Corporate Performance Nobody Auditioned For
On May 14, N’wa Mucanyi, posting as @Khanani, tweeted something that should have been printed in every job description in America: “The amount of performing required just to fit into corporate spaces is actually crazy.” Ten thousand likes. 1,500 retweets. 238,000 people who scrolled past it and felt something shift in their chest because, no matter what job you have, you’ve dealt with this on some level.
I replied: “I have templated responses in my head: ‘of course,’ ‘no way,’ ‘that’s amazing.’ Most of the time, I didn’t even hear what they said.” Five comments. One retweet. 138 likes. Small numbers next to hers, but the kind of small that means something. Because those 138 people didn’t just like the comment. They understood the scripts we create to survive our 9-to-5s.
There’s a sociologist named Erving Goffman who spent much of his career arguing that life is theater and that we perform different versions of ourselves depending on who’s watching. He called it “the presentation of self.” What he didn’t fully account for, writing as a white man in the 1950s, is that some people are scrutinized more closely than others. In many workplaces, people of color are expected to be especially careful about how they speak, react, dress, and carry themselves.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: no human being is happy every day. Not one. Your favorite CEO isn’t either. Yet the workplace has created an entire performance economy where “of course!” and “that’s amazing!” are currency. If you don’t perform the expected emotion, you risk being labeled difficult, disengaged, or not a culture fit.
And the fix isn’t complicated. It’s not therapy-speak. It’s not another wellness Slack channel. It’s not a “bring your whole self to work” mural in the lobby that nobody actually means.
The fix is simple: let people be human.
If someone says, “Honestly, I’m overwhelmed today” in a check-in, the appropriate response shouldn’t be concern. It should be recognition. Everyone in that room has been overwhelmed on a Tuesday. That isn’t insubordination. It’s honesty.
A degree doesn’t inoculate you against this. A master’s doesn’t. Neither does a decade of experience or a title with “Senior” in front of it. You can have every credential in the world and still be handed the same demand: perform, or risk being read as difficult.
Do the job. Hit the deadline. Be decent to the people around you. But stop confusing decency with performance, and stop confusing a resting face with disrespect.
The best work I’ve produced has come from rooms where people could say, “I don’t love this direction,” without being quietly filed under not a culture fit.
Because people shouldn’t have to audition for the right to be themselves at work. You hired a person, not a performance. And if the only version of someone your workplace knows how to value is the one smiling, nodding, and saying “of course,” then the problem isn’t their attitude.
It’s the culture.
Written by Ketia Jeune
