Task Masking? Babe, I’m Actually Working

Sorry you mistook burnout, betrayal, and a broken system for bad attitude.

”Stretching yourself as thin as our supposed snowflake millennial/gen z skin — and it still goes unnoticed?”

For those averse to tiktok brain rot, “task masking” is the act of looking busy enough to evade managerial micromanagement. Basically a survival tactic when you’re a foot-soldier knee-deep in the workplace trenches.

Think: huffing and puffing at your desk, typing like you’re defeating the final boss of corporate fuckery, Usain Bolting through the office with a battered notebook and half-dead laptop in hand. You know the sort.

I love how Gen Z name everything.

All the way back in yesteryear when I was under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights or wrecking my achilles standing for eight hours on a shopfloor (can we all agree retail is when we all decided humans are the worst?), we just called it “looking busy.” Or when your manager was on their way, it’d be like “*insert dickhead manager name* is coming” then we’d all disperse and fiddle with POS displays or click random shit on Salesforce.

“Task masking” is so official but I wonder if that’s the influence of the internet’s evolution and social media - everything is categorized and labeled. (Ok enough of that tangent but probs a good idea for another substack.)

Task masking is great… but what if you’re not pretending?

What if you’re actually working your arse off — meetings on meetings, slacks on slacks, circling back to ideas someone put a pin in three sprints ago, looping in vaguely relevant stakeholders to fast-track rotten low-hanging fruit, all to deliver a quick win that’s neither quick, nor a win, but will definitely make it into someone’s slide deck?

So, you’re overworked and underappreciated.

Your very real labour gets yeeted into the corporate black hole never to be seen, referenced or used as currency in your competency framework ever again.

Why, though? Surely if you have a worker who is consistently delivering value, you’d want to recognise that. They’re skilled, meticulous, efficient. It’s give and take, no?

…

Well, I think we’re all at the point now where we know meritocracy doesn’t exist — at least not in the way we were taught to believe.

We were raised on the myth that success follows your work ethic, your abilities, your talent. And yes, those things matter — just not in the way you were led to believe.

It’s not enough to do your job well. That’s cute.

The real game is knowing where to place your effort — and spoiler: it’s not in your task list.

It’s in proximity to power. It’s in becoming besties with Heads of Department. It’s in aligning yourself with the people who make decisions — or at least overhear them in passing — so that one day, if you’re lucky, someone might say your name in a meeting you weren’t invited to.

It’s about embedding yourself in that bro-coded, after-work drinks culture, where banter is currency and charisma is king. If you don’t know the name of their dog, what they brought back from their “cheeky little weekend in Lisbon,” or what nut milk their kid is allergic to, forget it. You’re not in the room. You’re not even on the list. And no one’s checking it twice.

Because if you’re not socially visible? If you’re not embedded in the internal influencer network? Then you’re just a Slack avatar haunting the sidebar, attached to a job title no one understands and work no one remembers.

And now let’s take what’s left of our cognitive function and direct it toward the people in positions above you.

The ones collecting bonuses for “leading from the front” while taking ideas from their subordinates.

Are they serving corporate excellence realness with engagement rates that make marketing weep, product adoption so high it looks suspicious, sprint velocity that fractures time and space, and churn rates so low you'd think the customers were being held hostage?

Or — and hear me out — did they simply get lucky during the company’s “we were building the plane mid-air” era? Legacy employees who just happened to be standing near a decision-maker when a promotion was being handed out like a party bag. People who said “yes” enough times and never asked annoying questions like “Should we have a plan?”

Now they’re in leadership roles with no clue how to manage. No framework for development. No sense of how to build a culture where recognition and progression are normalised instead of mythologised.

But they played the game. They always play the game.

They mastered the delicate art of seeming irreplaceable. Not by being brilliant — let’s not get silly — but by orbiting power just right. Telling the right people what they want to hear. Aligning themselves so neatly with company goals you’d think they were born with the mission statement tattooed on their lower back.

Whether they’re actually good at their job is beside the point. What matters is the vibe of competence. The performance. The loyalty cosplay. They played the long game — where loyalty is treated like a skill. A currency. A reason to keep you around long after your usefulness has expired.

And now?

They’re part of the furniture. Beige. Unmovable. Slightly stained. No one really knows where they came from — only that they were always… kind of there.

So if the system is broken — unfair, rigged, designed to reward proximity over potential — how are you supposed to keep dreaming about climbing the corporate ladder?

I mean, what ladder?

Half the rungs are missing, and the ones that remain are so slick with politics and bullshit you’d slip, smack your head, and come to just in time to see someone else using your neck as a step up.

And even if your mind does drift there — just for a second, just to imagine what it might feel like to be seen, to be recognised — how long could you keep it up?

How long could you play the game, keep the mask on, nod in the right meetings, pretend to care about the Q4 vision board... until what?

Until you retire?

Until the charade becomes your personality?

…

And what about your real dreams?

The ones that lived in your chest before rejection emails took the breath out of your lungs.

Before gatekeepers locked you out after hearing 5 seconds of what you had to say.

The dreams that belonged to a version of you that still had hope. That still believed you could figure it out, no matter what dickhead screamed 'could never be you' with relentless refrain.

Can you still feel the shards of hope beneath your skin — pressing just hard enough to remind you that the vision is still alive, even if you’re not sure you are?

Do you have the energy for that?

Can you dig through your overdraft at the end of the month, hoping there’s enough left for a course, a mic, a paintbrush — a chance on yourself?

To keep choosing yourself, again and again, even when everything around you says: don’t bother?

So before you come for Gen Z — before you cuss them out for being fragile, lazy, unwilling to work. For “task-masking.”

Think back.

To the moment you realised the blueprint you were told to follow was a fucking lie.

Now ask yourself: if you’d known it was a lie from the start — would you still have stuck to it?

Or would you have said fuck this, and looked out for yourself instead?

Refused to tear yourself apart for a system you didn’t create, didn’t break, but somehow ended up being responsible for fixing?

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