Nobody wants to work these days (Kim K, 2022)
This week, we’re talking about the Kardashians, aspirational marketing, and office workplaces—and their dated unrealistic perceptions of women.
Kim, there’s people that are dying
“Get your fucking ass up and work,” said Kimberly Kardashian in a recent interview with Variety as advice to women in business, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”
It’s an astute observation. Since the first lockdown, we’ve seen a zeitgeist defined by the anti-work movement, the Great Resignation, renewed calls for a four-day work week, and terms like ‘burnout’ and ‘toxic productivity.’ Work isn’t working anymore, if it ever has.
But that’s a lot coming from someone whose family has a net worth of over $4 billion. Arguably, the Kardashian clan has worked to leverage their fame into a formidable conglomerate. The family’s decade and a half hold over the entertainment industry has shifted from television to streaming platforms to social apps to generating their own waves—with Kim’s Skims and beauty brands; Kylie Cosmetics, Skin, and Baby; and Kendall’s 818 Tequila to name a few. They do hustle, let’s give them that.
Ultimately, most of us don’t get to choose how or when we work, or if we work at all. Kim K, forever getting dragged for living detached from reality, is the same businesswoman who has denied legally-required breaks and $25,000 in wages to at least seven people who worked in her household staff, according to a lawsuit filed last year.
You’re doing amazing, sweetie
Traditionally, aspirational marketing has told us that we could gain power and status with certain products. Ads feature conventionally attractive people living the dream in luxury homes and cars with successful careers—things we could have too if we bought Brand A.
Recently, conventional marketing has lost ground to the affirmative marketing of 'You're just fine as you are.’ It speaks of being content with yourself and comes at a time when the terms ‘body positivity’ and ‘body neutrality’ have entered the mainstream.
We owe this in part to younger audiences with a more cultivated understanding of marketing and a predisposition to distrust everything. I mean, have you seen women dance and cartwheel in white pants while on their periods? (Great, in theory, but maybe we could give women more bodily autonomy to rest and go with the flow.)
Aspirational marketing came before social media. Now there is enough fragmentation as people experience the world through their own prism of influence. This requires brands to adopt new ways of representing people to better reflect a diversity of viewpoints, bodies, and expressions of self-identity to even seem realistic.
We don’t carry that size
The office was never one size fits all, it fit some with the expectation that everyone else would adjust.
When over 700 people responded to The Times’ survey about returning to the offices, people preferring WFH listed reasons like sweatpants, quality time with kids, more hours to read and run, space to hide the angst of a crummy day or year, on top of COVID-19. But the most strongly argued was workplace culture.
One instance that encapsulates the experience for many is Kristen Egziabher who was passed for promotion before the pandemic because the higher-ups did not know her, only her work—as if small talk mattered more than anything else. Since then, Egziabher has been promoted with an 11% raise. “If I had continued going into the office,” she added, “there might have been some excuse around likability.”
Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack, studied 10,000 office workers last year and showed that women and people of color were more likely to see working remotely as beneficial than their white male colleagues. In the US, 86% of Hispanic and 81% of Black knowledge or non-manual workers said they preferred hybrid or remote work, compared with 75% of white workers. Globally, 50% of working mothers who participated in the studies reported wanting to work remotely compared with 43% of fathers. A sense of belonging at work increased for 24% of Black workers surveyed, compared with 5% of white workers since May 2021.
There were POC who were the office’s designated photocopier or caretakers who rushed out for school pickups, barely meeting their families’ needs while failing to meet unspoken professional standards. Even the thermostats in office buildings cater to the resting metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man.
Many have spent their entire career in spaces built for somebody else and the hybrid setup has brought a welcome reprieve from gender and racial discrimination.
