“Working hard keeps you poor in everything that truly matters. You spend most of the day hunched over a desk, sending emails and attending meetings about meetings.” With this harsh description of part of what an office job means in 2026, writer Leyla Kazim’s essay on Substack begins. Under the title I didn’t work for a year and nobody noticed, Kazim has detailed how she stopped performing her duties without anyone noticing her dereliction of duty. Her essay has been so successful that she has also published a version – of course viral – in the British newspaper The Telegraph.
With a simple method, this woman spent 12 months working approximately 15 minutes a week – the same amount of time she used to prepare for meetings where she convinced her bosses that she was making progress on her projects. The rest of the day, she would open an Excel spreadsheet on her screen where she meticulously planned her personal trips, although to others’ eyes, she was diligently working towards the goals of the software company with an office in London where she was employed. “I did absolutely no work for an entire year. The experiment didn’t end because someone discovered my inactivity, but because I finally left the job myself,” she explains in this essay.
Leyla Kazim has justified her experiment by analyzing how hard – existentially speaking – is the commitment to an office job where there is no clear vocation. “The activities that are meaningful to you —the things that bring you joy to create and do or spend time with your loved ones— are relegated to the margins of your life. That is, approximately before seven in the morning and after eight in the evening on weekdays, plus the crumbs left over from the weekend,” she writes. For her, whose first years working in this London office were more or less happy, everything changed when she realized she couldn’t stand the monotony of a job that didn’t make her feel useful: “Minutes stretch into hours and you wonder how it’s possible that it’s only half past three in the afternoon when you’ve been sitting in that chair for what feels like an eternity,” she explains.
Finally, after months without working, she concluded that “modern work is a game, a theatrical performance. Once you understand the main rule —that the appearance of effort matters more than the actual result— everything changes.”
Leyla Kazim’s case is real, although it closely resembles that of Marisa, the protagonist of the successful novel El descontento. In this work, Beatriz Serrano, its author, perfectly described what it means to “play office if you know how.” In this case, the game took place in an advertising agency. “There are jobs where you can’t perform. For example, a supermarket cashier or a nurse… But when we talk about some office jobs, the tasks are less tangible and not so easy to measure. That’s where what I called ‘playing office’ in the book comes in: going from one place to another, attending meetings, making a lot of noise to make it seem like you’re working,” she explains.
Are our jobs the great plays of our lives? To explain how Marisa gets into the spiral of working less and less, Serrano, who is also a finalist for the Planeta Prize with her second novel Fuego en la garganta, was inspired by a theory by sociologist Erving Goffman. “He developed a sociological theory about our way of relating, in which he said that we function in the world as if we were actors, as if we were always performing. He believed that only in the intimacy of our homes were we truly ourselves. I think that perhaps with our friends, our partner, or our in-laws, the character and the person are practically the same. However, at work, we play characters that are very far from ourselves. Offices may be the places where people stray furthest from their true selves.”
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For Serrano, this phenomenon even applies to the way we communicate. “There’s a language I call ‘corporate speak,’ which is when we talk in the plural about the company’s achievements: ‘We’ve lost an account,’ ‘we’ve earned a million dollars.’ Well, in reality, you’re still earning a thousand euros. But this part where the company is contaminating a person’s identity really caught my attention.”
When Beatriz Serrano wrote El Descontento, she wanted to reflect the behavior of some individuals she had worked with in different companies and all the ‘performances’ she had witnessed. “The book begins with a scene where Marisa is about to enter a Zoom meeting. She is preparing for that meeting like an actor before going on stage. When I was working on the novel, as I said before, I often returned to Erving Goffman’s theory and put phrases in Marisa’s mouth like: ‘Work is just a role that you have to know how to play’.”
Lena Ruiz Pérez is a Cultural Strategist at an advertising agency and, through her Instagram account, publishes videos in which she talks about current work culture and the unhappiness that having an office job causes many people, especially young people. “In the corporate world, a phenomenon occurs where work becomes a kind of trompe l’oeil. When you join, they tell you that your tasks will be these, that your functions will be these others, and that your impact will be this, but then you realize that most tasks are dedicated to things that have nothing to do with productive work itself,” she argues. For Ruiz Pérez, one has to play a very draining power game within companies to win and get promoted. “There are people who pour all their ego and their need to be seen into the corporate environment. It seems that success is measured more in power games and the appearance of effort than in real work.”
But how does having a performative office job affect a person’s mental health? “There’s a book called Bullshit Jobs that analyzes how having a large part of the population in repetitive, and on top of that, stressful jobs, doing tasks they know are tremendously useless, causes enormous damage to the spirit. It’s a book I really like,” explains Ruiz Pérez.
Returning to Leyla Kazim’s essay, her conclusion is that the experiment she carried out is not for everyone. “A bullshit job with room to slack off is one thing. A bullshit job that steals your life and health is unsustainable. This essay is for those who have hours to fill in front of a desk, not for those who are drowning. If you are drowning, that’s a completely different conversation. Your priority should be an exit strategy.”
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