Office humor content is having a major moment on TikTok right now. The relatable workplace comedy videos, the "coworker who microwaves fish" jokes, the passive-aggressive email parodies. I love this content. I watch it with the specific fondness of someone who has never actually worked in an office but can infer the vibes and is also extremely glad that the specifics don't apply to her life.
My office is a converted walk-in closet. My coworkers are a large-diaphragm condenser microphone, a dying pothos named Lazarus (or formerly dying, he's in a recovery arc), and sometimes Biscuit, the neighbor's dog, who visits when I need to dog-sit and has no concept of "session is rolling" or "please stop clicking your nails on the hardwood it's getting into the mic."
I am my own HR department, my own IT department, my own CEO and intern simultaneously, and I have never once successfully escalated a workplace complaint to anyone above myself. Let me walk you through a day in this very unconventional office.
The Morning Standup (With Myself)
A lot of office culture content references the morning standup. The daily team check-in where everyone says what they're working on. Mine goes like this:
I sit down at the desk with my coffee, which I made with the intention of drinking it hot and will not drink hot, and I look at the to-do list from yesterday and notice that several things have been on it for three days in a row. I say, out loud, sometimes, "okay, today we're doing these things." The "we" is theoretical. It is me and the condenser mic and Lazarus. Lazarus does not respond to the standup but maintains eye contact (metaphorically) from his shelf position. The condenser mic just stands there looking expensive and slightly judgmental, which is honestly the most accurate coworker simulation I've encountered.
Then I open the laptop. Then I see the emails. Then the standup is spiritually over because I'm now in reactive mode for twenty minutes handling correspondence before I've even touched the actual work. This is, I'm told, a universal office experience, which is comforting in a "misery loves company" kind of way.
The Coworker Who Microwaves Fish (This Is Me, Except It's Coffee)
You know the universal office villain: the person who microwaves fish in the shared kitchen. Creates a smell that lingers for an hour, affects everyone in the space, shows a complete indifference to shared atmospheric conditions.
In my office, the equivalent is me reheating coffee in the microwave for the third time in one day. I am the fish person. There is nobody else to be the fish person. Every single ambient annoyance in my office, the buzzing from the phone I forgot to mute that's on the desk by the mic, the creak of the secondhand chair at the exact wrong moment in a take, the sound of traffic that bleeds into the recordings when a truck drives by, all of it, I am responsible for. I am the difficult coworker and I cannot fire myself. I have tried. I keep showing up.
What I have learned from being my own difficult coworker is that most workplace annoyances are not about the person being difficult so much as about the friction between individual needs and shared space. I have exactly the same friction, between my needs as a focused recording artist and my needs as a person who exists in a body that sometimes has to make a call or sneeze during a take or eat lunch near the microphone. There is no policy for this. I am the policy. I am constantly negotiating with myself and occasionally losing.
The Performance Review (Annual, Extremely Uncomfortable)
I do actually give myself an annual review. I made a template. It has sections. I fill it out every January with a glass of whiskey and the specific emotional energy of an HR process that should be functional and is instead slightly unhinged.
The questions include: Did you make the things you said you were going to make? (Partially.) Did you handle your finances in a responsible adult way? (More so than previous years, which is a low bar but genuine progress.) Did you maintain work-life balance? (I would like to speak to whoever invented this concept and ask them if they've ever been self-employed.) Did you treat yourself with the professional respect you'd extend to someone you hired? (This is where the review gets quiet and uncomfortable.)
That last question is the one that trips me up every year. I would never hire someone and then tell them that what they made wasn't good enough in the middle of the process. I would never hire someone and then expect them to work until 3am without paying overtime. I would never hire someone and decline to let them have a day off when they're sick. And yet I do all of these things to myself regularly. The performance review section on "internal management practices" has had the same feedback three years running: be nicer to the one employee you have. That employee is you.
The IT Department (Also Me, Also A Disaster)
My computer is four years old and is running on software that is technically outdated. I know this. I have not updated it because the last time I did a major update it required three hours of troubleshooting plug-in compatibility and I lost a week of work momentum and I have not recovered psychologically from that experience. The IT department (me) has assessed the risk of continuing to use the current setup and determined that it is preferable to the known risk of the update. The IT department (also me) disagrees with this assessment. We have agreed to disagree and the update is scheduled for "whenever the stars align and I don't have anything important coming up," which will be never.
I have also experienced every type of technical crisis that any office IT department would handle: the audio interface suddenly not appearing on the computer at midnight when I'm in the middle of something. The DAW crashing mid-session with unsaved work. wait. that one. The save habits I now have are PTSD-level compulsive. Ctrl+S after every single take, every single time, no exceptions. The backup hard drive that made an unusual clicking sound and turned out to be dying. That last one was a very bad day. Recovery was partial. The lesson was complete.
The End-of-Day Wind-Down (No One Tells You When to Leave)
The thing about office humor content that captures something real is the boundaries of the workday. The commute in. The commute out. The physical departure from the space that signals: work is done, now I'm a person again. When your office is literally inside your home, that boundary is, generously described, blurry.
I have at different points in my career worked until I couldn't anymore and then fallen asleep at the desk. I have responded to emails at midnight not because they were urgent but because the laptop was open and the habit was strong. I have had entire weeks where I genuinely could not tell you if I was working or not working because the modes blurred together into one continuous anxious output state.
I now have a closing ritual. It is extremely non-corporate and very specific to me. I save everything. I close the DAW. I put Sunday (the guitar) back in the corner on her stand. I say goodnight to Lazarus, I know, I know, and I turn off the studio light. Then I go make tea. Not coffee. Tea is for after. Coffee is for the session. Tea means the session is over. These small rituals are the commute home. They're the boundary the office doesn't naturally provide.
The office humor content makes me laugh because I recognize all of it in my own solo version. The difficult coworker, the IT crises, the performance review anxiety, the negotiation over shared space. The difference is I'm doing it all alone, in a closet, with a microphone that judges me silently and a pothos that is finally, finally thriving.
If you've ever wished you could work for yourself and thought "how hard could it be," this is how hard it can be. Also, it's the best decision I ever made. Both things are completely true. Welcome to the closet office. The mic is always listening. The plant asks nothing. The coffee is cold but you'll drink it anyway.
The Part Nobody Tells You About the Solo Office
Here's the thing that the office humor content, funny as it is, doesn't really capture about working for yourself: the loneliness is real and it requires active management. In an office, even a dysfunctional one, even one where someone microwaves fish every Thursday, there are people. There is ambient human energy. You don't have to do anything for it to arrive. It's just there, because people are there.
In my closet, the ambient human energy is zero. On a day when I don't have a reason to leave the apartment, I can go from morning to late afternoon without speaking to another person. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes the solitude is exactly what the work needs. But sometimes it tips into isolation, which is a different animal. Isolation has a specific weight to it. A flatness. You stop being able to tell if your work is good because you've lost your external reference point. Everything starts to feel either too important or too small. This is not a productive creative state.
My solutions: the regular walk, no headphones, just the city. The coffee shop that I go to when I need the ambient human energy top-up but still want to be working. The group chat with two other self-employed musicians where we send each other updates, victories and catastrophes both, on a daily basis. Biscuit, whenever the neighbor needs a dog-sitter, which I actively encourage because that dog does more for my mental health than any productivity system I've ever tried.
The solo office is worth it. I want to be clear about that. The trade is good. But anyone who tells you self-employment is just freedom and flexibility without mentioning the loneliness management, they're leaving something important out. Know what you're signing up for. Then sign up anyway, if this is what you need. Just build the infrastructure for human contact in alongside the acoustic foam and the condenser mic. Both are necessary. Both are part of the job.