“Here’s a day in the life working at Google,” the clip opens. We see a woman in Los Angeles drive to the office, ask for valet parking, go get iced coffee and a banana, and attend to some tasks on a blurry screen. She brags but refuses to eat crates full of snacks, then describes her complimentary salad in detail. Office space highlights all around it include a nap room and a Harry Potter-themed conference room filled with flickering lamps and house flags.
“Welcome to a day in my life as a 22-year-old living in New York and working at Google,” another clip begins. This employee describes a day of meetings, but he films food and interiors: open areas filled with colorful armchairs, a room full of plants. The bathroom is stocked with Listerine, Lubriderm lotion, and bobby pins; the fridges are stocked with Red Bull, baby carrots and a wide selection of juices. She brings a barbecue plate. She opens drawers labeled “snacks,” each one filled with more treats than the last: gum, mints, M&Ms, several bags of chips. She closes with a view of Chelsea Piers.
Workplace TikToks walks us through a day at a job, typically a high-paying role in tech, banking, or consulting. The energetic storytellers, often women in their 20s, show compressed, curated versions of their routines: trips, coffee, chores, amenities, lunches, meetings, happy hour outings. Videos seemed to peak, as a format, in 2022, when workers showcased the elaborate perks of working for tech and financial giants. In most, the substance of the work was incidental; the storytellers bypassed spreadsheets, deadlines, and logs to such an extent that many saw the videos as evidence of just how spoiled and indolent the class of young professionals had become. But the clips weren’t about work. It was about the performance of a class role that comes with the job.
The offices, consequently, transmit expense and comfort. The textures are soft, the food abundant. Tasks exist in negative space, and conveniences fill the rest. These videos play the same role as the movies and shows that once provided aspirational images of different industries: the rom-coms about magazine editors, the TV dramas about glamorous lawyers, the stories of young tech workers in desk-filled offices. foosball, neither of which went over the parts where the characters answered emails. Young people have long turned to the media to form ideas, even misplaced ones, about work. On TikTok, they get those ideas not from Hollywood producers, but from the workers themselves. In fact, the people who make TikToks of the workday often claim, in voiceovers and interviews, that they are trying to increase access to exclusive workspaces and educate young workers, especially those from groups they have historically they have been denied access to elite jobs.
