Book Excerpt | 'How to Be Yourself': Irreverent and funny, Simon Doonan's book offers a toolkit to survive seemingly progressive office culture

How to Be Yourself in a Workplace Utopia

The old notion of enduring a boring job in order to pay your bills now seems like a Dickensian trope. All that tyrannical oversight is being replaced by vegan cupcakes, standing desks, nap rooms, and complimentary kombucha on tap.

Employees today are not only pampered, they are treated like fragile, temperamental child-pageant contestants, perpetually on the verge of becoming offended, anxious, or indignant—or allergic to wheat and cilantro.

Meditation rooms abound. Wellness and mindfulness are the new workplace priorities. Tread cautiously into this new utopia. As sensitive and “caring” as the new workplace is, I fear that—and this is a megaparadox—it might fall short in tolerating feisty individuality. There is still, nevertheless, a culture of conformity. Dissent is unwelcome. Not sure what I am referring to? Try chewing on a stick of beef jerky on Tofu Tuesdays and get back to me. Try wearing sequined stilettos when everyone else is wearing Allbirds. Clearly, it’s not hard to stand out in this sea of namaste. If you are a cynic with a rebellious streak, you may find yourself being dragged off to HR for yet another round of sensitivity training.

How to Keep Your Job While Remaining Yourself

Your challenges go way beyond learning how to comport yourself on Wheat-Free Wednesdays. Here’s the deal: you did such a fantastic job of standing out and asking informed, nerdy questions at your interview that you have already acquired something of a reputation. In fact, you are the new bright hope, a mini-Messiah. This is not a good thing. Burdened by high expectations, you must take care not to blunder about, lest you expose your flaws. How do you make sure you don’t fall short and get fired? You need to come up with a radical strategy: show up ten minutes early and leave ten minutes late.

Old-fashioned punctuality has untold benefits, especially in this brave new world. That extra time will allow you to masticate your locally harvested granola in peace and then reapply your lip gloss. You will have a moment to formulate your thoughts for that upcoming meeting. In an era when employees are loosey-goosey about timekeeping—Heather just texted from her reiki session and she’s running behind—the punctuality habit will mark you as an enigma, a strange combo of reliable and unknowable. Nobody will quite know what to make of you. Colleagues will project all kinds of stuff

onto you. You, meanwhile, will be craftily learning the ropes.

How to Avoid Becoming a Much Larger Self

Your biggest challenge upon entering a new workplace is to avoid the cruelty-free kale chips! Massive complimentary snack centers the size of convenience stores have erupted in every working environment, with dire consequences. Young employees have barely shed their “freshman fifteen” before they start packing on their “Facebook fifteen.” Introducing this kind of calorific temptation into the lives of young people whose jobs are sedentary is nothing short of sadistic.

There is a solution: petition to have the snack center removed. Caution. This may well elicit a wave of rage from colleagues. If the debate starts to get testy, introduce a little levity: suggest that HR provide free shock-collars that are triggered whenever employees come within three feet of the

dried non-GMO cranberries.

Author Simon Doonan at different times and ages.

Extracted with permission from  How to Be Yourself: Life-Changing Advice from a Reckless Contrarian, by Simon Doonan, published by Phaidon (phaidon.com)