Choose Your Path: Grindset or Girlboss
giving it 110%
There are two major ways that working life is romanticised: I call these two approaches the ‘grindset’ angle and the ‘corporate girlboss’ angle. The first puts overworking on a pedestal, asking you why you haven’t become a CEO by 25, while the second shows you all the glitz and glam of a low-commitment job with an exorbitant pay cheque.
Since I started working at my Big Girl Job, LinkedIn has become a part of my daily life. I get to the office, log in, and see who’s connected with me, whether my articles have been shared anywhere, and what the random people I’ve added are up to. This is something of a shameful secret, one I have to joke about with friends to reassure them that no, of course I’m not a corporate robot! I don’t enjoy the site, I just have to use it. “It’s hard to get by without it” I say, with a fearful look in my eye. “It’s just a part of the world of work.”
The truth is, I do not like LinkedIn. As a deeply jealous person with a permanent inferiority complex, it’s a great way to undermine my own achievements in comparison to others’ and be filled with misdirected rage as I see another smiling profile picture proclaim their latest job update or fun company day out.
LinkedIn might actually be worse than Instagram at making you feel bad about yourself. People are always talking about the challenges they’ve faced at work (much harder than your stupid little problems), the work they’re having to put in, how exhausted they are… and then photos of an office that looks like the lovechild of Google and an Architectural Digest video. Not only are their job and their problems more important than yours, but they’re having their crises in a room with a beanbag chair and a city view while you’re taking a breather in a freezing cold stairwell with an ominously stained carpet.
Perhaps the thing I hate the most is how seriously people take their posting. This is essentially an evolving CV, where you can let people know of your latest professional updates and prove yourself to be good at your job, and a tool to find people in your industry. So why do LinkedIn influencers (LinkedInfluencers) exist? I have nothing against these people as individuals, but the constant repetition of the same turgid messages gets tired very quickly. So many posts have this exact format:
A photo of someone smiling, maybe in a cafe or on the beach — regardless, the lighting is excellent.
A few introductory lines along the lines of ‘a year ago, I never would have thought…’, ‘when I left my 9-5, people thought I was crazy…’, or something similarly expository.
A list of bullet points, where each bullet point is an emoji, describing all the great things in this person’s life/ all the things they didn’t expect when they made some career move/ some generic tips about working hard but ‘taking care of yourself’.
I’m sure that these started with the best of intentions, but it’s hard not to look at them cynically. Surely not everyone is quitting their 9-5 to start a small business, or leading a fulfilling and exciting life as a ‘consultant’. Everything becomes a way to curate a personal brand, problems packaged into little #inspirational stories complete with creative writing class-approved exposition, problem and resolution.
It’s important to remember, LinkedIn tells you, to be working all the time. Even when you’re not at work, you should be posting about your job, your side hustles, your career goals. There’s a very surface level message of avoiding burnout and taking time for yourself, but for the majority of the time this is only a gateway to do better at work in the long run. Even your downtime is about climbing the ladder.
This romanticisation of working life and the quote-unquote grindset is seen beyond LinkedIn, of course. I recently overheard a woman talking about the internship programme at her company, and scoffing at the fact that someone staying half an hour overtime was meant to show commitment. Clearly she was expecting more, a body and soul sacrifice to corporate life. It took significant self control not to make any comment.
On the other side of the coin we have the corporate girlboss (gender neutral), exemplified by the much-parodied trend that was going around of young businesspeople documenting a ‘day in the life’ at their job in which the most work they did seemed to be answering a single email, or maybe opening a Macbook in a boardroom. Rather than the stress that many celebrate, the majority of their time is spent hanging out (‘networking’), eating nice food and going to cool places. Obviously, it’s kind of the dream — these people are being paid stacks of money to do essentially nothing. Some of them were even remotely working from swimming pools. Actually in the pool, laptop on the side, lounging around and doing some occasional ‘research’.
These two approaches to work are opposite ends of the same spectrum. One states that you must devote yourself entirely to work, pushing through any challenges that you may face in the name of career progression and a good LinkedIn post. On the other side, your job is the focal point of your aesthetic and lifestyle, but the actual amount of ‘work’ you’re doing is greatly reduced.
Neither of these is a positive approach to life. If your job is your entire world, your life orchestrated by whatever schedule your boss assigns to you, you lose a lot of yourself to something that is likely quite inconsequential. It’s good to find something positive in your job and enjoy working, just as it’s good to care about what you do, but it shouldn’t be all that you are.
I’m lucky enough to get to go to quite a few fancy events for my job, eating artistically-presented food and spending time in upmarket conference rooms. But I don’t mistake it for reality. I, as myself, am not a part of this world; I’m not snacking on caviar, throwing back expensive champagne and sauntering into five-star hotels like I belong there if I don’t have my conference name badge on. I’m there to represent something other than myself, and while I eagerly take every freebie I can get I know that none of it is ‘real’ — no matter how much I want to, I couldn’t be in these spheres just as myself. The occasional classy event also doesn’t negate all the hours spent sitting in a poorly climate-controlled office staring at a computer screen.
Work isn’t all glamour or all grime — it depends on the day. It’s good to appreciate the good parts of your job (without doing so you have a much higher chance of going insane, scientifically speaking), but living a life based solely around work, whether for the good, of events and free snacks, or the bad, of incessant pressure, leaves your real, non-work life to go by the wayside.
I think I end most of my posts by reflecting on what a hypocrite I am, and this one is no different. I’ve been known to overwork myself and, lying inert on the floor with grey-blue smudges under my eyes, think to myself “yeah, this is a good way to live,” seeing something romantic in my fatigue. I also like going to work events that require me to avail myself of an overcomplicated cocktail and pretend to understand what people are talking about, adjusting my posture to look like I fit into the rarified setting. Hopefully this will be a reminder to myself that those extremes aren’t mutually exclusive, and that neither of them should be mistaken as a single, true, reality.