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Screenland
The Generations Fantasizing About Boring Office Jobs
“Day in my life” videos filmed at corporate offices fetishize white-collar minutiae. But they reveal something deeper.
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By
Casey Michael Henry
April 21, 2026,
5:00 a.m. ET
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A video opens
on a scene of stark banality. A young woman types assiduously on a keyboard in an unnamed office. A headline announcing, “DAY IN MY LIFE: 25-year-old working 9-5 in corporate america,” appears at the top. What follows is a sequence of white-collar tasks, treated with the bland ceremony of pruning a bonsai.
In another
video
, a woman who works as a “big four management consultant” helps brainstorm marketing ideas with the help of obscure phrases like “Stimulist of Brutal Well Being,” accompanied by propulsive filler music. In another, events like ordinary
conversations are tagged
with precise beginning and ending time stamps. The daily grind is relieved by nightly streaming, with services like Hulu standing in for any individual show or viewing option.
Post-pandemic, there has been a slow creep of such “day in my life” videos, which trace the rituals and etiquette of standard office culture, framing the mundane as aspirational. As the genre has grown, these routines have taken on a mystical glow of pleasing predictability, yielding a tool kit of repeatedly used tropes. There are the ASMR keyboard clacks, the to-the-minute time stamps, the takeout and the caffeinated beverages, the rapt appreciation of basic consumer goods. They occur in comfortable, if prosaic, accounting or consulting firms, P.R. shops, insurance cubicles or regional government offices.
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@KEZIAJCBS
The genre often highlights different spins on Americana, like a
Capitol Hill press secretary
preparing a flier commemorating Pearl Harbor or a man who identifies
as a dad, a landlord and a “Fed”
carving out time for the Pledge of Allegiance and lunch breaks to “fuel the meat suit.” Its conventions are so entrenched that they’ve become elastic, in fact, with one parody video applying the structure to the life of a weapons manufacturer. In previous times, such scenes might have been the backdrop for a satirical novel about crushing corporate tedium or a Mike Judge comedy. Yet, recently, this genre has boomed among creators and their audiences, who seem to yearn for office conventions and etiquette lost in the Covid era to omnipresent blue light and DoorDashed pad Thai.
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