many folks are playing corporate caricatures, on behalf of their employer's brand or their own?

Reality bites

The last few months have felt a little bit like everyone's coming out of their caves. We've had more invites for coffee, or patio hangs. We've sent more of those invites ourselves. Not for the first time since the pandemic started, but in greater volume and to a broader group of people. Like we all have this intuitive feeling that it's time to reconnect, or past time. And also that we have the energy for it now, which has not always been true.

There's a consistent undercurrent to those conversations, though. Behind the LinkedIn shine, a lot of the people we talk with right now are deeply dissatisfied with their work. Worse than dissatisfied, really. Despondent. A sense that they've made it through a storm, smiled through the whole trade show, but for what? They use words like, "lonely." And, "burn it all down." And, "hopeless."

We're in the midst of a crisis of meaning when it comes to work. And it sure doesn't help that everyone on LinkedIn seems to be having a happier, shinier, more photoshopped experience than you are. Or that when you try to talk about the un-shiny parts, what you get back is, "Sure you hate your job, but everyone hates their job, right?" Neither of these are true. But both of them are disorienting and isolating.

You've got homework

Last month we wrote about finding your puffin. It's still important that you do, and several of you wrote to say thanks for the kick in the ass. Our pleasure.

But we heard from a few of you that the ask was too big. That making a change towards excitement and enthusiasm was just not a thing you could reach in a single hop, nice as it sounds. Some of you are too deep in the pit to know which way to look for something better. Okay, fair enough.

The urge to reconnect, though, that's a signal. Those patio coffees, or zoom calls, or sending TikToks to a friend you haven't seen in a while. Like intuitive eating, these are your body's way of telling you that you need to re-activate some connections. Not only because human connection is a powerful source of meaning on its own. But also because some part of you knows that when you're trying to untangle something big, talking it out helps.

So that's your homework. If you're struggling to find meaning at work. If you're feeling sort of isolated and blah. If the daylight savings time change just has you upside down. Whatever. Your homework is to find someone you can have a real conversation with about work. Ideally a few someones. Old colleagues, old bosses, peers, family, friends, it can be anyone really. As long as you and that person can agree at the start of the conversation that you're not going to be trade-show shiny today.

Complain, if you need to get the complaining out of the way. But then get to the real stuff. Talk about what's missing from work right now. What you hoped this job would be that it isn't. What you need that you aren't getting. And how you know that's something you need. Try to remember the last time you felt really connected to something meaningful, and measure the distance between then and now.

Treat yourself and your person as objects worthy of study. Get curious about answers that feel too superficial, and push back hard if either of you accidentally fall back into Disney Princess. It's hard to hold space for each other this way, we know, but it's also amazing what comes out of it.

Once you get to the end of three of these conversations, we guarantee you'll see things differently. When you give yourself over to this exercise in good faith, we've never seen it fail. You may or may not have unlocked a Deep Truth about yourself, but you'll definitely have a richer perspective on where things sit. You'll be in motion. And you'll have rekindled three friendships, which is an end in itself worthy of your time.

If you don't know how to start that conversation with them, feel free to blame us. Forward them this email with an opener like, "Hey this made me think of you — can we catch up?"

- Melissa and Johnathan