The girl is desperate; her employers are cold. They’re heartless, she’s unhinged. Or she’s “based” and they’re drones; they’re mindless, she’s relentless; she’s out for answers and they’re just doing their jobs.
These are among the conflicting judgments I saw rendered upon yet another viral TikTok clip as it was held up like a talisman to entrance the Twitter crowds. In this one, a young woman named Brittany Pietsch secretly films herself getting fired on a video call by H.R. shills she’s never met. She knows it’s coming and she’s ready for them with demands: explain why I, specifically, after mere months of earnest hard work, am being cut loose from your fellowship.
They are obviously in the midst of delivering mass layoffs and have nothing to offer her but factory-assembled cant about “collective calibration” and “revenue leadership.” There’s a chance this is all staged, as many sketches of corporate Zoom-life are. But it doesn’t quite feel that way. The company is mentioned several times by name—it’s Cloudflare, the cybersecurity giant. And the call has the stuttering rhythms of an actual difficult conversation, the lame attempts at groping for adequate language that characterize a real communications breakdown. It feels true to life, at least.
Onto this primary text there were layered, like one digital filter after another, a thousand thousand stories about What This Means. It is a parable of childish entitlement, an indictment of metrics-addled company dunderheads, a poignant window into the drab home offices of post-COVID work.
All or some of these accounts may have truth to them, so far as they go. But cumulatively they have the effect of burying the girl herself beneath a jumbled scrawl of competing narratives, distorting her image until it loses all its human specificity. It’s hard to see the woman for the memes.
All I could see or hear, beneath the din of commentary, was a girl pleading to be known. “Can you explain for me why Brittany Pietsch is being let go?” she asks. “I have like, really given my whole energy and life over the last four months to this job.” That’s when she’s closest to tears.
There are people in the company with whom she thought she had a connection; none of them are anywhere to be seen. You get the impression that on other Zoom calls she saw the first warm flush of encouragement on her manager’s face—party projected, maybe, but partly real—only to find the windows abruptly shuttered and the door abruptly locked, her on the outside. Maybe she really thought this company was different. Its recruitment copy probably said so, enthusiastically. It is not.
Asking for compassion from your office job means bringing a beautiful desire to the wrong people. In the 2005 movie Cinderella Man, the title character’s boxing manager accuses the promoter Jimmy Johnston of acting heartlessly. Bruce McGill, as Johnston, replies: “My heart’s for my family, Joe. My brains and my balls are for business, and this is business.” We can barely live without love; it’s natural to crave it. Getting and giving it at work are both good things, if they happen to be on offer. But if your job is your only source of emotional nutrients—if you give your “whole energy and life” to it—chances are there will come a day when you find yourself starved.
And it strikes me that Brittany Pietsch is not the only one who’s starved. I’m thinking for example of the way people react when their favorite Internet personality says something they vehemently disagree with. The primary feeling you usually see expressed in such cases is betrayal. The favored pundit has not simply made a mistake; he has “betrayed conservatism” or whatever cause he has been enlisted to defend.
Why should we feel betrayed by bosses and podcasters? Did they promise to stay true to us, or to represent our views exactly as their own? If they did, we shouldn’t have believed them. But we enroll them as our standard-bearers and implicate them in contracts they never signed. We want so much from each other that no one seems prepared to give. Is it because we’ve appointed these people to roles in our lives that we’ve otherwise left gapingly empty? Roles like mentor, father, lover, friend?
The internet is loud; most people can’t get their views heard above the general roar. So they find a broadcaster they agree with, and maybe in some corner of their minds a voice whispers: “people listen to him, so he’ll speak for me. What I say through him will matter.” Now disagreement means wounds and disappointment, which are bound to follow.
You don’t need a YouTuber to speak on your behalf: you need friends who listen to you and care what you think, so that you won’t rely on internet strangers to do that job. (They won’t feed the hunger anyway, even if you acquire your own audience. I promise.) You don’t need a boss that sees how hard you work and honors you for it: you need a family that does.
I know, I know, it’s not that easy: dating is a blood sport and plenty of social institutions are in rubble. But it turns out we can’t replace them with careers or politics. I imagine that the effort to do so is what really lies beneath many of the online trends we try to attribute to other things—the passionate fits of ideology, the bitter grumblings about the opposite sex, the inanities of corporate care-speak. We pass it all off as reasoning and principle, but underneath much of it is a whimper of pain far more basic than we care to theorize about. We’re lonely. We want love.
Which can be had, but not first and foremost from bots or bosses. Rumors about the death of social life have been somewhat exaggerated, if you’re willing to start by turning yourself into the friend you’d like to have. The ways of doing so are just as mundane as you’d think, though perhaps more enjoyable than you fear: go to church. Read interesting books and talk about them. Log off once in a while. Other humans, real ones—God’s crowning gift—are out there. The first step is confessing you need them.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
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Somebody’s sister (no relation) should write a book about this
This episode kept bringing to mind a line from a poem I wrote early last year (that ended up being my first published poem, something I likely would not have attempted were it not for Young Heretics), and though I run the risk of being "that guy that's self promoting", I'll share the snippet:
I am the imitation that yearns to be the thing
But slip with ease to Circe's proffered role.
I root for the Ashes of a lost and ruined claim,
Yet digitize the thirst inside my soul.