Shakespeare’s famous quote came to mind today as I thought about impostor syndrome in tech. Specifically, I was thinking about my own impostor syndrome working in tech, but the writing on the wall of my current company has made me anguish and become very blasé. As one famous tumblr user put it, I’m going to reframe my impostor syndrome as me being a fucking amazing con artist. I’ve fooled these people for ten years of nearly steady employment!

Anonymous grumbling within the company is that a lot of people are lazy and entitled and you know what? That’s me! I am a human being and thus I am entitled to live a good life. And if I can do that with a minimum amount of effort at my day job? Perfect! I’m hardly lazy, I just have different priorities. The sentiment really reeks of childless behavior, to be honest.

This train of thought led me to Shakespeare, he who popularized “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players;” The idea of the world as a stage predated Shakespeare, but this particular quote from his play As You Like It, is now the most commonly recognized usage. The Wikipedia page on the subject was a rather intersting read actually.

In any case, the full monologue from the play to me slants in the direction of people being forced into patterns – various roles that we play throughout our lives. While this interpretation has merit as is, I’m going to extend upon it.

You hear the word “performative” a lot in discussions of the arts and gender identities. We are all performing our gender to some degree or other. In my own case, I perform femininity by wearing lots of cool jewelry and fun clothes and choosing pink and purple whenever a color choice must be made. The men in my life perform masculity by cutting their hair short (and wearing significantly less colorful clothes, or at least not caring enough to seek out more colorful clothes than the default available in clothing stores around here).

In terms of art, I mean “performance” in the social media landscape. I shy away from social media because the brain rot is real and I found myself looking at short videos of artists making art instead of making my own, so I had to step away. When I attempted to make my own videos, the setup to film became a level of friction that I found too high of a threshold to actually doing the art and so I stopped trying. I felt that to film and post myself working on my art was being a try-hard. Like performing being an artist was more important that doing my art. This didn’t sit well with me, not to mention that I never had that view of other artists posting their videos of them doing their art.

Double standards never end, do they?

Anyway, armed with my amazing skills as a con artist, my courage of a mediocre white man, and the ancient wisdom of all of life being a performance, I’ve coalesced the notion that I’m going to give one hell of a performance – the performance of a lifetime. Come watch me!