Trailhead: Anne Helen Petersen. "LARPing your job". Culture Study (2019-05-05).

There are two aspects of this newsletter topic that came to mind: (1) how unnecessary it is to act busy at your job as a means of justification for having the job; (2) the sad strange yet admirable who are highly skilled at making it look like they are working when the results say otherwise.

At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: we still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.

It is admirable when you discover someone who has made a steady career out of looking like they do steady work. If it works, then obviously a good performance they're putting on. It's not something I would aspire to--I am somewhat militantly anti-performance, for good or ill--but I recognize in that behavior someone who has discovered what The Game is really about, and is playing it the way it was designed, if not the way it was intended.