A Gen Z tech worker went viral for saying her corporate job feels like a 'full-time acting gig,' and now wants to inspire others to be themselves at work

• A TikToker sounded off on performative professionalism, saying her job felt like an "acting gig."
• Hannah Shirley, who quit to become a content creator, said the act was detrimental to her mental health.

A 23-year-old tech worker went viral Tuesday for saying her corporate job "feels like a full-time acting gig." She told Insider she posted the video to encourage others to be themselves at work, which includes how we dress and how we talk to colleagues.

Hannah Shirley is based in the Bay Area and left her job at the ed-tech company Udemy last Friday to pursue a career in content creation. In a fitting TikTok amid her transition, she told viewers being more authentic would improve employee mental health and also enhance office culture.

"Why do we show up every day pretending our genuine passion in this lifetime is the growth of the business?" Shirley said in the clip, which has over 360,000 views. In the comments, she called out the inanity of corporate jargon, including phrases like "boiling the ocean" (making a task unnecessarily difficult) and "building the plane while we're flying it" (making decisions as you go).

Viewers overwhelmingly resonated with the message. "We could all speak casually and probably get more done tbh," one wrote. "It's all pageantry and I'm too neurodivergent for it," another said.

Shirley told Insider the performative aspects of work started irking her when she began her first in-person corporate job after finishing school at UC Berkeley, where she was mostly remote.

"As a Gen Zer especially, I'm questioning why we do a lot of these things," she said. "I felt like I was kind of putting on this mask and being uber-professional just because that's how all the other generations have set up the corporate world to be."

Shirley said the artifice is detrimental to employee mental health and company culture.

"It doesn't feel like we can really live our lives when we're just so drained — especially mentally, sometimes even physically — from the character that we play at work," she said. "Office culture should be a little bit deeper than what projects you have going on on your team."

Shirley noted that while Gen Z regularly gets flack for being lazy or questioning everything, she feels her generation is "really brave" for "identifying things that maybe don't make sense to us."

"In the case of my video," she said, "I wanted to be that voice."