Being a corporate drone was souless. But years of inane tasks gave me my life back

What does it take to be good at a job? Is it dedication? Creativity? Organisation? It’s a hard question to answer because so often it is dependent on an individual’s personality, circumstances and expectations.

Perhaps a better question for the modern work environment is what does it take to look like you’re good at your job?

Artwork: Marija ErcegovacCredit: Marija Ercegovac

This is a question I can answer with some authority. Generally, it involves turning up a few minutes early, making small talk with colleagues, sending emails containing open-ended questions. Nodding in agreement during meetings. Groaning something like “What a day”, when clocking off 15 minutes after the official end-of-day time.

I’m not the first person to exist in this state. Corporate drones have existed for as long as corporations have. But this kind of dissociated effort is having a moment. The mission in these roles, which have been christened “fake email jobs”, is to suggest that you’re burdened by responsibilities, even if no one can say what they actually are.

If you were to share your job title to someone at a party, for example, they’d probably have follow-up questions about what your role entails because the title of the job itself is so opaque, but walk away still fundamentally unclear about what it is you do during working hours.

To many, this kind of career existence might sound awful: the kind of drudgery that causes an eight-hour workday to drag on like a millennium. But for fans such as myself, they can be oddly liberating. Hell, most of the time they don’t even require having your work email on your phone.

To work a fake email job is to understand that doing work and performing work are two similar but distinctly separate things.

Those who do work are motivated by a sense of progress. Around them, things change and evolve. Sure, that might not always be for the better – doing work doesn’t necessarily mean doing good work. But there is an intentionality about it.

Those who perform the work are subtler. The goal of this breed of professional performance artist is to be invisible. One must be present and seemingly competent enough to fade into the background. Show too much skill and ambition and you could raise an eyebrow. Be too incompetent or frustrating and you’ll draw a sigh. Good and bad attention present the same issue – they get you noticed. Instead, a job well implied (rather than done) rewards you with the pleasure of moving through the day as unbothered and unburdened as possible.

I have given the impression of being good at my job for most of my career. I spoke up in meetings, promptly replied to emails and was among the first in and last out of the office. But, if I’m honest with myself and the HR department, my work wasn’t really my strong point. Rather, I was skilled at the performance of work.

Despite my expertise in this area, I haven’t always played this particular game of charades. Early on in my working life, I invested more time, energy and emotion into my jobs than I was ever paid for. I deeply cared. But over the years, I began to realise that whether I gave my heart and soul or an iota of attention, the results were largely the same. I was no more fulfilled or rewarded when I committed myself fully as when I floated by.

Despite my employer’s assurances that we were a family or that I had a bright future, they never really cared about me. So why should I care about them? Wouldn’t a better bargain be to turn up on time, be as non-disruptive as possible and save all that dedication, creativity, organisation and passion for my own life?

Not every job can be approached this way, of course. We all hope our doctors, teachers, dentists and firefighters are present in body and mind when they punch in for their shift. But the deep secret behind fake email jobs is that they can be approached this way because most of these roles probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.

One thing I often considered when in these jobs was what would happen if I wasn’t there? If I just didn’t show up one day, would it really matter? The answer was always probably not.

Maybe my coworkers would pick up 5 per cent more slack. A manager could have to do marginally more menial labour and possibly feel a little less powerful with one less person to boss around. The office would have one less body.

Deep down, I never felt bad about this ruse because we were in on it together. We all knew that much of our professional lives were pointless, but we persisted because we were wedded to the delusion that our existence should be crowded with deadlines and questions like: “So, what do you do?”

Society is obsessed with employment and careers. We’re conditioned to judge ourselves and others by our resumes. When any other approach to existence is seen as a delusion, all we can do to resist is create our own illusions. Ones where we’re very busy but will still 100 per cent reply to that email right away.

Wendy Syfret is a freelance writer and author based in Melbourne.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.