Illustration by Cady Siregar
A Twitter meme has the power to give more insight into the mental health of society-at-large than most employee morale activities which is probably why you’ve been finding those tweets about workplace burnout so funny over the past few days. Sometimes the only available antidote to the seven-day work week is a template joke about the absurdity of your work-life balance.
The format is incredibly simple, to the point that even I was able to do one. Start with some basics like your salary, how “busy you were,” how many hours you worked, and whatever other office-related drudgery springs to mind. Then, memorialize your legacy with a list of achievements that sound way cooler than “I got overtime pay.” Like “burning down the temple of artemis at ephesus” or filling out “The FADER’s Songs of the Summer bracket.”
Other options include bad decisions, the kind of embarrassment that leaves you hoping the earth swallows you whole, and/or witnessing a pivotal moment in history, such as “the death of a pop-tart on national television.”
For some reason, there also seems to be an oddly disproportionate number of sports-related tweets about Steph Curry and some guy named Brock Purdy— not to mention how the NFL somehow managed to botch a straightforward meme format by saying nobody would care if you RSVPed to their wedding and then bailed for a football game.
That said, some of the most slap-in-the-face truths have come from the finance bros. Take the anonymous guy behind Twitter’s infamous Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA, Esq., who remains extremely on brand with his comment about your “fancy title” paling in comparison to “how hot your wife is.” Or, the other viral finance guy, who just flat-out admits that people will remember absolutely “nothing” about you.
Perhaps there’s a reason for that, seeing as how Wall Street does have a longstanding reputation for 80-hour work weeks facilitated by substance abuse. Workplace burnout is getting so bad that people have upped the language to “burnout crisis,” with Fortune reporting that about 82% of employees are at risk.
We may already be beyond help; data collected by MyPerfectResume shows that 88% of workers report they’re already burnt out, while Slack’s Workforce Index also acknowledging the rising rates of burnout, resulting from near-constant pressure to work around the clock to keep our jobs. We’re reaching a point where even a lawyer’s six-figure starting salary doesn’t seem worth the 12-hour days, and “almost all U.S. physicians surveyed feel burned out on a regular basis, with many having considered career change.”
There was a reason the “Great Resignation” happened in the first place, and why members of China’s younger generation are continuing to spiral in the wake of the “lying flat” protest movement. So even though this new wave of “nobody will remember” memes are meant to be outlandish and over the top, the first half of the text is just the honest truth. Because when faced with yet another depressing reminder of how overworked and underpaid we are, we might as well laugh about that one time we called our teacher “mom” during our Uber driver side-hustle.
