“Here’s a day in the life working at Google,” the clip opens. We watch a woman in Los Angeles drive to the office, get valet parking, fetch some iced coffee and a banana and tend to some tasks on a blurred-out screen. She shows off but declines to eat drawers full of snacks, then describes her complimentary salad in detail. Highlights of the office space around her include a nap room and a Harry Potter-themed conference room filled with flickering lamps and house flags.

“Welcome to a day in my life as a 22-year-old living in NYC and working at Google,” another clip begins. This employee describes a day of meetings, but films food and interiors: open areas filled with colorful couches, a room stocked with plants. The bathroom is stocked with Listerine, Lubriderm lotion and bobby pins; the fridges teem with Red Bull, baby carrots and a wide selection of juices. She fetches a plate of barbecue. She opens drawers labeled “snacks,” each containing more delights than the last: gum, mints, M&Ms, various bags of chips. She closes with a view of Chelsea Piers.

Workplace TikToks walk us through a day at a job — usually a well-compensated role in tech, banking or consulting. Energetic narrators, often women in their 20s, show off compressed and curated versions of their routines: commutes, coffee, tasks, amenities, lunch, meetings, dip out for happy hour. The videos seemed to peak, as a format, in 2022, as workers showed off the elaborate perks of working for tech and finance giants. In most, the substance of work was incidental; the narrators glossed over spreadsheets, deadlines and check-ins to such an extent that many saw the videos as evidence of just how spoiled and indolent the young professional class had become. But the clips were not about labor. They were about the performance of a class role that comes with the labor.

The offices, accordingly, convey expense and ease. The textures are smooth, the food is abundant. Tasks exist in negative space, and amenities fill the rest. These videos play the same role as the films and shows that once provided aspirational images of different industries: the romantic comedies about magazine editors, the TV dramas about glamorous lawyers, the stories of young tech workers in offices strewn with foosball tables — none of which belabored the parts where the characters answered emails. Young people have long turned to media to form ideas, including off-base ones, about work. On TikTok, they get those ideas not from Hollywood producers but from workers themselves. Indeed, the people making workday TikToks often claim, in voice-overs and interviews, that they are trying to increase access to exclusive work spaces and educate young workers, especially those from groups historically denied access to elite jobs.

The clips were not about labor. They were about the performance of a class role.

Much of what these creators flaunt, and what seems to attract the ire of critics, is that work does not appear to dominate their lives. Instead of being embarrassed by their hypercorporate jobs, they revel in how peaceful and lucrative a 9-to-5 (or a 10-to-whenever) can be. Some seem to take a mercenary approach to these jobs and the cushy lifestyles they afford, treating employment less like a vocation and more like a hack. One Facebook employee begins working in the office at 10:30, spends a few hours “analyzing metrics and identifying root causes,” goes to lunch, and is out the door, heading to Trader Joe’s, by 5:45. A user comments: “my sign to move to tech, thanks bestieeee.” The poster responds “This is why I’m here.”

Some workplaces have tacitly endorsed workday TikToks about their companies — free marketing and recruiting — while others, especially on Wall Street, have reacted harshly, chiding workers for exposing things like unappealing hours. As for the videos, they, too, can be lucrative. JeeIn Youn, 23, a management consultant in Chicago who makes regular workday posts, told me in September that she paid her rent using TikTok earnings.

“Come with me to steal company assets from TikTok because I was laid off,” a woman begins. We follow her as she scans into the office, showing off its brightly lit hallways and views of Manhattan. She fills her bag with Cheez-Its and Skittles (“This is where they keep the company assets”) before laying her company laptop and badge on a desk, relinquishing them.

Late last year, the vibes changed and the belts tightened. Historically flush companies started laying off tens of thousands; Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced plans to trim 12,000 workers. Suddenly the world flaunted in workday TikToks felt like an Eden — or, perhaps, a hubristically decadent era. In January, a laid-off creator posted a grim new kind of TikTok: “A Day in My Life Getting Laid Off at Google.” We see her receiving an ominous text from her boss, finding her email locked, trading messages with colleagues and crying. Then she goes to Disneyland and gets a churro. The visual language — food, computer screens, selfies — mirrors the workday clips, only warped and darker. “I don’t really know what’s next for me,” she says, “but I will be vlogging my journey and posting more content, so feel free to follow along.” Her “A Day in My Life Working from the Google LA office” video, posted earlier that month, featured a speakeasy and arcade games and received fewer than 200,000 views. Her layoff clip got nearly five million.

In one video, that root-cause identifier at Facebook announces that “my journey at Meta did come to an end.” In another, a man rants about tech being “over-glamorized” while acknowledging his own contributions to the glamorizing. One clip parodies workday posts, offering a day in the life of a newly unemployed person. (“From 1 pm – 10, I kind of just space out, thinking about what could have been.”) Another adopts a tongue-in-cheek framing: “POV: you got laid off from your tech job right after moving to NYC and signing a 12 months lease.”

Many creators have kept up the aspirational image of work, the visual vocabulary of luxury, that dominated months ago. But anxiety about a downturn is changing the tenor of posts, and plenty have slowed down with the snack drawers. Either way, the urge to aestheticize work remains. Perhaps more than on any other platform, TikTok’s influencers talk through what they are experiencing, even as fun office perks give way to brutal cuts. It’s uncanny to watch clips of boisterous lunch buffets next to teary videos about being exiled from them — sometimes from the very same creators just months apart. You come to see how workday and layoff TikToks are mutually intelligible, odd sides of the same coin. No matter what happens, they say, workers will post through it. Work will be forged into content, no matter what.