Why Your Job Feels Like a Video Game You Didn’t Sign Up For

Dave from accounting just posted a photo of his morning coffee with the caption 'Fueling up for another day of disrupting the spreadsheet game 💪☕️ #MondayMotivation.' His actual spreadsheet has been broken for three weeks, but his personal brand is absolutely thriving.

Welcome to 2025, where pretending to be a thought leader on LinkedIn is somehow part of everyone's job description.

While AI might be freeing us up from a bunch of tedious routine tasks in the office, we've barely noticed that we've been plunged into a new world of work that feels like a real-life video game.

Good luck trying to just do your job; there's no room anymore for non-playable characters.

Showing up in the new world of work requires you to bring main character energy to social media.

Whether you're an employee, a digital nomad or a business owner, the technology that was meant to simplify our lives has instead become an ever-present pressure, demanding relentless self-promotion and visibility.

The to-do list is endless: build a brand, network, promote products, attract clients.

It's not uncommon for workers to have to maintain a presence and respond across 17 different platforms during the workday.

In this new economy, your personal and professional value is directly tied to your brand's visibility.

Everyone is a marketing department now.

And social media is a gamified overlord who decides who is credible and who isn't, determined by likes and followers.

In a world that prioritises quick content creation over substance, it's easy to wonder, did I wake up in an office version of Squid Game?

Those who don't go viral are left behind. In this new landscape, tangible achievements stitched together over a career have been replaced by digital metrics.

LinkedIn has become like a corporate karaoke night that never ends. Everyone's forced to perform, most can't carry a tune, but we all have to clap anyway. The awkwardness is palpable when we're forced to celebrate our own mundane achievements. "Thrilled to announce I successfully attended a meeting today! #blessed #leadership #synergy." We're like proud toddlers showing off finger paintings, except the refrigerator is public and your boss is watching.

Then there's the exhausting pressure to have hot takes on every trending topic, even if it's completely outside your field. A supply chain manager suddenly becomes a geopolitical expert because the algorithm rewards timely commentary.

The author Tim Ferriss offered a somewhat cynical yet widely embraced strategy for gaining professional credibility in his pre-social media book The 4-Hour Workweek.

Once, you'd gain respect by offering a free lecture at a local college, become a member of some prestigious-sounding industry group or run your workshop as a free trial in return for a positive testimonial and the chance to put the company's logo on your website.

But now? Credibility is defined by digital badges. Certified Expert. Leadership Coach. Course Completed.

I recently witnessed the algorithm bestow a LinkedIn Top Voice badge upon an academic in a field unrelated to their area of expertise, purely for posting plagiarised chunks of news articles over the course of a year without contributing a single original thought of their own.

There are entire courses now that promise to make you a LinkedIn influencer (for a fee).

The formula is simple: post three to five times a week, recycle content, and make comments on as many important people's posts as you can.

We are told by US internet personality Gary Vaynerchuk that the masses are too ignorant, stupid or busy to have noticed this is the 15th time you have posted a platitude.

Maybe they didn't see it. Maybe it will be helpful this time.

Today I saw a post encouraging LinkedIn users to "put yourself out there and post often, even when you don't feel like it".

Dark triad leadership (narcissism, sociopathy and Machiavellianism) is a hot topic in management research.

A study found that one in five CEOs are psychopaths.

Encouraging these people to be their authentic self on social media seems like a terrible idea.

This latest LinkedIn post trend feels like taking your kid to a birthday party in Beverly Hills, knowing you'll never be able to measure up.

When it is done well, social media can lead us to wonderful new connections and some fascinating finds. Threads is rating highly on both these fronts right now. But there's the rub: the selling of ourselves or our company is far less evident on that platform.

The metric to succeed on LinkedIn right now feels like it requires louder and louder shouting into the void.

I refuse to spend hours every week on writing like-chasing posts filled with dozens (literally sometimes) of irritating emojis along with copy paste AI summaries of the link the person is posting in order to get a badge I don't want bestowed upon me by an algorithm that will change what it wants next week.

Our goal surely shouldn't be to be the most popular or to go viral. That path guarantees everyone feels inadequate.

Your ideal customer is probably too busy or disinterested to be on LinkedIn scrolling through hundreds of posts about the same news story, announcements about people leaving or starting new jobs, or the hip crowd attending cool parties at Davos or Burning Man.

Before we write any more news headlines about the tragic state of worker productivity and engagement, we should stand back and look at the gopher-like existence of the modern employee.

To level up in this video game, you must master digital whack-a-mole from your cubicle all day long.

Slack message from your coworker. Bam. LinkedIn post. Winner sound. Attend unnecessary meeting. Failed that level. Attempt to write the important thing. Fend off simultaneous Teams and Zoom calls. Survive a bit longer albeit with the third coffee of the day. Enter data into the CRM. More coffee. Check how many impressions and likes the LinkedIn post got.

You are a Sims character now, low on energy, water, food and sleep but if you escape the game before 8pm you'll just have time after the commute to recharge ready to play again tomorrow.

What if our brains weren't suffocated by thousands of people doing the same thing across multiple platforms?

Imagine if we had time to read, reflect and savour something meaningful.

By slipping the chains of the algorithm we can give ourselves the time to create genuinely good, satisfying work.

The only flaw in this revolutionary plan?

The AI overlords would need to make the post go viral.